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,…
Fame and Fortune Came to Canada’s Biggest “King Coal” When He Fought American Trust Elias Rogers Began Life as Farm Lad in York County — Earned First Wages in a Lumber Yard — A Quaker by Faith — Once Ran for Mayor in Toronto From the Toronto Star Weekly, September 20, 1913 Passing along King…
Millions of Diaspora Jews owe a huge debt of gratitude to Baron Maurice de Hirsch, the Jewish magnate, banker and philanthropist who built the Orient Express railroad from Vienna to Constantinople, for assisting our Russian ancestors to reach the United States, Canada, Argentina and other hospitable shores. According to his biographer, Samuel J. Lee, Hirsch…
From the Toronto Star Weekly, July 5, 1913 Emphatically the right man in the right place is Dr. George H. Locke as Toronto’s chief librarian. Possibly he does not look quite look the part, for there is a notable absence of “mustiness” about him. And “mustiness,” to many people’s minds, should be the lot of…
Hard to believe, but there were Jews in Toronto and probably Montreal as well who were drawing monthly pensions from the U.S. government as late as 1925 for their participation as soldiers in the American Civil War. An index of Civil War pension recipients indicates that some 4,966 veterans of America’s most sanguinary conflict filed…
From the Toronto Star, November 4, 1909 ◊ This article reflects two problems sometimes faced by members of the city’s Jewish community in regard to the police. The first is selective enforcement of the law, seemingly targeting the Jews (and certainly other minorities probably even more). The second is the specific Sunday blue laws that meant…
Exclusive Report, February 3, 2013 Former Toronto Mayor David Crombie easily charmed a full-house audience at a January 30th meeting of the North Toronto Historical Society in Northern District Library. Although Crombie’s advertised topic was “North Toronto 1912, Then and Now,” references to North Toronto were few and far between. But it didn’t seem to…
