If you were impressed by the highly realistic street scenes of ancient Rome in the movie Gladiator, chances are you’ll be dazzled by the fully interactive, virtual reconstruction of the Jewish Temple and adjacent sections of Old Jerusalem that is on view in the Davidson Center, a museum that opened with little fanfare in Jerusalem…
Weiner’s Jewish Roots in Ukraine and Moldova
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Ten years ago (in 1988), Miriam Weiner wrote a letter to a regional museum in Priluki, Ukraine, requesting information on any Jewish documents there. Back then, relations between Western and Iron Curtain countries were still affected by the deep freeze of the Cold War. In the 1980s, relatively few Jewish genealogists attempted to correspond with…
Norman Levine’s ‘The Ability to Forget’
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The Ability to Forget, a compelling new collection of short stories by Canadian expatriate writer Norman Levine, is a welcome addition to his much-praised ouevre, which includes By A Frozen River, Canada Made Me and other celebrated collections going back decades. Levine’s trademark first-person narration is usually as sparse as it is sparkling. These 15…
Obit: Dr. Nestor Yanga, Toronto SARS victim (1948-2003)
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As the first doctor in North America to die of SARS, Toronto physician Nestor Yanga may have gained more prominence in death than by anything he had accomplished in life. He was a dedicated general practitioner, church volunteer and family man who was passionate about everything he did, according to friends. A former president of…
Obit: Nancy Wade Stadler, Toronto librarian (1948-2002)
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When it came to literature and children, Nancy Wade Stadler was like an open book: she loved reading and she loved transmitting the joy of reading to young minds. Stadler worked as a children’s librarian and branch head throughout the Toronto Public Library system for 20 years. She had an extensive knowledge of literature and…
New hope for the dead (cemetery restoration)
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“Jewish gravestones are fairer than royal palaces.” — Talmud (Sanh. 96b). When the Nazis marched into Staszow, Poland, in 1939, not even the Jewish dead could rest in peace any more. Highly utilitarian, the Germans removed the tombstones from the cemetery for use as paving blocks in the streets. After the war, the town repaved…
What’s in a name?
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Back in the Toronto of 1913, when my future grandfather Isaac Naftolin announced his intention to marry my future grandmother Esther Arnoff, his parents Meir-Feivel and Etta Naftolin were said to have opposed the match on the grounds that the name Esther was too much like Etta and that such a coincidence would surely bring…
Kaminkers come together in Toronto
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About 220 relatives of the Kaminker family, all descended from a common ancestor born about 1806 in Pomuran, Galicia, are preparing to come together for a four-day reunion this weekend in Toronto. Besides Toronto, participants are coming from Buffalo, Detroit, Cleveland, Los Angeles, Dallas and other American cities, as well as from Argentina, France, Ukraine…
Of bats, owls and the Center for Millennial Studies
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Owing to a paucity of documentation, historians will probably never resolve their centuries-old debate over how long or how deeply the masses of European were gripped by a millennial fever at the close of the first Christian millennium around the year 1000. Was there widespread hysteria and terror, as many historians of the “romantic school”…
Publish your family history
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To everything there is a season, says the Ecclesiastian writer, a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to pluck up that which is planted. For genealogists and family historians, there is a time to gather in family stories and details … and a time to…
