North Star with Ellin Bessner

As Canadian Jewish kids begin settling into their cabins and tents at overnight camp this month, they’ll find some of the camps are offering something extra: mental health support teams. Whether an on-site emotional support dog or a nighttime ritual of journaling positive achievements, camps are adding mental health components including 24-hour support professionals. They’re called “camper care di...

Construction has begun at the site of the Joseph and Wolf Lebovic Jewish Community campus in Vaughan, Ont. for the Honey and Barry Sherman Arena. The $52 million dollar arena–to be attached to the existing JCC complex–is a gift from their son Jonathan Sherman to the Toronto Jewish community. The late Sherman’s three surviving daughters are not participating. It would make the UJA Federation of Gre...

Talk about an identity crisis. For his whole life, Canadian actor Noam Tomaschoff, 31, thought he was the son of a Jewish couple with roots in Israel and Montreal. Tomaschoff went to Jewish day school, speaks Hebrew and has visited Israel. But last summer, his life changed when his parents learned he was planning to take a DNA test, for fun, while on holiday at the cottage. So they sat him down to...

Welcome to one of the most squalid Jewish-owned office buildings in Canada: 788 Marlee Ave. in midtown Toronto. Over the years, it’s been home to countless Zionist organizations and Jewish charities—including Mazon Canada, Canadian Young Judaea, Sar-El Canada, Camp Shalom, Machane Lev summer camp, the Association for Soldiers of Israel, Canadian Friends of Yad Sarah, and more. Some tenants have be...

Fashion journalist Jeanne Beker has been in the public eye for more than 50 years, most notably as a globetrotting reporter interviewing some of the world’s highest-profile designers and models, as well as entertainers the likes of Paul McCartney and Bob Hope. But for the last year, Beker, now 71, has turned the camera on her own story—as a breast cancer patient. She’s been extremely public about...

Torontonians will elect a new mayor, the city’s 66th, on Monday, June 26, in a byelection made necessary by the surprise resignation of John Tory in February. With 102 names on the ballot—including a pet dog—the choice for voters can be confusing, but  The CJN Daily ‘s political panel is here to break down the issues and evaluate the frontrunners. In the days leading up to the vote, it’s Olivia Ch...

Dani Dayan was in Canada last week to honour the outgoing chair of the Canadian Society for Yad Vashem, Fran Sonshine, and to attend the opening of the new Toronto Holocaust Museum. Dayan, 67, took the job as chair of Yad Vashem in 2021. After enjoying a high-profile political career as a spokesman for Jewish settlers in Israel, and then as Israel’s Consul General in New York City, Dayan made it h...

On Friday, an American jury brought down a guilty verdict for all 63 counts against the gunman who burst into the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018, murdering 11 Jews and wounding six others. It was the worst-ever mass killing of Jews in the United States. Among the victims was a Toronto native, Joyce Fienberg. The retired widow, 75, attended the synagogue nearly every day, according to...

This week, the Consky family of Toronto is marking the third anniversary of Harvey Consky’s death, on June 13, 2020. Consky, 67, was a personal injury lawyer, a husband, and father of two. He was diagnosed with an incurable form of anal cancer during the terrifying first few days of the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Doctors gave him two months to live. That’s when his adult son Mitchell Consk...

For the past six weeks, thousands of high school students from around Toronto have gone on a special field trip back in time. They’ve attended an immersive outdoor play about antisemitism in 1933 Toronto, when growing racial tensions between local Nazi supporters and Jewish immigrants boiled over at a baseball game at Willowvale Park, now known now as Christie Pits. The ensuing street brawls laste...

The latest court challenge to Quebec’s controversial new French-language law, Bill 96, has been launched by a group of two dozen municipalities with large English-speaking populations, led by the heavily Jewish suburb of Côte Saint-Luc. At a media conference on June 7, mayors outlined their objection to five new rules which came into effect on June 1 this year, after the original bill passed in 20...

The new $30-million dollar Toronto Holocaust Museum officially opened on June 9, with some of the Holocaust survivors who worked so hard to make this facility a reality in attendance. Nate Leipciger, 95, cut the ceremonial ribbon and dedicated the new museum to his late parents and sister, Polish Jews who were deported to Auschwitz. (His father did survive.) The new Toronto Holocaust Museum uses m...

It may be a tired joke that Jews make great lawyers, but there is some truth to it. And that truth begins at events like the annual Jewish Day School Debate Tournament, which drew dozens of middle school debaters on March 21, 2023. Grades 6-8 students from Heschel, Netivot, Bialik South, Bialik North and Associated competed in a long-overdue war of words—the ninth time the competition was held, bu...

