North Star with Ellin Bessner

An estimated 67,000 Israelis living abroad say they planned to fly back to the Jewish State to vote Tuesday Oct. 27 in the historic national election – the first one since Oct. 7, 2023. Many Israelis living in Canada are among those making the long trip. Most of the voters who spoke to The CJN say they hope to see the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu defeated, the weakening of the p...

It’s hard to remember when Canadians have had so many elections in such a short span. In three weeks this October, there will have been seven—including municipal and provincial votes, plus the referendum in Alberta. Albertans voted “No” on Monday, Oct. 19, to consider a Brexit-style split from Canada, while on Oct. 5, Quebecers elected a separatist government, with only 28 per cent of the popular...

Montreal artist Sheila Nemtin Levine didn’t plan to fulfill the final commandment of the Torah, which says that every Jew should write their own Old Testament. But that’s what ended up happening after she painted 54 vibrant, mixed-media canvases—one for each parashah in the Torah—and imbued each with a modern take on the ancient Biblical verses. Her exhibit, Tablet Tableaux, has just opened for a...

Ellin is off today, so we're bringing you the latest episode of Menschwarmers, The CJN's Jewish sports podcast. Hear more at thecjn.ca/menschwarmers Jewish hockey is having a moment. Players like Adam Fox, the Hughes brothers, Zeev Buium, Zach Hyman, Jake Walman and Devon Levi are having a major impact on the ice—and with more Jewish players joining the NHL each year, fans are holding them up as r...

Note: This episode contains explicit and offensive language. When the Canadian Armed Forces issued an official apology in October 2025 for decades of racial discrimination and harassment experienced by its members, Toronto-based Capt. Rabbi Jonathan Jaffit, a Jewish officer, was one of many who subsequently applied to a Federal Court–approved claims process to receive financial compensation and re...

After six terms and 22 years of public service, Shelley Laskin is stepping away from the Toronto District School Board. The board's longest-serving active trustee has decided not to run again on Oct. 26, when Ontario voters head to the polls and choose their next local leaders. In doing so, one of Toronto's most prominent Jewish advocates at the school board level leaves during a sensitive time. T...

When Rachel Carmela’s mother died just before the COVID pandemic, her family was able to sit shiva. But the sudden lockdown in March 2020 curtailed communal gatherings where she could say Kaddish for the rest of her year of mourning. At the time, Carmela was working as a music and mindfulness teacher. She began writing songs to help cope with her grief and immersed herself in books and courses on...

When Calgary’s new sculpture, Shattered Into Light , was transported from the artist’s California studio in a wooden crate, Calgary Jewish cemetery operators thought it looked like an artifact from the film Raiders of the Lost Ark . The sculpture and an adjacent plaque were installed in a renovated community space inside Calgary’s historic Erlton cemetery, now called the Garden of Remembrance. Ded...

When Belleville resident Debbie Hoskin’s husband discovered an antisemitic black and white, two-sided flyer on their front lawn on Oct. 1, she knew right away it was Jew hatred, as she calls it: the text blames Jews for everything from profiting off COVID-19 to being the promoters of abortion. Although Hoskin is of Jewish heritage, her home wasn’t the only one on her street to wake up to these pos...

Television producer Perry Rosemond, who died Sept. 11 in Las Vegas, helped create some of the most iconic Canadian television of his generation, especially The King of Kensington , but also brought Mr. Dressup and Hockey Night in Canada to the small screen. The kid from Winnipeg’s North End went on to make it big in Toronto and Hollywood over a 50-year career, helping launch the careers of Martin...

Israel's election to form the country's next government is less than four weeks away, with voters in Israel going to the polls on Oct. 27. Long serving Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is once again leading the right-wing Likud party's hopes to return to office ,which he has held on and off for nearly 19 of the last thirty years, since 1996. This election comes after Israel's longest war since In...

It’s been nearly four months since a massive rainstorm hit Winnipeg on June 9, causing a flood in the basement of the Asper Jewish Community Campus. That’s where half the archival collection of the Jewish Heritage Centre of Western Canada was being stored: among the collection were some of the 70,000 photographs, old Jewish newspapers, Torah covers, and other cloth and textiles donated by generati...

