It was the 1936 movie Rembrandt starring Charles Laughton that persuaded then-14-year-old student Aba Bayefsky to switch from an academic stream to the art department at Toronto’s Central Tech High School, but it was his experience as an official war artist in Europe during and immediately after WWII that instilled a deep and permanent sense…
Tag: toronto
Artist Karla Goldberg triumphs over adversity
by •
Although it usually doesn’t host art exhibitions, The Baycrest Geriatric Centre has made a rare exception in the case of Karla Goldberg, an 84-year-old Toronto artist who trained herself to make art with her left hand after a stroke paralyzed the right side of her body two years ago. The exhibition “Creative Strokes of the…
Bases (and basement) loaded for Peter Seidman
by •
Give Peter Seidman a book about baseball that he doesn’t already have and you’re likely to score a bases-loaded home run with the Montreal-born collector of baseball paraphernalia. But chances are you’ll strike out in the attempt, because the 57-year-old teacher and administrator for the Toronto board of education has already amassed more than 4,000…
New book from JGS Toronto
by •
To mark its 25th anniversary, the Jewish Genealogical Society of Canada (Toronto) has published a book of 44 genealogy-related stories written by its members. The stories in Tracing Our Roots, Telling Our Stories are diverse and range freely over geography and time, encompassing both the Old World and the New from a couple of centuries…
Windows into Toronto’s past
by •
Towards the end of the 19th century, as Jewish multitudes left the Old World for the promising shores of the New, the Toronto neighbourhood of St. John’s Ward became a densely populated Jewish ghetto. Toronto’s population was counted as 86,415 in the 1881 census, with an average of 19 persons per acre. On Elizabeth, Chestnut,…
Goldwin Smith, Historical Puzzle
by •
A historical puzzle: Why did Goldwin Smith, the foremost literary personality of 19th-century English Canada and a notorious anti-semite, attend the opening of Toronto’s Holy Blossom Temple on Bond Street in 1897? And why, despite his outspoken enmity towards the Jews, did he contribute to the Holy Blossom’s building fund, as congregational records show? If…
Jerry Gray still traveling with Travellers
by •
By his own telling, Jerry Gray had one of the most thrilling experiences of his life in late June (2011). In front of a sold-out house at Toronto’s Roy Thomson Hall, he stood at the conductor’s podium, raised a baton, and led the 385-voice Mormon Tabernacle Choir and a full orchestra in a rousing rendition…
Descendants of Michigan’s first Jewish settler ‘reunite’
by •
About 60 descendants of Ezekiel Solomons, an 18th-century Jewish fur trader who operated a trading post in what is now Michigan, gathered recently for a first family reunion at Fort Michilimackinac in Mackinaw City, Michigan, about 50 miles south of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. Sheldon and Judith Godfrey, a husband-and-wife-team of historians from Toronto, were…
Czech-Sudeten Jews the focus of Far to Go
by •
Toronto novelist Alison Pick, whose book Far to Go was on the list of 13 contenders for the 2011 Man Booker prize announced in July, says she has benefited from the honour even though Far to Go did not make the three-title short list that the Man Booker jury released on September 6. “I think…
Translation guide spurred my Glicenstein breakthrough
by •
Two centuries ago, as part of a wave of reforms that swept Europe after the American and French revolutions, the locks were removed on the ghettos in which the Jews had been confined since medieval times, and the inhabitants were permitted to move freely in and out at all hours as they pleased. Whereas previously…
