Meyer Joshua Nurenberger, an internationally-known Jewish writer and publisher who founded the Canadian Jewish News, has died in Toronto at the age of 90. During a journalistic career that stretched from the 1930s into the 1990s, Mr. Nurenberger interviewed Albert Einstein, covered the Nuremberg and Eichmann trials, and was editor of the Morgen Journal, a…
Obit: deputy police chief Jim Noble (1924-2003)
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Jim Noble, who rose from beat cop to deputy chief during a 37-year career on the Toronto police force, died recently in Toronto. He was 78 years old. Noble’s career was marked by an almost continuous advancement through the ranks. As a divisional detective, he worked on a gamut of crimes that included “housebreaking, frauds,…
A remembrance of J.D. Salinger (1919-2010)
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Not having published a thing in almost half a century apparently hasn’t diminished the fame of America’s most reclusive writer. J. D. Salinger died in January at the age of 91, prompting some hopeful observers to wonder whether he left a vault full of manuscripts to be published posthumously. Born in New York in 1919…
Jewish genealogy in Pennsylvania
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Anyone with the surname Eisen (which means ‘iron’) knows that Jews have had an historic involvement in the steel trade. From Shtetl to Milltown: Litvaks, Hungarians, and Galizianers in Western Pennsylvania, 1875-1925 by Robert Perlman is a thorough local history that chronicles the rise of various Jewish communities in a sprinkling of towns in and…
Incident in Marrakech
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In 1786 the Italian Jewish scholar Samuel Romanelli (1757 1817) boarded a ship at Gibraltar expecting it to carry him eventually to his home in Mantua. The vessel stopped at several Moroccan ports, however, and Romanelli went ashore and innocently became entangled in some legal trouble. Consequently his passport was confiscated and, to his immense chagrin, his intended brief…
An organization that redeems lost Jews
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A New York rabbinical court made a precedent-setting halakhic decision last summer that could eventually pave the way for legions of “lost” Jews to return to Judaism. The case revolves around Wendy Armstrong, a real estate professional in St. Louis, Mo., who was raised in a Christian home and attended a Methodist church as a…
Conversation thrives on JewishGen discussion group
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Just as the medical profession has debated the ethics of using data from horrendous Nazi medical experiments, the Jewish genealogical community recently discussed the ethics of using a Nazi census of “non-Teutonic” people in Germany in 1938-39. For the most part, the medical community has wisely branded the Nazi’s medical sadism as completely inadmissable to…
Bernard Malamud’s Collected Stories
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In a literary career that stretched roughly from 1940 to his death in 1986, Bernard Malamud wrote a handful of acclaimed novels, including The Natural, The Fixer and The Assistant. Between the novels, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author refined his artistry by writing short stories. For the first time, all of Malamud’s short fiction has been…
Not Quite Mainstream offers rich assortment
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A new collection of 17 short stories by Canadian Jewish writers, published by the Red Deer Press of Calgary, demonstrates both the diversity and literary acumen that we have come to expect from our writing community, pasat and present. Not Quite Mainstream: Canadian Jewish Short Stories is edited by Norman Ravvin, the gifted short-story writer…
Obit: Justice Paul Lamek (2001)
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Remembered for his intellectual vigour and his great love of the law, Superior Court Justice Paul Lamek has died in Toronto at the age of 65. Lamek studied law at Oxford and began his distinguished career as a teacher of law at the University of Pennsylvania for two years and then at Toronto’s Osgoode Hall…
