If the city ever proclaims an official day dedicated to the Jewish community’s many successes, it would be most fitting to call it Meyer W. Gasner Day. That’s because MW, as he was known, gave the community its start. He’s the man who spearheaded almost every aspect of Jewish living in Toronto, be it Jewish…
Tag: JEWISH TORONTO
Architects’ records given to Ontario Jewish Archives
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Photographs, blueprints and press clippings documenting the career of the late Toronto architect Harold Kaplan and his firm Kaplan and Sprachman are now in the Ontario Jewish Archives. Records of Kaplan and Sprachman’s work are also at the City of Toronto Archives, the Archives of Ontario and the National Archives of Canada. Kaplan’s two daughters,…
Sherman was society president for 60 years
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William Sherman, who served as president of the Lipsker Young Mens Society for more than 60 years, died recently (2003) at age 91. He was the son of Samuel who came here from Lipsk, Poland in 1905, and in 1930 started Sherman Tailors on College Street. Samuel’s three sons, Teddy, the late Sollie and William,…
Obit: artist Ernest Raab (died 2003)
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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…
Harbord class of ’53 gathers for 50th reunion
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Many graduates of Harbord Collegiate Institute, once the centre of activities for Jewish teens in Toronto, have wonderful memories of their time at the school. The graduating class of 1953 recently held its 50th reunion dinner at Meron Banquet Hall, where 88 graduates, spouses and partners gathered, from places as far away as Kingston and…
Jewish Toronto: miscellaneous photos from the olden days
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MEDICAL ARTS BUILDING ON BLOOR STREET (illustration, above) : New structure to be erected on the old Sweny property at northeast corner of Bloor and St. George stret by a group of Toronto physicians. The site was acquired from the Toronto General Trusts Co., executors of the Sweny estate, and has 140 feet frontage on…
Exhibit offers colourful look at Toronto’s garment industry
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Through a series of colourful panels, photographs, display cases, clothing racks, and stand-alone artifacts such as a 1917 Singer treadle industrial sewing machine, the exhibition, A Common Thread, which opened recently in the Reuben and Helene Dennis Museum of Beth Tzedec Synagogue, offers a lively and compelling look at the history of Toronto’s garment industry from the early…
McCaul Synagogue Golden Anniversary Book (1938)
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THIS Golden Anniversary book was published in 1938 to mark the first 50 years of the Beth Hamidrash Hagadol Chevra Tehillim of Toronto, which was founded in 1887 and moved into the McCaul Street Synagogue about 1905. In the early 1950s it merged with the Goel Tzedec Congregation on University Avenue to become the present Beth…
The House of the Living (Excerpt)
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THE following is the beginning of The House of the Living, a “long” short story by Bill Gladstone. It is a romance-mystery of Jewish genealogy. Genealogist David Lazarus assists a married lady named Sarah Blum to discover what happened to an uncle who disappeared from her family, and changes his life in the process. Originally…
Bar mitzvah takes family back to old Ostrovtzer Synagogue
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Nathan Friedman-Burley’s bar mitzvah was a walk down memory lane for his family. The event took place at the Cecil Community Centre at 58 Cecil Street in downtown Toronto, once the home of the vibrant Anshei Ostrovtzer Synagogue where Friedman-Burley’s great-grandfather, Israel Nachman Weinberg, was one of the founders in 1922 and the first president,…
