North Star with Ellin Bessner

According to Robert Brym, a sociology professor at the University of Toronto, while two-thirds of Canada’s Jews currently feel unsafe and victimized in this country, and think it will get worse, his new study also shows most non-Jewish Canadians actually have positive feelings about Jews. His research was published before B’nai Brith Canada released its annual antisemitism audit earlier this week,...

Organizers of the 36th annual March of the Living commemoration, in Poland, knew that this year’s three-kilometre walk at Auschwitz would feel even more poignant after Oct. 7. That’s why some Israeli Holocaust survivors were invited to join the procession, which honoured not just the memory of the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust—but also the 1,200 people in Israel who were murdered in t...

Show notes Vancouver Holocaust speaker Rubin Pinsky fled a Nazi work camp in May 1942 and survived for more than two years in the forests of Poland, serving as a teenage Jewish partisan. Pinsky, a former yeshiva student, blew up trains, sabotaged telephone wires and killed Nazis and collaborators. One time, he even finished off a timber wolf attempting to hunt a wild rabbit the starving partisans...

Show notes: At least five Canadian university campuses are now home to temporary tent cities erected by pro-Palestinian students protesting Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza. The U of T, McGill, Western, the University of Ottawa and the University of British Columbia have all become focal points for protestors insisting they won’t leave until their schools divest of financial ties to Israel, amon...

The youngest child traditionally asks the Four Questions at Passover. But Daniel Marquez, 8, of Mississauga, Ont., could probably have answered all the questions by himself: the Grade 3 student won the 2024 JewQ competition, an annual tournament of Jewish knowledge hosted by Chabad. Marquez hoisted his trophy onstage during a live game show on April 7–held an hour away from the Lubavitch movement’...

Show notes It’s coming up on five months since Paul Finlayson, a business instructor in the Toronto area, was suspended from teaching at the University of Guelph-Humber, in Nov. 2023. Finlayson, who is not Jewish, is the subject of an internal investigation after several students and staff members filed complaints in the aftermath of Oct. 7. They told the university they felt unsafe on campus afte...

It’s going to be a special Passover seder this year in Victoria, B.C. for The Klezbians, an all-woman musical group that performs Klezmer music. They’re marking 10 years since the band formed to play professionally in 2014. And even before that, the band and their wider group of Jewish lesbian friends have been holding annual inclusive seders, by invitation only, at a private home. These seders st...

Show notes: In just a few weeks, Ruby Grinberg will be packing her red ball gown and heading to Montreal to compete in the 2024 Miss Canada competition. The 20-year-old Toronto-born political science student will vie for the tiara against 20 other young women in the venerable contest—a pageant that, when it started in the 1940s, was all about beauty and bathing suits, but these days is more about...

The week before Passover is always a busy time for supermarkets’ kosher meat sections. But this year, the meat you’ll find is likely different, because of a change in how kosher cows are being slaughtered in Canada. As  The CJN Daily  reported on earlier this year, the country’s two main kosher certifying bodies, the Kashruth Council of Canada and the Jewish Community Council in Montreal, which ru...

A delegation of 17 Canadians from British Columbia spent an anxious Saturday night hunkered down in Tel Aviv, watching the skies and waiting for air raid sirens, as Iran made good on its threat to retaliate for the Israeli airstrike that killed two top Iranian military commanders in Syria earlier this month. The overnight barrage of 200 drones, cruise missiles and ballistic missiles launched from...

Show notes Two Toronto community leaders have gone public about a legal fight involving one of Canada’s oldest Zionist organizations, which also runs Camp Shalom, a 75-year-old Jewish summer camp in Ontario. David Matlow, a CJN columnist who also lectures widely about Theodore Herzl, has taken the little-known Toronto Zionist Council to court over allegedly restricting who can be a member, claimin...

Show notes Mount Royal’s Member of Parliament, Anthony Housefather, has made headlines for the past three weeks for publicly mulling over whether to quit the governing Liberal party. He found himself torn after being one of just three members of his own party to reject an anti-Israel motion held in Parliament on March 18. But late on Friday, April 5, Housefather announced he will be staying a Libe...

For the second time in less than two weeks, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre is promising Canadian Jews that he has their backs after Oct. 7 in a way that, he says, Canada’s current prime minister no longer does. Poilievre told a crowd of 600 people at Toronto’s Beth Tikvah synagogue on April 7 that he wants more done to protect Canadian Jews’ rights to live and worship in the country. He call...