Warning: This podcast contains a clip of hateful language. Both B’nai Brith Canada and Montreal’s Jewish federation, Federation CJA, have issued a call to change legislation in some provinces, including Quebec, that currently prevents private armed guards from working at Jewish institutions. B’nai Brith Canada also wants “a sufficient police presence at every Jewish institution in Canada.” CIJA, t...

Israeli Rabbi Oded Peles was a few minutes late starting the Yom Kippur evening service in Belleville, Ont., on Sept. 20, because he paused to help two female congregants light extra candles outside the sanctuary. Seconds later, a hail of bullets tore into the stained-glass windows beside the pulpit at Sons of Jacob synagogue, where Rabbi Peles would have been standing to lead the congregation in...

Amb. Deborah Lyons has stayed out of the public eye for the past year, ever since she abruptly stepped down as Canada’s last special envoy on preserving Holocaust remembrance and combatting antisemitism. Lyons resigned three months early from her high-profile role, in July 2025, at the time telling The CJN she felt “despondent and despairing” over how few Canadians stood up against anti-Jewish hat...

Nadav Zysblat has just begun his posting as Israel’s new Consul General in Toronto and Western Canada at a particularly difficult moment in Canada-Israel relations. In the days surrounding his arrival, Canada announced it would bring forward measures to ban trade in goods from illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank, while a boycott campaign targeted pro-Israel singer Boy George’s Vancouver c...

Work crews affixed a row of black metal fence posts into cement around the front and along both sides of Beth Tzedec Congregation in midtown Toronto on Sept. 10, laying the foundation for a new permanent security fence at Canada’s largest synagogue. The unprecedented installation is happening just one day ahead of Rosh Hashanah and subsequent High Holidays, which begin on the evening of Sept. 11....

This week, the Toronto International Film Festival will take over the city’s downtown. Among the many films slated for red-carpet premieres is  Our Loves , the latest by award-winning Israeli filmmaker Avi Nesher, which will receive its worldwide debut on Sept. 13.– the second day of Rosh Hashana. The film follows ordinary people navigating troubled relationships when Hamas’s massacre unfolds on O...

The Federal Court has ordered Canada to release another group of Nazi war criminal documents from the 1985 Deschênes report laying bare the government's controversial immigration policies that allowed several thousand collaborators into Canada after the Second World War. The federal Library and Archives Canada has fought the release for years citing privacy laws protecting longstanding diplomatic...

A landmark letter on MAID, approved recently by Toronto's main Orthodox rabbinical council—also called the Vaad HaRabbanim—is sounding the alarm about what the group notes is the increasing prevalence of medically assisted death making "inroads" into the local Jewish community. Citing the figure of 5,000 patients in Ontario in 2023 who the council describes as being "euthanized by m...

A leaked memo to CBC journalists last week ordered them not to call the 9/11 al-Qaida attacks "terrorism" in forthcoming coverage of next month's 25th anniversary. It prompted backlash within Canada and beyond. Not long after Toronto Sun journalist Warren Kinsella broke the story on Aug. 27, the head of the FBI, the U.S. ambassador to Canada, CSIS, two Canadian cabinet ministers and seve...

Earlier this week, on Aug. 24, Montreal’s City Council adopted a motion expressing solidarity with the Palestinians and all civilians affected, and supporting international investigations into genocide claims and human rights violations, acknowledging that International Criminal Court arrest warrants have been issued for for Israeli leaders, and that Canada placed sanctions on Israel. But three “d...

When trade negotiations between Canada and the United States broke off Aug. 19, mere weeks before Rosh Hashanah, Prime Minister Mark Carney described the situation as being “at war”. Farmers are now finding themselves caught in the crosshairs; among them are Jewish producers of festive staples this upcoming High Holidays season: milk and honey. Canadian milk products and natural honey are among th...

This fall, two well-known Canadian Jewish schools will introduce new heads of school—and both leaders share similar visions for what students and parents and staff can expect when classes begin the first week of September. TanenbaumCHAT, Canada’s largest pluralistic Jewish high school, in Toronto, is welcoming Dr. Amy Platt, who joins after nearly a decade leading one of the city’s elementary/midd...

The late Holocaust survivor and speaker Eva Olsson died Aug. 4 in Port Carling, Ont. She was 101. She once estimated that she had given 4,300 presentations over the years. Her family says she likely reached over 1.5 million people with her story of resilience and courage. Although she only started speaking about her life in her 70s, 15,000 people wrote her letters saying how moved they were. The O...