North Star with Ellin Bessner

Montreal-area Liberal MP Anthony Housefather said he is grateful to have been officially appointed on Friday July 5 as a special advisor to the Prime Minister and cabinet on relations with Canada's Jewish community, and on antisemitism. Housefather's new title also comes with a budget for travel, and to hire one extra staffer to help with the pile of files he is already working on, in the wake of...

An estimated 500 people turned out on Sunday, June 23, to march through the streets of Kitchener, Ont., carrying Israeli flags and raising funds to help victims of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel and subsequent war. The number might not sound like a lot, but to organizer Jeff Budd—whose family has sponsored this Walk for Israel for generations, and who expected maybe 150 people might turn up—it...

Birju Dattani is a Canadian human rights lawyer who worked in the Yukon and his home province of Alberta before being catapulted into the highest-profile human rights job in the country a few weeks ago. In mid-June, Canada’s justice minster announced Dattani’s appointment for a five-year term as chief commissioner at the federal human rights watchdog. But the ink was hardly dry on the Order-in-Cou...

Canada Day is usually a holiday of patriotism and pride. But this year, nine months after Oct. 7 sparked new waves of antisemitism across the country, many Jewish Canadians continue to feel isolated, vulnerable and anxious. It seems like every few weeks, a new synagogue is attacked or vandalized; Jewish and Israeli children are being routinely bullied; open supporters of Israel can find themselves...

Author Robert Rotenberg never imagined that his newest police crime novel, written against the backdrop of European fascism, would come out at the same time that far-right political leaders are sweeping into office across the continent. Nor did he plan that  What We Buried  would be published in the aftermath of one of the most embarrassing moments in recent Canadian history, when lawmakers from a...

Like the Taylor Swift song about her ex-boyfriend, El Al airlines is likely “never, ever, getting back together” with Canada, at least not in the form of direct non-stop El Al flights with the Star of David logo on its planes. Two years ago on June 21, 2022 the Israeli carrier announced it was shuttering direct service to Toronto. After 40 years of service to Canada, the Toronto office was closed,...

An Ontario court judge is expected to rule as early as this week on whether the seven-week-old pro-Palestinian tent city at the University of Toronto will be allowed to remain, or whether it must be dismantled immediately—with police help, if necessary. Lawyers for the university were in court last week arguing the encampment is illegal and has done irreparable harm to UofT’s international reputat...

Rising , the new children’s book by award-winning Canadian author Sidura Ludwig, tells the story of a Jewish child and their mother preparing homemade challah bread for Shabbat. Ludwig wrote the story four years ago, during the pandemic lockdown, when she found solace in the weekly ritual of challah-making during those uncertain times. Now, releasing in a post-Oct. 7 world, Ludwig realizes the act...

It’s been more than two weeks since an unknown suspect set fire to the front doors of Vancouver’s Schara Tzedeck synagogue on May 30, while people were inside attending a late-night meeting. A passerby saw the flames and called it in, while a shul member used his jacket to douse the flames. No one was hurt, but the incident left one of the building’s ornate silver doors blackened—and the community...

Since Oct. 8, Hezbollah—the Iranian-backed Shia militia in southern Lebanon—has launched thousands of rockets into northern Israeli communities, including Metula and Kiryat Shmona, which for decades have been financially supported by Canada's Jewish community. But Israeli air strikes that killed a senior Hezbollah commander last week have escalated the situation. Hezbollah militants subsequently l...

Alexandria Fanjoy Silver enjoys being a proud and loud advocate for Toronto's Jewish community, even though she only became an "official" Jew in 2009. Her parents brought her up as a member of the Anglican Church; yet, while growing up, she always felt an "obsession" and a pull towards Judaism. And so, as a university student in 2007, after visiting to the Nazi death camps in P...

Ellin Bessner, host of  The CJN Daily _podcast, was admittedly nervous ahead of Sunday’s 55th annual Walk with Israel, held by UJA Federation of Greater Toronto. For weeks, pro-Palestinian protest groups in the city had been threatening to disrupt the important Jewish solidarity march—the first one since the deadly Hamas attack on Oct. 7. It was stunning watching the record turnout of an estimated...

Montreal professor Joseph Schwarcz doesn’t actually have a medical degree, but that hasn’t stopped him from becoming a popular public figure in the Canadian media landscape as a reliable face of science. Schwarcz, 76, actually has a doctorate in chemistry from McGill University, where he has been based for more than four decades. In that time, he’s hosted a long-running weekly science radio show,...

