Eli Pfefferkorn says he was walking in the park one day, thinking about the story he had been longing to tell, when suddenly he experienced a rare and startling revelation. “I found the voice,” he said. “One day, one morning, I heard the voice from inside coming . . . a voice I had not…
Tag: Holocaust
Josef Krystal, 74, Labour Zionist activist (2000)
by •
Josef Krystal, who was national president of the Labour Zionist Alliance of Canada, died recently (2000) after a long illness. He was 74. Owner of the Krystal Cap Company, he was active in the business until he became ill. His son Steven, who worked with him in the business for 20 years, is continuing to…
Orchestrating the American dream
by •
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…
Publisher has strong ideological mission
by •
Nearly a decade after he founded a publishing company with a strong ideological mission, Howard Rotberg may take his place among that small and proud group of Canadians who operate successful small publishing houses. Although Mantua Books started off slowly, it now publishes one new title each month. Some of the books sell tens of…
How Yad Vashem computerized names of victims
by •
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…
Abram’s latest crime novel features hard-boiled cop
by •
As a volunteer for the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, the organization created by filmmaker Steven Spielberg, author Alvin Abram gained first-hand knowledge of the experiences of Holocaust survivors. In his recently published seventh book, The Minyan, Abram combines his flare for detective crime mysteries with a story about the Holocaust, featuring locales…
Chmielniker Society carries on heritage
by •
The memory of a murdered Jewish community has been kept alive for years by members of the Chmielniker Society of Toronto. Chmielnik, located in the southeast of Poland, was once home to more than 8,000 Jews before World War II. This was in a town of 10,000. The Chmielniker Society is made up of those who…
Obit: artist Ernest Raab (died 2003)
by •
Ernest Raab, an internationally renowned sculptor, artist, poet, writer, and Talmudic scholar, died Aug. 22. He was 77. Among his many other works, Raab created the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial and the monument to Raoul Wallenberg in Earl Bales Park, a bas relief at Beth Tzedec Congregation and the stained glass windows at Beth David…
On the Warsaw Ghetto
by •
In the decades before the Holocaust, the Jews of Warsaw believed that they were on the eve of a great positive transformation, according to an Israeli professor of Jewish history who took part in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. The Jews of Warsaw were poor, often living in one-room flats where lively discussions of religion, politics…
Book Review: The Hare with Amber Eyes
by •
Edmund de Waal, London-based author of The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Family’s Century of Art and Loss, has described this memorable book as “a biography of a collection and the biography of my family.” The collection he refers to is an assortment of some 264 netsuke, tiny elegant figurines carved by Japanese craftsmen in…
