Tag: canada

The City Man: Fine novel of ’30s Toronto

by Bill Gladstone • August 5, 2011

Howard Akler has made an auspicious literary debut with his first novel, The City Man (Coach House Books), a crisply written tale that conjures up the look and feel of Toronto in the ‘30s. The story focuses on Toronto Star reporter Eli Morenz who, freshly returned from a convalescence in the country, writes a riveting…

by Bill Gladstone • August 5, 2011

If you’re a Toronto lover like me, you’re bound to enjoy and marvel over Michael Redhill’s novel Consolation (Anchor Canada), which delivers a gripping human story, elegantly and poetically told, and a grittily realistic literary portrait of 1850s Toronto that is so well executed that it shines. In alternating chapters, Consolation artfully knits together two…

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MyHeritage to delete all Russian accounts

by n-a • January 15, 2025

MyHeritage, the large Israel-based family-tree and DNA genealogy service, announced that it was ceasing operations in Russia and that all of its Russian account data, including DNA tests, would be deleted on February 1, 2025. MyHeritage explained that they were forced to suspend their services in Russia due to local legislation. Russian account holders were…

by Bill Gladstone • January 13, 2025

Originally appeared in The Canadian Jewish News The Rothschilds had one. The Disraelis had one. The Montefiore, Mocatta and Sassoon families each had one. And so, according to some interpretations, did each of the twelve tribes of Israel. Popular with the Jewish aristocracy in Europe since medieval times, Jewish coats of arms once seemed a…

by n-a • May 16, 2024

Marriage By Rabbi Held To Be Invalid He Was Not A British Subject at Time He Performed Ceremony Globe, January 15, 1925 (Canadian Press, Montreal) — Because a rabbi who conducted the ceremony was not a British subject, Mr. Justice Bruneau, in the Superior Court today, handed down judgment annulling a marriage conducted ten years…

by Bill Gladstone • May 26, 2023

26 May 2023 Census enumerators across Canada were busy on June 1, 1931, going door to door to gather 40 fields of personal information about 10,376,379 Canadians, including family names and relationships, age, gender, occupation, employment status, racial origin and whether the family had acquired a radio. Having sat in a vault for the past…

by n-a • March 30, 2023

New Volumes Published March 30, 2023 Dr. Neil Rosenstein, author of the newly-updated The Unbroken Chain recently announced publication of new volumes in the massive work. Rosenstein is one of the foremost Jewish genealogists in America today, with an internationally acclaimed expertise in the genealogy of rabbinic dynastic families. The Unbroken Chain deals uniquely with…

by Bill Gladstone • January 8, 2023

From Inside Toronto (2017) My niece Katie gave birth to her first child recently (a boy) and she suddenly realized how little she knew about her ancestors, especially on her father’s side. Since I’m the family genealogist and a professional one to boot, I gladly volunteered to research her antecedants. Little did I realize that…

by Bill Gladstone • January 8, 2023

From Inside Toronto, 2016 As if attaining genealogical records wasn’t already hard enough, genealogists now have to face a steep new barrier when it comes to getting Ontario birth records. Quietly, on the sly and when no one was looking, the Ontario Registrar General changed its longstanding rule about how long to wait before birth…

by Bill Gladstone • November 30, 2022

Shanghai’s Baghdadi Jews: A Collection of Biographical Reflections, by Maisie J. Meyer, author and editor. Large format, 480 pages, softcover. Blacksmith Books, Hong Kong, 2015. Shanghai’s community of Ashkenazic Jews, who arrived from Poland and elsewhere in Europe in the early 20th century and in advance of the Holocaust, is already fairly well-known. What is…

by Bill Gladstone • November 26, 2022

Jewish Glasgow: An Illustrated History. By Kenneth Collins, Harvey Kaplan and Stephen Kliner. Published by the Scottish Jewish Archives Centre. Hardcover, large format, fully illustrated in colour, 192 pages. www.sjac.org.uk Jews have been in Scotland for a little more than three centuries, but in Glasgow for just about two centuries, and the Jewish community in…

by Bill Gladstone • November 13, 2022

Our Litvak Inheritance, Volumes One and Two of Our Litvak and South African Jewish Inheritance, compiled by David Solly Sandler. Three large-format paperback volumes with b&w illustrations , published 2016. Like most South African Jews, Sandler’s ancestors emigrated to South Africa from Lithuania between 1880 and 1920. A thorough historical researcher but not what…

by Bill Gladstone • November 5, 2022

Book Review: An American Experience: Adeline Moses Loeb (1876-1953) and Her Early American Jewish Ancestors. Contributors are John L. Loeb, Jr., Kathy L. Plotkin, Margaret Loeb Kempner and Judith E. Endelman, with an introduction by Eli N. Evans. Hardcover, large format, full colour, 350 pages, plus large genealogical poster in back pocket. Published by the…

by Bill Gladstone • July 2, 2021

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Jewish Name Changing in America

by Bill Gladstone • August 29, 2020

A Rosenberg by Any Other Name: A History of Jewish Name Changing in America, by Kirsten Fermaglich, New York University Press, 2018. Although Jewish name-changing was widespread throughout the United States and Canada throughout much of the 20th century, no one has studied this interesting phenomenon at book length until now. The author, Kirsten…

by n-a • July 7, 2019

“The Lot of the Census Taker in the Ward is Anything But an Easy One” is the title of the first story; its subtitle is “The Foreigners There Have No Idea of the Months of the Year, and It Takes a Long Time to Convince Them That the Information Is Not for the Tax Collector.”…

by Bill Gladstone • April 2, 2016

From AVOTAYNU, 2009 “Zhlobin — Market Street” reads the caption of this rare postcard photograph, circa 1900, of the Belarussian shtetl where my great-grandparents lived before bringing their children to Canada about 1910. The postcard was part of an incredible collection of more than 100 old family-related photos from Russia and Toronto from the 1890s…

by Bill Gladstone • February 23, 2016

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 n-a • December 14, 2015

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…