From the Toronto Evening Telegram, April 1919 Thirty-nine years ago up on the the old grounds in Queen’s Park, near where now stand the Parliament Buildings, the Clipper Baseball Club performed. That was in 1880, a long time ago, it is true, but not too long for even some of the present day “regulars” to…
Herman Kempinski was evidently a first cousin once removed to my great-great-grandfather, Rafael Glicenstein, and both came from the town of Konin, Poland. Herman, born about 1854, was one of the many thousands of Russian-Polish Jews to emigrate to the United States in the late 1800s: he left Konin at age 17 in 1872. He…
From the Toronto Star, 1900 Character Sketches Among the Throngs Who Travel Up and Down in the Big Departmental Stores of Toronto David Harum, who said, when striving with his rich friend, that many a wealthy man would duck his head instinctively at the cry, “beware bridge,” knew what he was talking about, for nearly…
From Toronto Evening Telegram, 1928 When King Street, from Yonge Street to the Market, was Toronto’s busiest shopping district, Heintzman’s piano factory was at number 117, just east of Church Street, opposite St. James Cathedral. This is a picture of the factory taken about 1880. “Ye Olde Firme” occupied these premises until removal to the…
From the Toronto Star Weekly, June 13, 1914 “It is a great mistake,” said a local pawnbroker, “to imagine that the pawnbroker deals only with the poverty-stricken classes. The pawnbroker in a big way of business could reveal, if he so chose, some very surprising secrets of the business he transacts with customers whom the…
August 2018 The moment I stepped out of the car, I realized that this was the first time a member of my family had been back in our ancestral town in more than 130 years. I was in Konin, in the Lodz district of Poland, the town where my paternal ancestors had lived for generations…
Wonder of wonder and miracle of miracles, the new production of Fiddler On The Roof at the Broadway Theatre in New York — directed by Bartlett Sher and freshly choreographed by Israeli choreographer Hofesh Schechter — is good enough to make seasoned theatregoers forget that they ever saw a previous production of Fiddler or…
Curious about your Jewish ancestors from Romania? Read Jill Culiner’s ‘Finding Home: In the Footsteps of the Jewish Fusgeyers’ Between about 1900 and 1914, multitudes of impoverished Jewish refugees sold their meagre possessions, joined into large groups for protection, and trekked hundreds of miles out of Romania on foot. The exodus of the Jewish “Fusgeyers” — Yiddish…
by Henry Wellisch In the early 1920s Dr. Arthur Czellitzer, a Berlin ophthalmologist, founded the Gesellschaft fur Judische Familien Forschung, the “Society for Jewish Family Research.” It is now recognized as the world’s first society dedicated to Jewish genealogy in the modern era. The society had regular meetings in Berlin and published a newsletter entitled, Mitteilunngen…
Frame Store on South Side of King Street between Yonge and Bay Is Being Torn Down — Quebec Bank Will Erect Costly Edifice — Old Place Dates Back to 1834 Toronto Star, March 13, 1911 What is claimed to be the oldest building on King Street is being torn down to-day to make way at last…
