Sometime between 1905 and 1908, my mother’s grandparents said goodbye to their parents and their village of Zhlobin, Belarus, and brought their children with them to Canada. For decades, although they were divided by a wide gulf of geography and history, family members sent letters in Yiddish back and forth between the Old World and…
Tag: history
Good ship Paducah smuggled Jews to Palestine
by •
A recent ceremony at the U.S. Holocaust Museum paid tribute to the captain and crew of the Paducah, an aging American gunship that was sold as surplus after WWII and retrofitted to smuggle Holocaust survivors through the British blockade to Palestine in 1947. The captain of the Paducah was Rudolph Patzert, a 35-year-old New York…
War of 1812 replayed at Backhouse Conservation Area
by •
Painted a bright red, the 201-year-old John C. Backhouse Mill seems as conspicuous against its background of grass and trees as the British Redcoats must have been when engaged in combat with the Americans during the War of 1812. A historic property that was restored to pristine condition two years ago for its 200th anniversary,…
Uncovering Spain’s Jewish past
by •
A statue in the Plaza Mayor or main square of Trujillo, Spain, a well-preserved old town of 10,000 inhabitants, is dedicated to its most illustrious citizen, the conquistador Francisco Pizarro, conqueror of Peru. The Pizarro family built a handsome mansion in the Plaza Mayor about 1560. Its facade is decorated with carved images of the…
Two books on the Jews of Montreal
by •
From the Ghetto to the Main: The Story of the Jews of Montreal, by Joe King, is a masterly treatment of more than two and half centuries of Jewish history in what was once the largest Jewish community in the Dominion of Canada. King sets the stage for his subject in five chapters that sketch…
Finding the Biblical David on the road to Beit Guvrin
by •
We were driving southward through Israel’s Shephelah region when our guide pulled the van over to the shoulder and drew our attention to a ridge of hills to the right of us and a roughly parallel ridge to the left. We were south of Beit Shemesh on the road to Beit Guvrin, near the Ha-Ela…
Caught in a nightmarish Abyss of Despair
by •
Born about 1620 in Ostrog, Volynia, Rabbi Nathan Hanover and his family were among the countless Jews in Ukraine and eastern Poland whose lives were disrupted by the Chmielnicki massacres of 1648 and the intermittent attacks that continued for years afterwards. Hanover travelled extensively over the region of devastation, speaking with many affected people and…
Moored in Morocco: tale of an 18th-century Jewish traveller
by •
From the earliest days of Hebrew printing to the present, Jewish readers have found great favor in literary accounts of Jewish travellers, especially those who, like the famed 12th-century Benjamin of Tudela, provided first-hand descriptions of the holy city of Jerusalem. One of the acknowledged classics of the genre is Travail in an Arab Land,…
A Jewish homeland on Grand Island, 1825
by •
Manuel Mordecai Noah, an American Jew born in Philadelphia in 1785, did much world travelling in his day — he visited Europe numerous times and was the US consul to Tunis — but it is perhaps the tale surrounding his travels from New York City to the upper reaches of New York State in 1825…
Merida, a Roman retirement community in Spain
by •
Merida, a city of 41,000 inhabitants in the Spanish province of Estremadura, boasts the most spectacular Roman ruins in Spain and an outstanding museum in which many impressive ancient treasures are housed. One’s introduction to the National Museum of Roman Art in Merida is the town itself. Merida was founded in 25 BC and named…
