It is perhaps fitting that Dara Solomon began her new job as director of the Ontario Jewish Archives at the beginning of May [2012], which has been designated Jewish Heritage Month in Ontario. Not only does the experienced museum curator bring a new face to the Archives, but she is also intent on setting up…
Tag: genealogy
From Belarus to Cape Breton & beyond
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From the Canadian Jewish News, May 15, 1997 In the early part of the century, our parents sailed to this country from many parts of Europe, and their history is interwoven with Canada. Now along comes a book about Whitney Pier, Cape Breton Island, one of the most fascinating settlements of early Jewish life. The…
Orchestrating the American dream
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Family Matters: Sam, Jennie and the Kids, by Burton Bernstein, was first published in 1982, and remains, 30 years later, one of the most interesting family histories this reviewer has read. The reason is not so much that Burton Bernstein was the brother of a celebrity, the great composer-conductor Leonard Bernstein, but because he treated…
Titanic genealogy
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The 100th anniversary of the S.S. Titanic disaster is almost upon us. The legendary British ship sank on the night of April 14-15, 1912, after striking an iceberg in the North Atlantic on its maiden voyage. More than 1,500 of the 2,200 people aboard perished in the tragedy, which has been memorialized in books, popular…
How Yad Vashem computerized names of victims
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Faced with a non-negotiable deadline of March 31, 1999, an army of some 1,200 data entry clerks, software technicians, Holocaust scholars and other specialists worked at a feverish pitch through late February and March to computerize the names of three million or more Holocaust victims from a collection of documents at the Yad Vashem Holocaust…
Genealogist explores her family’s history in Stropkov
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Jews settled in Stropkov, in the Slovak Republic, around 1640. It was a little town in the backwoods of Slovakia with a Jewish atmosphere because it was between Galicia and Hungary and thus attracted Jews fleeing from those two areas. On May 24, 1942, the day before the Nazis began to deport Jews, the records…
Lost in Hollywood: my cousin, the child actor
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During a sightseeing visit to Los Angeles some years ago, I surprised myself by taking a cab to the Margaret Herrick Library at the Fairbanks Center for Motion Picture Study in Beverly Hills. I hadn’t seen the Getty Museum, the Hollywood studios and so many other sights, so why was I going to some musty…
Devor family reunion in Toronto, 1983
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Thanks to the prodigious efforts of Toronto accountant Louis Devor, 180 members of a clan that variously spelled its surname as Devor, Devore, Dwor and D’wor, met in Toronto in the summer of 1983, reported Frank Rasky in a story in the Canadian Jewish News of August 4, 1983. Participants, who ranged in age from…
A Bacher family reunion in the Catskills, 1983
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More than 250 members of the Bacher family met for a reunion at Grossinger’s, the Catskills resort, reported the Canadian Jewish News on July 21, 1983. The following is a summary of the original story. Ethel Bacher and Yossel Yussiper of Bukovina, Romania, who died in an 1860s cholera epidemic, were the ancestors to which…
Medical condition leads to genealogy breakthrough
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Stanley Diamond, a semi-retired Montreal businessman who ran a company that manufactured decorated ceilings, has become a medical-genealogical detective in a bid to defuse what he calls a “ticking time bomb” and prevent potential suffering and death caused by thalassemia, a genetic disease. Common among Sephardic Jews, Greeks, Italians and other Mediterranean peoples, the gene…
