When Dr. Daniel Drucker of Toronto’s Mount Sinai Hospital receives the US$150,000 Manpei-Suzuki prize for groundbreaking diabetes research this February (2015), he will be only the latest in a long parade of medical researchers at the world-famous institution to be recognized for their excellence. A researcher engaged in a different sort of quest — probing…
The following is an abridgement of a talk that Bill Gladstone gave to the Jewish Genealogical Society of Canada (Toronto) on March 28, 2012. Definition A landsmanshaft is a group consisting, at least initially, of Jewish immigrants who came from the same village, town, country or region in Eastern Europe or the Russian Empire. The…
Born in Germany to Holocaust-survivor parents after World War Two, Toronto publisher Margie Wolfe has for many years been engaged in the pivotal task of exporting published Holocaust books to some 50 countries around the globe, both in their original English and translated into about 40 languages. Holocaust books for young readers are a main…
Photo: Section of the Ward, ca 1910s, from Louisa & Albert Streets at lower left, the Armouries at centre, and the old University Avenue Synagogue seen from the back (it faced onto University Ave., midway between Queen and Dundas) The neighbourhood known as “the Ward” was one of the most colourful areas in the city’s…
From The Jewish Standard, April 1, 1966 The author, in an earlier article, wrote of the career of Mr. Charles Kahn, Toronto’s first Jewish dentist. The following article deals with the first Jewish pharmacist in Toronto and discloses hitherto unknown material in the history of Jewish life in Old Toronto. At just about the time…
Ambitious in scope and masterful in execution, Allan Levine’s panoramic portrait of our city from its beginnings to the present is sweeping and opinionated, judicious and clever, insightful and gossipy all at once. This is no dry academic survey but a lively, popular-style “biography” in the mode of Peter Ackroyd’s London (2000) and other recent…
Back in 1938, two Jewish boys posed for a photo on the steps of Toronto’s Ostrovtzer Synagogue on the north side of Cecil Street, just east of Spadina. Last week [July 2014], roughly 76 years after that first photo was snapped, Gurion Hyman and Gordon Perlmutter returned to the same spot and had…
The illustration appeared in the Toronto Star on January 15, 1907, as the city welcomed a new city council into City Hall. The mayor was named Coatsworth. Note that there are no women councillors; however, it seems there are a few women present (note their distinctive hats) in the gallery in the background. In early…
Angell and Janey Lester (nee Alexander) were living in this house at 4 Radnor Rd., Bristol, in 1911 when this photo was taken. Janey is standing outside the house holding her infant son, Lionel Lester, with her four-year-old daughter, Ida, standing in front. Janey’s younger sister, twelve-year-old Dora Alexander, stands beside them in the dark…
Torontonians who have vanished to the four corners of the globe From the Toronto Star Weekly, November 29, 1913 By Arthur Barron In nearly every large city and town across the face of the earth are groups of men and women who, by all the laws of preference, should be spending their lives hundreds or…
