Etan Diamond, an American academic, has written a full-length study of the Orthodox Jewish community of Toronto and its pioneering movement northward from the inner city into the suburbs in the postwar era. Published recently by the University of North Carolina Press, Diamond’s And I Will Dwell in Their Midst: Orthodox Jews in Suburbia devotes…
Russian Dance: true romance in Stalinist Moscow
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One evening in 1928, a Russian-Jewish physician and his wife, Marc and Katya Cheftel, attended a large and fancy dinner party at the Manhattan home of the renowned concert-hall impresario Max Rabinoff and his petite wife Bluet, who was equally known for her beauty, wit and charm. Although Rabinoff had made a fortune as a…
Book tells story of Lithuanian Jewry
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On the brink of the Second World War, Lithuanian Jews were “a poor tribe,” notes Israeli Professor Dov Levin in his book, The Litvaks: A Short History of the Jews of Lithuania. Numbering some 155,000 on the eve of the Holocaust, Lithuania’s Jews served as the country’s millers, bakers, tailors, plasterers, glaziers, blacksmiths, waggoners and…
Shneidman’s study of the Vilna Ghetto
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N.N. Shneidman, a retired university professor living in Toronto, has written a book about the wartime Vilnius Ghetto in order, he says, to relate historic events and details that have never before been published in English. Published by the Mosaic Press of Oakville, Ont., the new book is called The Three Tragic Heroes of the…
‘Portraits of the Past’ focuses on Jews in German countryside
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Ten years ago, American historian Emily Rose became curious about a pair of fine oil portraits that had hung above the fireplace in her grandparents’ apartment in New York. One of the paintings showed a portly, distinguished man, the other a woman adorned in a lace bonnet and pearls. Since they derived from the mid-1800s,…
Dubnow’s classic History of the Jews in Poland and Russia
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Born in Belarussia, and later a resident of St. Petersburg, Odessa, Kovno and Riga, Simon Dubnow (1860-1941) published his first essay about the Jews of Russia in 1880, and understood at a relatively early age that the subject would always be of particular significance for him. He wrote in his diary in 1892, “My life’s…
‘Jewish Victorian’ a fascinating window into British past
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It is not commonly known that 14 large asteroids in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter were discovered by Herman Goldschmidt, a French-Jewish astronomer and artist, over a remarkable decade of scientific achievement beginning in 1852. Since only 20 asteroids had been known to science before Goldschmidt’s heavenly investigations, which he began with only…
Jews In Places You Never Thought Of
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Recently published in hardcover, Jews In Places You Never Thought Of (Ktav), edited by Karen Primack, reminds us that the Jewish family tree includes many diverse and exotic branches. Ever heard of the Chuetas of Majorca and other islands off the Mediterranean coast of Spain? Outwardly Catholic, they are considered descendants of hidden Jews who…
‘Unbroken Chain’ links diverse rabbis, celebrities
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Dr. Neil Rosenstein of New Jersey has been researching his roots ever since his childhood in South Africa. Born in Cape Town in 1944, he studied medicine there and interned in Israel, but despite the rigours of medical school he never abandoned his family tree research for long. A surgeon, he jokingly describes his medical…
Obits: Kew Dock Yip (1906-2001) & Irving Himel (1915-2001)
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Kew Dock Yip, a familiar and distinguished figure in Toronto’s Chinatown for more than half a century, has died in Toronto at the age of 94. While serving as a reserve in the Queen’s Own Rifles in 1942, Mr. Yip entered Osgoode Hall Law School and in 1945 became the first lawyer of Asian descent…
