From The Canadian Jewish News, January 2014 Canadian, Israeli-born writer Ayelet Tsabari, whose first book of short stories The Best Place on Earth was recently published by HarperCollins of Toronto, writes with amazing intensity not only about modern Israelis, but also about the small Mizrachi (“Eastern”) Jewish minority in Israel; her grandparents came from Yemen.…
From The Toronto Evening Telegram, May 6 1912 Note: This article describes the surprisingly high cosmopolitan character of the Toronto Police Force of 1912. For the previous decade the city had been filling up with tens of thousands of European and other immigrants, so it only seems appropriate that some would find their way onto…
S.W. Jacobs, K.C., M.P., Draws the Attention of the Members of Parliament to the Fact That Jews Have Been Murdered in Poland Even After the Treaty With Poland Had Been Signed From the Canadian Jewish Chronicle, September 19, 1919 Ottawa, Sept. 12 — Two resolutions calling for approval of compacts entered into by certain of…
From the Toronto Daily Star, May 7, 1907 At the next meeting of the annual conference of the Canadian Chiefs of Police, one of the most important subjects to be discussed is the establishment of a central general bureau for the identification of criminals. At the present time there is no general bureau and the…
◊ In 1947 the Canadian Jewish Congress published the first of two parts of the book Canadian Jews in World War II. The books were edited by David Rome. The first part deals with Decorations and the second part, which appeared in 1948, memorializes the Casualties. The books were dedicated to the millions of Jews everywhere…
My father rarely spoke about his war experiences, so when he did so one evening in December 1987, I recorded the conversation as best I could remember it in my journal. At a restaurant for dinner, my father reminisced about the old days: but what else do people reminisce about? Britain declared war against Germany…
From the Canadian Jewish News, Summer 2013 With his latest novel A Bird’s Eye, prolific Toronto writer Cary Fagan has created what may be his best work since his acclaimed first novel, The Animals’ Waltz, won the Canadian Jewish Fiction Prize in 1994. A Bird’s Eye marks a return for Fagan to the small-canvas, miniature…
From the Canadian Jewish News, February 2013 Novelist Susan Glickman is the latest in a series of Canadian novelists, scholars, scriptwriters and performance artists to become enchanted by the legend of Esther Brandeau, the first known Jew to set foot in New France. As a young single Jewish woman, Esther Brandeau would not have been…
Five people who survived the Holocaust in a makeshift shelter in a Ukrainian forest were reunited recently in Toronto for the first time since their liberation by the Russians in April 1944. The five are the only remaining survivors of an original group of ten women and children from Rokitno, a town in the Volhynian…
From the Canadian Jewish Chronicle, September 19, 1919 ◊ Note: “In 1919, Russian Jews were caught in the middle of a civil war, and became the victims of warring Red and White Russian, Ukrainian and Polish forces, among others. Thousands of pogroms resulted in the loss of an estimated 100,000 Jewish lives. Polish troops, Petlura’s soldiers,…
