THE following feature profile of Jacob Cohen, a retired Toronto businessman who became Toronto’s first Jewish justice of the peace in 1907, appeared in the Toronto Globe of March 12, 1910. * * * SNUGLY settled in the heart of Toronto reposes a little Hebrew nation sixteen thousand strong and growing rapidly. It has its…
Tag: canada
Canada’s 400th birthday — and Toronto at 100 (1934)
by •
From the Brisbane Courier Mail, May 26, 1934 CANADA is to be numbered among the new countries, yet it enters in July upon the 400th year of its history. On July 24, 1534, Jacques Cartier, mariner of St. Malo, in Brittany, set up a cross on the mainland of Canada at Gaspe, and took possession…
The new Arts & Letters Club opens, 1910
by •
The Arts and Letters Club will have unique quarters in the York County Building on Adelaide Street From The Star Weekly, August 1910 By Augustus Bridle Less than a year ago a well-known artist in Toronto, whose name is W. E. H. Macdonald, drew a simple picture of a Viking ship with full sails set…
Influx of poor Hebrews causes problem (1891)
by •
From The Globe, September 10, 1891 The influx of pauper Hebrew immigrants to this port is increasing to such an extent as to cause considerable uneasiness unless some immediate action is taken for its prevention. It was only a few days ago that a party was landed at Quebec, whch after considerable annoyance wee sent…
Historic postal station on Yonge needs saving
by •
The federal government has plans to sell Postal Station K, the historic art deco building at 2384 Yonge Street, several blocks north of Eglinton, and local residents are up in arms at the thought that a condo developer may take over the property. “This building is of great historic significance, and also stands on the site of…
Toronto Jewry, Only Yesterday, by Ben Kayfetz (1967)
by •
From the Canadian Jewish Review, November 24, 1967 Although Toronto Jewry is either 118 years old (if one estimates its age from the date of the Pape Avenue burial ground) or 111 years old (estimating from the first permanently organized congregation), its relative newness can be gauged by two facts: until only a few years…
Book reviews: a police procedural and a medical procedural
by •
With the Eaton Centre and Scarborough block party shootings in Toronto, and the Dark Knight and Sikh Temple shootings in Colorado and Wisconsin, gun crimes have been screaming from the headlines all summer. Seems a perfect time, then, to look at Robert Rotenberg’s third police procedural crime novel, Stray Bullets. As he demonstrated in his…
Saturday Night casts a low eye upon the Jew, 1904
by •
◊ Saturday Night, the staunch Canadian magazine, did us a service by preserving in prose the naïve, native prejudicial stereotype of the day. This article from 1904 paints a disgustingly dark portrait of the ugly foreigner, particularly the Jew, who was then collectively making Toronto a cosmopolitan city for the first time. Anti-semitic in its purest…
On Toronto’s First Synagogue, by Dr. David Eisen
by •
View from north-east corner Adelaide & Victoria, Toronto, 1856 From the Jewish Standard, April 15, 1966 That Toronto’s first synagogue was located over a drug store at the corner of Richmond and Yonge Streets is fairly well known in the Jewish community. But what this structure looked like and the general appearance of the neighbourhood…
Rabbi Schild’s memoir of an ‘uncertain passage’
by •
From Books in Canada, 2002 One evening some months ago, a crowd of about 600 people gathered in Toronto’s Adath Israel Synagogue for the launch of Rabbi Erwin Schild’s latest book, The Very Narrow Bridge: A Memoir of an Uncertain Passage. The hall in the synagogue was packed (standing room only) as the rabbi delivered…