Hagar Brodutch, her husband Avichai and their three children are settling into their temporary home in Toronto for an extended vacation after a horrific ordeal. Hagar and the kids were among the most high-profile hostages kidnapped on Oct. 7 by Hamas and released after 51 days, during a ceasefire deal in November 2023. Many Canadians followed the Brodutch case closely because they have family livi...

Just hours before Hamas’ attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 the Israeli film star Swell Ariel Or was in Canada as the guest of honour at an Israel Bonds fundraiser. The twenty-something actor was fresh off her breakout role in the Israeli historical family saga “The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem” which aired on Netflix in 2022. She portrayed Luna Ermoza, the fashion-designer daughter of a Sepha...

We're taking a day off at The CJN Daily, so please enjoy this podcast from our friends at Montreal's Federation CJA, which aired last month. To subscribe to their feed, click here . In this episode of the Federation CJA 360 Podcast, host Glenn Nashen talks about using the law and the courts to fight back. Meet lawyer Neil Oberman, who is standing up for the Montreal Jewish community and helping fi...

Yafa Sakkejha was named after the city of Jaffa, where, until 1948, her Palestinian grandparents lived and owned property and managed orange groves. Sakkejha’s mother grew up in East Jerusalem, but left the country during the First Intifada in the late 1980s. Sakkejha, who was born and raised in Toronto, feels deep pain over the devastation that has resulted from Oct. 7—not just for the Palestinia...

Since Oct. 7, at least five mezuzahs have been torn off the doors of Jewish students living in residence at Queen’s University. At the University of Windsor, a law professor urged a Jewish student not to attend their class because “Zionists aren’t welcome”. And in just the last few weeks, some protesters who set up pro-Palestinian tent encampments on Canadian university campuses have celebrated Ha...

One day after the weekend targeting of Bais Chaya Mushka, a Jewish girl’s school in Toronto, by suspects who sprayed the front of building with bullets, the school’s students and their families have gone from initial shock and fear, to the determination not to be intimidated. They turned out in large numbers at a popular park to join the city’s Chabad Jewish community for a fun-filled day of ballo...

Show notes Seniors are in the spotlight this week as Canada and other countries are meeting at the United Nations to discuss ways to help the world’s billion people over the age of 60. And Dan Levitt is in the thick of it—the longtime nursing home administrator from Vancouver, who started as British Columbia’s official seniors advocate in April, flew down to New York to advocate for a binding inte...

The CJN Daily ‘s Honourable Menschen is back, just ahead of Lag b’Omer on June 11, when tens of thousands of observant Jews traditionally make a pilgrimage to Israel’s Mt. Meron to visit the tomb of Rabbi Simeon Bar Yochai, the author of the Zohar. Ahead of the calendar anniversary, it felt important to shine a spotlight on the legacies left by these recently departed Canadian Jewish figures: Patr...

Eitan Cohen, 13, is determined to head back to class after the Victoria Day long weekend—despite months of being bullied, taunted, threatened and assaulted by a few fellow students in his school in Toronto, in the wake of Oct. 7. It came to a head on May 17, when hundreds of neighbours and friends came to walk Eitan to Faywood Arts-Based Curriculum School. It was a show of solidarity for the boy a...

On April 30, Shaked Tsurkan, a 14-year-old Israeli girl attending high school in New Brunswick, was followed and beaten up by an older student. It happened off school grounds during the lunch hour and other classmates gathered to watch—someone even filmed the whole thing on their phone, later posted to social media, where you can see Tsurkan getting jumped from behind, thrown to the ground and pun...

The respected Israeli journalist and author Yossi Klein Halevi is bringing his message of hope to Canada on May 14, 2024, to mark Israel’s 76th anniversary. Speaking at a synagogue in Toronto about the impact of Oct. 7 on Jewish history, Klein Halevi believes that, after Hamas’s attack seven months ago, Israel made the decision not be a victim. Instead, the Jewish state unleashed the country’s ful...

As Israel and Jewish communities around the world mark Yom ha-Zikaron, the Israeli memorial day for fallen soldiers and victims of terror, some Toronto veterans of the Yom Kippur War are remembering the chaos and the fear they experienced during their own military service some 50 years ago. On Oct. 6, 1973, Israel fought Egyptian and Syrian forces after the Arab states launched surprise invasions...