As I am researching the history of my mother’s huge Toronto mishpocha (family), I’ve attempted to locate as many ships’ passenger manifests as possible showing the arrival of relatives to Canada from their various towns in Belarus, beginning about a century ago. The recently established web site of the National Archives’s Canadian Genealogy Centre (www.genealogy.gc.ca)…
Tag: canada
Pierre Berton’s ‘No Jews Need Apply’
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Pierre Berton’s column “No Jews Need Apply,” which originally appeared in Maclean’s in November 1948 and was reprinted in last week’s CJN, offered a penetrating look at the discreet, country-club-style antisemitism that was rife in Canadian society. Berton, who died last month, pointed out that people with names like Greenberg were frequently denied job interviews,…
Sephardic Jews in early Canada
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One of the most interesting and unusual items pertaining to the Jewish history of confederate and pre-confederate Canada is a two-centuries-old diary in the custody of the National Archives of Canada. The diary belonged to Samuel Jacobs, a European merchant whose ship, the Betsy, was known to have plied the St. Lawrence carrying trade goods…
Jews and the Lord’s Day Act
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Deputy Magistrate Kingsford of Toronto had his hands full one October day in 1900 when two Jewish butchers and a Jewish baker appeared before him, all charged with violating the Lord’s Day Act by pursuing their callings on a Sunday. One of the butchers was actually Rabbi Isaac Helpern, spiritual leader of the Austrian Jewish…
The 1911 census is a powerful tool
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The 1911 census of Canada, which became available to the public in mid July for the first time, is a tremendously valuable resource for family tree researchers whose relatives were in Canada in the first decade of the 20th century. It is the latest in a wave of genealogical resources — the Ellis Island data…
Genealogy as a labour of love
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“I’m working on a book of family history,” Sara Edell Kelman declares, as she shows me her massive collection of archival documents, ketubot, photographs, Yiddish letters and other family memorabilia, spilling out of diverse albums, binders and boxes. “No, it’s more than one book — it’s a series of books. There’s a lot of stuff…
Interview with playwright Jason Sherman
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Although his current play It’s All True is based on a “labor opera” from the 1930s, and though many of his previous plays have been highly critical of Israel, Toronto playwright Jason Sherman told an audience at Harbourfront recently, “I don’t think of myself as a political playwright any more than I do a Jewish…
Drabinsky protects Showboat with legal action
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Entertainment mogul Garth Drabinsky has filed a legal notice of claim against the Ontario government after learning that the provincial Anti-Racism Secretariat allegedly funnelled $200,000 to various groups that were part of an organized campaign to stop the musical Show Boat from opening at the North York Performing Arts Centre in October 1993. “They have…
The making of Ragtime the musical
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Last week in Toronto (1996), arts journalists were given an exclusive first peek at four stage numbers from Ragtime, the musical-in-progress that Livent Inc. is developing from the best-selling 1975 novel by E.L. Doctorow. Given that the show isn’t set to open at North York’s Ford Center until next January, the pieces seemed surprisingly polished.…
The art of magazine profiles
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The New Yorker or Maclean’s Magazine: which has perfected the art of the magazine profile to a higher degree? Magazine lovers will recognize that the question is rhetorical and doesn’t require an answer. After all, it was the New Yorker that invented, about 1927, the modern intimate journalistic essay we recognize as a magazine profile.…