With over 41,000 members and counting, the Everything Jewish Toronto Facebook group has found itself serving as an unofficial online public square for Canada’s largest Jewish community. The group was created a decade ago by two Toronto sisters–Jennifer Stallman and Brittney Waxman Sultan–as a vehicle to promote Jewish businesses, for a fee, to a Jewish audience. It has since morphed into a popular...

Just two months after Justin Trudeau held a closed-door meeting with Toronto’s Jewish leaders, the Canadian prime minister spent an hour last week doing the same thing at a Vancouver synagogue, Temple Sholom. Trudeau met privately with four leading community rabbis and the local Federation’s chair of the community security committee. Sources tell The CJN the meeting was arranged in advance by the...

I got to be a guest on The CJN's 'Bonjour Chai' this week, and actually gave my personal opinions about the past 6 months of being a Jewish journalist in Canada. On The CJN Daily, I don't usually state my opinions, so this is a big debut for me! Here's the show as a special bonus Sunday episode. A slew of headlines came out this week, within Canada and beyond, warning of a rising tide of antisemit...

In the early days after the shock of Oct. 7, many Diaspora Jewish communities including Canada swung into action to send military equipment, clothing and medical supplies to Israel–along with emergency financial help. But with the conflict in its sixth month and over 130 Israeli hostages still being held in captivity, grass roots groups have sprung up from coast to coast to coast, as Canadians tak...

Just days after Canadian lawmakers voted to stop further export permits of arms sales to Israel, the Israeli ambassador to Ottawa, Iddo Moed, hinted the move would not go unanswered. He told The CJN that Canada’s decision to halt weapons sales—even though the motion was non-binding on the government—sent “the wrong message at the wrong time.” However, Moed denied that Canada’s new policy would mak...

Canadian Liberal MP Anthony Housefather is clear about one thing: he will run for office again in the riding of Mount Royal—and he expects to win. But he’s undecided about whether he’ll stick with the federal Liberals, or choose instead to cross the aisle or even sit as an independent. The 51-year-old, who has represented his riding since 2015, says has been “reflecting” on his political future si...

Embattled cabinet minister Ya’ara Saks says it was her “choice” to meet with the leader of the Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas last week in Ramallah, and that includes posing for photos that show him holding her arm and hand. The Liberal MP for a heavily Jewish Toronto riding, the Canadian-Israeli has been heavily criticized by community members since those photos were posted March 14 on the o...

Late Monday night, March 18, 2024, Canada’s lawmakers voted to keep a key part of the country’s foreign policy on Israel-Palestine the same as it’s been for decades. The controversial opposition-led motion, originally put forward to the House of Commons by the NDP’s foreign affairs critic and a longtime Palestinian advocate, Heather McPherson, called for Canada to immediately recognize Palestine a...

The photo has caused outrage in Canada’s Jewish community. Last week, the government released an image of the minister of foreign affairs, Melanie Joly, and Ya’ara Saks—her Israeli-Canadian cabinet colleague and Toronto area MP—smiling and holding hands in Ramallah with the leader of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas. The grip and grin photo was taken on March 12, while the two Canadian pol...

It’s been a week since Selina Robinson scorched her premier and former B.C. NDP colleagues for their “silence” after Oct. 7, and for the way they’ve treated the prominent Jewish politician ever since. Robinson quit the governing party on March 6—the day of her 60th birthday—releasing a blistering five-page letter. Robinson said she was heartbroken, but felt compelled to leave when her premier, Dav...

Canada’s main kosher supervision agencies, the Kashruth Council of Canada (COR) and the Jewish Community Council in Montreal, which runs the MK brand, do not believe Canada wants to ban kosher slaughter. But they say new regulations to reduce animal suffering will have the same impact and puts the nation’s entire domestic kosher meat industry “very much at risk”. COR and MK and two of the country’...

For decades, Israeli entrepreneurs have been mounting traveling real estate trade shows here in Canada, to encourage Diaspora Jews to buy property in Israel. But in the wake of Oct. 7, there has been renewed attention paid to anything having to do with Israel and Palestinians, meaning several of these annual real estate events in Montreal and Toronto last week touched off large, aggressive anti-Is...