The morning after firefighters quenched a late-night arsonist’s blaze at Toronto’s Anshei Minsk Synagogue, congregants arrived to a chilling sight: thousands of prayer and holy books, charred by fire and soaked by firefighters’ hoses, were littered across the building’s front steps and the adjoining sidewalk. While the building sustained damage estimated at several thousand dollars,…
Turning rogues into role models
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Well over a century after the fact, there can be little pain in admitting that a distant cousin of mine, born to wealth and social status, was the subject of a spectacular bankruptcy proceeding in London, England in the 1860s. An account of his failed business affairs appeared in the London Times. I suspect the…
Genealogy and the Holocaust
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Tombstone carvers often symbolically represent a life cut tragically short, as when a child dies, by a cemetery monument in the shape of a truncated tree trunk. This motif is sometimes also used among Jewish genealogists when drawing charts of families cut down in the Holocaust; shoots are shown growing from the severed trunk when…
Museum projects virtual reconstruction of ancient Temple
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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…
