His name was Moses; he was a leader of his people; he spent much time in Egypt and the desert; he wandered incessantly; he is associated with a fiery mountain and the holiday of Passover; and his life lasted longer than a century. These traits describe the biblical Moses, of course, but they also refer…
From the Jewish Virtual Library (Encyclopedia Judaica) Rafah (Ar. Rafaḥ; Heb. Rafi’ah) is a town near the Mediterranean coast at the southern end of Gaza where it borders with Egypt. Rafah is first mentioned in an inscription of the pharoah Seti I (c. 1300 B.C.E.) as Rph; it also appears in other Egyptian sources, in…
From The National Post, 2000 Dr. Reuven Yosef, one of Israel’s best-known ornithologists, has won a $25,000 (US) enterprise award from the Rolex Watch Company for transforming a garbage dump into a bird sanctuary outside the burgeoning tourist resort of Eilat on Israel’s 11-km-long strip of Red Sea coast. Born in India, Yosef came to…
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…
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…
Faux-intellectual “No Logo” celeb Naomi Klein spoke at a “Seder In The Street” last month in New York City before about one hundred mostly adoring JINO (“Jewish-in-name-only”) fans. She shamelessly delivered an antisemitic screed that would have made many of the more discreet, country-club sort of antisemites blush. Klein began her remarks by attacking the…
Note (May 16, 2024): Several days ago, Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow declined to attend the Jewish community’s flag-raising ceremony of an Israeli flag at City Hall, asserting that it was “divisive.” To be fair, such flag-raising ceremonies are frequent and the Mayor rarely attends them. However, it is telling that she was AWOL at an…
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…
by Dr Stuart E Rosenberg From The Canadian Jewish News, 1972 Here’s an interesting footnote to Jewish Canadiana. A very unusual episode, full of portent and prophecy for the future of Jews everywhere, was played out in a remote corner of the country, at an army base in Windsor, Nova Scotia. It was there that…