Jewish groups and politicians are calling on the Canadian military to do more than just impose a $3,000 fine and severe reprimand on a soldier who made “disgusting” antisemitic comments during a training course he led at Canadian Forces Base Petawawa in 2021. The court martial judgement was handed down in the fall of 2022, but it’s just come to light now. It involved a 20+ year veteran soldier wit...

Actor Saul Rubinek was born in a displaced person’s camp in Germany right after the Second World War. His Polish parents survived the Holocaust thanks to Christian farmers who hid them from the Nazis. After the family moved to Canada in 1949, Rubinek’s father Israel used to blame Hitler for curtailing his burgeoning career in Yiddish theatre. That’s why it meant so much to his son, now 74, to play...

Amichai Chikli, Israel's new Minister for Diaspora Affairs and Combatting Antisemitism, just wrapped up a four-day visit to Canada. And while he met Jewish leaders in Montreal, Toronto and Ottawa—briefing them on Israel's new $53-million Alef Bet project to invest in Jewish day school education in North America—his trip also raised some eyebrows because of who else he came to see. Chikli was the k...

Cellist Denis Brott is about to kick off the annual Montreal Chamber Music Festival in his hometown of Montreal on June 4. It's the 28th edition of the festival he founded in the mid-1990s to make classical music more accessible to the general public. He'll also be performing—marking an incredible story of survival. Brott, the Juno-award-winning musician from a legendary Canadian classical music f...

The Vancouver Jewish Community Garden had its official ribbon-cutting ceremony on May 28, just after the Shavuot harvest festival: a fitting debut for the $200,000 initiative. Organizers hope the tubs of lettuce and apple trees will shortly become a hub for teaching about the environment, feeding the needy and hosting Jewish events. Located on the rooftop of a two-storey parking structure between...

Nearly 90 years after Nazi Germany stripped art dealer Max Stern of his gallery in Dusseldorf and forced the German Jew to liquidate his large art collection to non-Jews, Stern’s heirs have agreed to sell one of the stolen paintings back to the City of Dusseldorf. The painting is called “Portrait of the Artist’s Children” (1860) by Dutch master Wilhelm von Schadow. It’s actually been hanging in th...

It was a trip down memory lane this weekend for hundreds of former residents of Bathurst Manor, a Toronto neighbourhood that was built starting in 1954 on the northern limit of the city. The Manor, as it's fondly known, became home to scores of Holocaust survivors and also to Canadian-born Jewish families looking for space, greenery and safety in single family homes that cost under $25,0000. It's...

Hartley Garshowitz went to England this past week to represent his family at the 80th anniversary ceremonies for the famous Dambusters Raid on Hitler’s Germany in 1943. His uncle, Warrant Officer Albert Garshowitz, of Hamilton, was a wireless operator and air gunner on board one of the Lancaster bombers tasked with a top-secret raid that had never been tried before: to bomb three hydroelectric dam...

On May 29, Albertans will go to the polls in an election that will either return sitting Premier Danielle Smith of the United Conservative Party for a full second term, or turf her in favour of former premier Rachel Notley, who ran Alberta under an NDP government from 2015 to 2019. Smith was sworn in just seven months ago in October 2022, after the resignation of her predecessor, Jason Kenney. She...

An Ontario court judge has sided with former Conservative senator Linda Frum and dismissed a $2.5-million defamation lawsuit brought against her by a Montreal-area newspaper, the  Journal Sada Al Mashrek . The judge ruled on May 15 that the lawsuit violated Ontario’s anti-SLAPP laws, which are designed to protect people from long and expensive court cases that would effectively gag them from comme...

On May 16, the House of Commons’ Foreign Affairs and International Development Committee adopted a motion introduced by the NDP’s Heather McPherson, a vocal critic of the Israeli government. Her motion—which passed with the support of four Liberal MPs, the NDP and the Bloc Quebecois—will now see the committee hold hearings on how Canada can foster peace between Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, in l...

The group is calling itself the Network of Engaged Canadian Academics, or NECA, and its founders are two professors from Ottawa: Deidre Butler, director of the Zelikovitz Centre for Jewish Studies at Carleton University and Cary Kogan, a clinical psychology professor at Ottawa U. Each has personally experienced anti-Israel or antisemitic incidents in recent years at their workplaces: Butler was no...