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…
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…
This colourful portrait shows a group of Jewish men in the Old Yishuv or Jewish community in Palestine of the British Mandate. The glass slide, produced by a Toronto company (Screen and Sound Service Limited) on King Street, was part of a large collection of glass slides that were evidently used in talks to Christian…
by Dr. Stephen A Speisman Lewis Samuel, merchant and philanthropist, was born in 1827 at Kingston upon Hull, England. He married Kate Seckelman in 1850 and they had eight children including Sigmund, a prominent philanthropist and patron of the arts in Toronto. He died on May 10 May 1887 at Victoria, B.C. and was buried…
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.…
from Canadian Jewish News (2015) When Cantor Bernard Wladowsky was lured from Chicago to Toronto in March 1912 to begin singing in Goel Tzedec Congregation’s monumental new synagogue on University Avenue, he was 36 years old, in beautiful voice, and of striking appearance in his white clerical robes. As the Toronto Daily Star marveled at…
By Brian Mulroney Brian Mulroney, Canada’s prime minister from 1984 to 1993, was awarded the World Jewish Congress’s Theodor Herzl Award in New York on November 9, 2023. This is an edited transcript of his remarks (courtesy sapirjournal.org). In his book Explaining Hitler, Ron Rosenbaum tells of Hitler, just prior to his suicide, as the Third…
The 60th anniversary of the atomic blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki this month (August 2005) provides an occasion to recall the small but thriving Jewish community that once existed in the southern Japanese port city of Nagasaki. Nagasaki’s Jewish colony was founded by a few Jewish refugees fleeing the Russian pogroms of the 1880s; the…
Silas Aaron Hardoon was born into a poor Jewish family in Baghdad in 1851, but when he died in Shanghai China 80 years later, he was regarded as the wealthiest man in Asia, leaving behind a fortune worth as much as $15 billion in today’s dollars. When Hardoon arrived in Shanghai as a youth of…
