Family Matters: Sam, Jennie and the Kids, by Burton Bernstein, was first published in 1982, and remains, 30 years later, one of the most interesting family histories this reviewer has read. The reason is not so much that Burton Bernstein was the brother of a celebrity, the great composer-conductor Leonard Bernstein, but because he treated…
Notorious Criminals Whom the Detectives Have Arrested at the Request of Distant Authorities From the Toronto Star, December 5, 1903 The work of the Toronto police authorities is not confined to the depredations committed within the city limits. A generous portion of their work consists in ferreting out and apprehending criminals who have committed offences…
From The Jewish Times, 1912 (as reprinted in The Jewish Standard, 1934) by S. J. Birnbaum The Jewish Standard’s introduction: The following article is part of a thesis written by Mr. Birnbaum, now an attorney in Toronto, when he attended the University of Toronto. It is to our knowledge the most authoritative history of Toronto’s…
From the Star Weekly, February 3, 1912 Toronto boasts the largest Dickens society in the world Centenary of Famous Novelist Will Be Celebrated with Much Feeling Next Wednesday — Over 1,000 Members in Dickens Fellowship Next Wednesday (February 7, 1912), the centenary of the birth of Charles Dickens, will be celebrated throughout the English-speaking world…
The Leventon family reunion, held recently in Dublin, Ireland, brought together 127 direct descendants — including 28 from Canada — of Rosa and Rabbi Israel Leventon, who lived in the 19th century. Rabbi Leventon served as the last spiritual leader of Dublin’s Mary’s Abbey Synagogue, which closed in 1892, and he was the first spiritual…
His name was Moses; he was a leader of his people; he spent much time in Egypt and the desert; he wandered incessantly; he is associated with a fiery mountain and the holiday of Passover; and his life lasted longer than a century. These traits describe the biblical Moses, of course, but they also refer…
Sometime between 1905 and 1908, my mother’s grandparents said goodbye to their parents and their village of Zhlobin, Belarus, and brought their children with them to Canada. For decades, although they were divided by a wide gulf of geography and history, family members sent letters in Yiddish back and forth between the Old World and…
Eighteen-year-old Frank Westwood had gone out with friends about 7.30 that Saturday evening, October 6, 1894. By the time he returned to his family’s Jameson Avenue mansion about 10:30, his father, sister and brother had already retired upstairs; his mother, seeing he was safely in, shortly went up, too, leaving him on the stairs. The…
Manuel Mordecai Noah, an American Jew born in Philadelphia in 1785, did much world travelling in his day — he visited Europe numerous times and was the US consul to Tunis — but it is perhaps the tale surrounding his travels from New York City to the upper reaches of New York State in 1825…
It has been 35 years since Joan Micklin Silver’s film Hester Street first appeared on the silver screen. Although the slow-paced, 90-minute black-and-white drama is not as well known as Crossing Delancey, which Silver directed more than a decade later, I regard the earlier film as the more pure work of art. A minor classic,…
