A new online source of genealogical information about immigrants to Canada from the 1930s to the 1950s From Remembering Our Yesterdays, a blog at Inside Toronto While working at Libraries and Archives Canada several years ago, Joanna Crandell discovered that hundreds of mysterious “order-in-council” lists related to immigrants appeared in the index under the subject…
From the Globe, October 27, 1902 A Centre of History: Frank Yeigh Conducts a Farewell Pilgrimage through old Parliament Buildings A farewell tour of inspection of the old Parliament buildings, now in process of dissolution, was paid by the Canadian Club on Saturday afternoon under the guidance of Mr. Frank Yeigh. Probably 400 persons, including many…
From the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 2001 Canadian Jews are calling on their government to tighten its borders with the United States following unconfirmed reports that some of the terrorists involved in the terror attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon may have entered the United States from Canada. Jewish officials long have been…
Remember Jody Wilson-Raybould? She’s the former Trudeauvian Minister of Justice and Attorney-General who — incredible as it sounds — insisted upon telling the truth, a course that must have seemed all but inconceivable to the PM and his appointed viziers. In her 2021 memoir, Indian In The Cabinet, Wilson-Raybould, an Indigenous Canadian who uses the…
From the Canadian Jewish News, February 2015 In late 1947 and early 1948, representatives of the Canadian garment industry organized what became known as the Tailor Project, a plan to select more than 2,200 skilled tailors from the Displaced Person camps of Europe and give them jobs and housing in Canada. The Tailor Project had…
Editor’s Introduction: Anyone who searches the phrase “Crystal beach racial disturbance” will come up with details of a brief race riot that occurred in the Ontario summer resort town in the summer of 1956. But news of an earlier “disturbance” — in the summer of 1942 — does not seem to come up at all.…
From the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 2002 One year after passing anti-terrorism legislation, Canada’s Liberal Government has responded to an intense barrage of criticism by adding the Lebanese-based Shi’ite group Hezbollah to its list of outlawed terrorist entities. After months of insisting that the so-called “social” wing of Hezbollah does not deserve the terrorist label because…
Toronto publisher Now and Then Books’s latest title — Only Yesterday: Collected Pieces on the Jews of Toronto, by Benjamin Kayfetz and Stephen A. Speisman — is a prolifically illustrated book featuring 18 evocative articles by two notable historians of Toronto’s Jewish community. Culled from a variety of sources, the pieces in Only Yesterday focus…
From the Canadian Jewish News, April 8, 2020 Note: I compiled this quiz for the Canadian Jewish News, and it ran as the cover story on the very last issue that was published. Answers appear below. ♦ QUESTIONS 1. What wartime Canadian novel dealt centrally with Jewish characters and themes and won a Governor General’s…
by Dr. Stephen A Speisman Lewis Samuel, merchant and philanthropist, was born in 1827 at Kingston upon Hull, England. He married Kate Seckelman in 1850 and they had eight children including Sigmund, a prominent philanthropist and patron of the arts in Toronto. He died on May 10 May 1887 at Victoria, B.C. and was buried…
