A windowless, doorless chamber, set high up into the wall of an antiquated synagogue and accessible only by ladder, is not normally the sort of place to which a traveller dreams of arriving. However, it was precisely such a room that Solomon Schechter, a Cambridge professor of Talmudic literature, was determined to reach when he…
Originally appeared in The Canadian Jewish News The Rothschilds had one. The Disraelis had one. The Montefiore, Mocatta and Sassoon families each had one. And so, according to some interpretations, did each of the twelve tribes of Israel. Popular with the Jewish aristocracy in Europe since medieval times, Jewish coats of arms once seemed a…
Report from the Canadian Jewish Chronicle, 1919 Ukraine, the Scene of Wholesale Murder Since Last November. Whole Communities Wiped Out. Troops of Petliura and Grigorieff Principal Culprits. Bolshevik Troops Kill Many in Spite of Rigorous Measures of Their Commanders Authentic reports have reached this country of a series of massacres which have raged in the…
Originally appeared in The Toronto Star Yuval Lufan has the craggy face and rough hands of a fisherman who goes out onto the Sea of Galilee nightly with lanterns that attract the fish into his nets. Born on the shores of the lake about 50 years ago, he says he has dreamed since he was…
Dan Behat, the former chief archaeologist of Jerusalem, served as a senior lecturer at Bar-Ilan University and has also taught extensively in Canada. He has lectured to Christian groups around the world on Jerusalem in the time of Jesus and was once invited by Pope John Paul II to do so at the Vatican. He…
Editor’s Introduction: Anyone who searches the phrase “Crystal beach racial disturbance” will come up with details of a brief race riot that occurred in the Ontario summer resort town in the summer of 1956. But news of an earlier “disturbance” — in the summer of 1942 — does not seem to come up at all.…
Toronto publisher Now and Then Books’s latest title — Only Yesterday: Collected Pieces on the Jews of Toronto, by Benjamin Kayfetz and Stephen A. Speisman — is a prolifically illustrated book featuring 18 evocative articles by two notable historians of Toronto’s Jewish community. Culled from a variety of sources, the pieces in Only Yesterday focus…
From the Canadian Jewish News, April 8, 2020 Note: I compiled this quiz for the Canadian Jewish News, and it ran as the cover story on the very last issue that was published. Answers appear below. ♦ QUESTIONS 1. What wartime Canadian novel dealt centrally with Jewish characters and themes and won a Governor General’s…
Dr. David Eisen, Toronto’s first Jewish radiologist, was always intrigued with Jewish history. The youngest son of a Galician peddler who came to Toronto about 1902, David Eisen attended the University of Toronto’s medical school from 1917 to 1922, and joined the Mount Sinai Hospital after graduating. A quarter of a century ago, Eisen published…
From The Toronto Star, January 5, 1907 The Greatest Hebrew Community Ever Assembled, Over 800,000 Souls. ARE BUYING UP MANHATTAN Real Estate and Clothing Favorite Fields – Will Starve to Gain End – Poverty to Affluence New York – The Jews of New York City have recently celebrated the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of…
