Forcing Jews to wear yellow badges and keeping them locked up in ghettoes were not cruelties that the Nazis invented in the 20th century, but rather practices that the popes “had championed for hundreds of years,” says the author of a new book condemning the Vatican for its role in promulgating the hatred that led…
Spirit possession in Judaism
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One day about ten years ago, a teenaged Russian immigrant to Israel witnessed a fatal traffic accident through her window. The tragedy occurred on a Friday afternoon. The next day the 17-year-old witness, Menuhah, showed her sister the spot on the road where it had occurred. There was still blood on the road and Menuhah…
Blurb about ‘Times Square Rabbi’
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Proferring an eight-step program for recovery based on the teachings of Maimonides, Rabbi Yehudah Fine prowls the mean streets of Manhattan, seeking young people to redeem from their chosen hells in his book Times Square Rabbi (Hazelden). Fine’s gritty, true-to-life realism rings completely true — and it is: this is a non-fiction account of the…
Blurb about Two-Gun Cohen
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Published by St. Martin’s Press, Two-Gun Cohen is an intriguing biography by Daniel S. Levy (distributed in Canada by McClelland & Stewart). The son of orthodox Jewish parents, the title character was a con man, card sharp and pickpocket from east-end London who was arrested, sent to reform school, then shipped to western Canada. Hustling and…
Writer explores her brother’s mysterious death
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The last time Nomi Berger saw her brother Peter, he was 19 years old and submerged in Montreal’s pot-smoking and acid-dropping hippie counter-culture. The year was 1968. Peter, who lived in a house with several others, had recently been arrested for drug possession and had fought bitterly with his parents. “Help me,” he had beseeched…
Rabbi Schild’s ‘World Through My Window’
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Rabbi Erwin Schild, rabbi emeritus of Adath Israel Synagogue in Toronto and author of World Through My Window, an anthology of sermons published in 1992, arrives in Germany this week (1996) to attend the launch of the German-language edition of his book and to initiate a six-week speaking tour in German. The book was translated…
Obit: Toronto fire chief Walter Shanahan (1931-2002)
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Walter Shanahan, a firefighter who climbed the ladder to the top of the Toronto Fire Department, has died at the age of 71, largely as the result of lingering respiratory problems caused by injuries suffered in two catastrophic city fires. Shanahan joined the fire department in 1953 and served for many years as a firefighter,…
Obit: herniologist Nicholas Obney (1918-2003)
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Dr. Nicholas Obney, who performed more than 32,000 hernia operations during his long career at the renowned Shouldice Hospital in Toronto and Thornhill, Ont., once told a television interviewer that he had never encountered two hernias the same. Dr. Obney joined the Shouldice Hospital in 1946 and was its chief surgeon between 1965 and his…
The Family Orchard, family history novel
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Nomi Eve, author of The Family Orchard, has taken sections of her family history, as supplied to her by her father, a genealogist, and used them as the foundation for a novel that spans two centuries and the familiar Jewish terrain from Eastern Europe to the land of Israel. As she advises, references to actual localities…
Obit: Eugene Fairweather (1920-2002)
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Rev. Canon Eugene Fairweather, an Anglican priest who taught for decades at Toronto’s Trinity College, helped introduce major liturgical reforms to the Anglican Church of Canada and played a leading role in promoting ecumenical dialogue around the world, has died in hospital in Kentville, N.S. at the age of 81. Known as an outstanding scholar…
