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…
Ex-Alderman Edward Galley Has Been Going to Them Since the Year 1852 HOW C.N.E. HAS GROWN SINCE THE EARLY DAYS First Held in a Few Tents in Boulton’s Fields — Big Display of Patchwork Quilts from Toronto Star Weekly, September 9, 1922 By William Lewis Edmonds Toronto can boast of having at least one citizen…
Devotion of Workers in Sweat Shops and Other East Side Hebrews to the Drama – The Productions of the Official Playwrights – Ways of the Yiddish Actors. From The New York Sun, October 18, 1896 New York is the only city in the world where the Jewish stage has achieved anything like prosperity. While in…
From the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, October 24, 2004 You may not find Dr. Neil Rosenstein’s new book listed on national best-seller lists, but the noted genealogist — with his tongue halfway in his cheek — compares it to the popular thriller “The Da Vinci Code.” Both books, the noted American genealogist and surgeon said, deal in…
