◊ An item in the Toronto Star from 1936 explains a certain inscription on a tombstone found at the Pape Avenue Cemetery, Toronto’s oldest Jewish cemetery. George Sorblum, Toronto’s “unknown soldier,” died in 1919 but his family only learned what happened to him in 2007. * * * From the Toronto Star, November 7, 1936 Some…
From the Canadian Jewish News, 1996 David Rome was born and spent his first ten years in Vilna, the “Jerusalem of Lithuania.” This tells us much about his love of books and writing, his search for deep roots in Canadian Jewish life and his overall ahavat Yisrael. When they came to America, his family settled,…
Angell and Janey Lester (nee Alexander) were living in this house at 4 Radnor Rd., Bristol, in 1911 when this photo was taken. Janey is standing outside the house holding her infant son, Lionel Lester, with her four-year-old daughter, Ida, standing in front. Janey’s younger sister, twelve-year-old Dora Alexander, stands beside them in the dark…
From The London Jewish Chronicle, March 20, 1931 ◊ This shocking tale from the height of the depression focuses on a poor and desperate mother who, with a helpless infant, was caught in a bureaucratic no-man’s-land between the United States and Canada while authorities argued over which country would take her. Dorothy Cohen, a Jewish girl,…
Judith, a thirtyish Canadian who has been in Israel for ten years, returns to Toronto because her father is dying, and promises to stay long enough to earn a degree in social work. Enrolled in a fictitious college outside of Toronto, she becomes immersed in the inescapable political culture of modern academia — a simmering…
The following passages have been excerpted from The Rise of the Toronto Jewish Community, by Shmuel Mayer Shapiro (1877-1958), the late editor and publisher of the Toronto Yiddish newspaper, the Hebrew Journal. After surfacing in a synagogue archives in 2009, his unpublished manuscript was illustrated with some 90 rare and historic photographs and illustrations and…
Economics of Refugees : Canada Could Strike a Great Blow for Democracy From Saturday Night, March 1939 By Gwethalyn Graham ◊ Gwethalyn Graham (1913 – 1965) was a Toronto-born writer, whose 1944 novel Earth and High Heaven was the first Canadian book to reach number one on the New York Times best-seller list. Graham won the…
Part One in a series by a prominent Canadian Jewish bachelor By Anonymous (originally serialized in 1919) Foreword I hope that none who read this chronicle of my adventures into the field of pro-matrimony (if I may so call it) will feel that I am writing in a spirit of boastfulness. On the contrary, I…
From the Globe and Mail, October 10, 2002 ◊ Jack Burghardt, broadcaster, politician, lay preacher. Born Port Colborne, Ont., on Sept. 19, 1929; died London, Ont. on Sept. 28, 2002. Jack Burghardt, a well-known television personality and lay preacher who became a member of Parliament for London West and then deputy mayor of London, has died…
From the Toronto Star Weekly, August 1914 An artist and photographer for the Toronto Star Weekly captured these “unprecedented scenes” in Toronto in August 1914 as the city and the nation prepared for war in Europe. The above drawing (based on a photograph) shows recruits drilling outside Toronto’s Armouries. The photograph below showed more recruits drilling at the…
