North Star with Ellin Bessner

A new TV series by award-winning Canadian filmmaker Igal Hecht explores whether archeology can definitively prove the Jewish connection to Israel. Just in time for Passover and Easter, the first season of Secrets of the Land debuted March 15 on YES TV, a Canadian faith-based channel. Hecht and his team were given unprecedented access to some of Israel’s most important archeological excavation site...

When the Russian invasion began a year ago on Feb. 24, 2022, newlyweds Inna Movchan and Vitalli Shkarbun were in Lviv, eagerly anticipating their wedding reception with more than 100 guests. Instead, as Russian shells started to fall, the party was cancelled, and the young couple found themselves in a long line of cars fleeing to safety. They arrived in Toronto in April of last year. Since then, t...

In the world of British Columbia high school athletics, it was a huge deal on March 11, when the senior boys basketball squad from King David High School—the province's only Jewish high school—came from behind during the last seven minutes of the BC School Sports 1A Boys Basketball Provincial Tournament finals, beating the defending provincial champions from Unity Christian School. After the Lions...

Demographer Charles Shahar has been digging into the latest Canadian census data, from 2021, to paint a fuller picture of what Canada’s Jewish community looks like. He says while cities from coast to coast have seen their Jewish populations grow significantly—especially Victoria, Vancouver, Calgary, Winnipeg, Ottawa, Montreal and Halifax—the Toronto area has plateaued. Whether it is because of the...

Ben Ben Chimol, 17, is the youngest person we have profiled on  The CJN Daily ‘s Honourable Menschen series, where we pay tribute to prominent members of the Canadian Jewish community who have recently passed away. The Grade 12 teen, who died of cancer in Winnipeg in early December 2022, was a budding artist and beatboxer. His family and classmates have created a memorial fund through the city’s J...

Montreal filmmaker Ezra Soiferman loves the winters in his native city so much, he’s made a new film about them, called  Montreal, Snowbec . It’s a love letter to the season where the city is covered by nearly six feet of white stuff each year. In the film, Soiferman showcases the beauty of Place Ville Marie’s searchlight, plus many Jewish winter scenes, including two Hasidic men walking through a...

Rabbi Daniel Korobkin leads one of Canada's largest Orthodox synagogues: Beth Avraham Yoseph, known as The BAYT, in Thornhill, Ont. In recent weeks, he has been regularly leading prayers for the victims of the escalating violence and terror attacks between Palestinians and Israelis. They come against the backdrop of growing worldwide condemnation—even by some Canadian Jewish leaders and groups—of...

It might be the first time that Holocaust poems have made it to the top of Canada’s most famous music award, the Junos. The poems were written in 1942 and 1943 by the grandmother of Toronto singer Lenka Lichtenberg, who found them only recently—by accident. She turned these haunting wartime verses into an album called  Thieves of Dreams . On March 11, the Junos—considered the Canadian version of t...

Adath Israel's emeritus rabbi, Erwin Schild, turns 103 on Mar. 9. Schild, who proudly lives in the same Toronto home he bought soon after he first took the pulpit job in 1947, may be Canada's oldest living Conservative rabbi. He is nearly as old as the large egalitarian congregation itself, which is marking its 120th year. He served for 42 years, retiring in 1989, after which he wrote four books....

Dr. Paula Gordon, of Vancouver, is a renowned Canadian radiologist and breast cancer specialist. She also recently became a recipient of the Order of Canada for her pioneering research into using ultrasound to detect hard-to-spot breast cancers. But that was decades ago. Now, Gordon—a professor at the University of British Columbia's medical school—is campaigning for expanded screening for breast...

The leader of the Conservative Party of Canada, Pierre Poilievre, will not take further action to sanction three members of parliament who posed for photos recently with a far-right German politician. Poilievre told reporters on Parliament Hill on Monday March 6 that he will also not kick the trio out of caucus. The three Tory politicians—Dr. Colin Carrie, of Oshawa, Leslyn Lewis of Halidmand-Norf...

My Way Bikery, the only kosher bakery in Victoria, B.C., will of course be selling traditional Purim hamantashen cookies for the rest of March. But Moshe and Leah Appel, the bakery’s new owners, are becoming known for one of Leah’s creative inventions: the “challnut”. It’s a donut made from challah dough, filled with jelly and topped with sugar. They are so in-demand that, last week, someone actua...

Dr. Daniel J. Drucker was sitting in his research lab at Toronto’s Mount Sinai Hospital when his name was announced that he’d won Israel’s Wolf Prize, a Nobel-like award given to scientists and artists who help the world. The announcement came Feb. 9. Drucker is only the 11th Canadian to win the prestigious award since its inception in 1978, and some people think it also gives him a good chance to...

For years, Fraidy Hecht of Kelowna, B.C., had to go to great lengths each month to fulfil the ancient requirement for religious Jewish women to immerse themselves in a ritual bath known as a mikvah. In the summers, Hecht could use the nearby lake, in a pinch; but in winter, it meant a five-hour road trip to Vancouver to find a mikvah—not just time-consuming, but occasionally treacherous when the w...

Travel agent Jay Mandelker of Toronto never imagined his Florida winter holiday would place him at the centre of a rare but horrifying alligator attack that killed his 85-year-old neighbour last Monday. Mandelker is the head of the homeowner’s association in the Spanish Lakes Fairways 55+ retirement community in Fort Pierce, where the victim, Gloria Serge, was pulled into the pond by the 10-foot-l...

Canadian philanthropist Charles Bronfman is one of 15 signatories to an open letter to Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, which sounds the alarm over the new government’s push to reform the judiciary. Bronfman, who created the Birthright program that sends young Jews to visit Israel, says he didn’t write the letter himself. But his name tops the list of uber-wealthy North American Jews,...

Nearly 12 years ago, Toronto business executive Stephen Kaplan took a solo motorcycle trip to Alaska. He promised his worried wife, Danielle, it would be his last. But somewhere on a remote road in the Yukon, Kaplan hit a pothole and flew off his powerful bike. When he landed, he’d broken his spine and damaged his heart. The lifelong adventurer couldn’t move, trapped alone on the side of a road in...

More than 60 years ago, in 1961, Saul Fenster and his older brother, Henry—two Jewish siblings from Poland who had survived the Holocaust—bought a swampy plot of land an hour north of Montreal with the dream of opening a ski resort for families. And so, the Belle Neige ski hill in Montreal’s Laurentien mountains was born. Saul had learned to ski after the war in Switzerland, where he had been sent...

In a relatively short time, Dan Illouz went from being a McGill University law student to sitting in Israel’s Knesset as a member of the ruling Likud government. The son of Moroccan immigrants to Montreal, Illouz moved to Israel 13 years ago. Since then, he has held political jobs and also served as a Jerusalem city councillor before taking his seat in the Knesset after Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud...

Sketches on a restaurant napkin, a notebook draft of “Hallelujah”, black and white Polaroid snapshots of his naked chest: the late Canadian singer and poet Leonard Cohen kept it all for posterity. Now, a curator with the Art Gallery of Ontario has convinced the Cohen estate to dig into the icon’s personal treasures and stage a never-before-seen exhibit of the very personal collection. Cohen’s two...

It’s been seven months since the federal government was made aware that it had awarded a lucrative training contract to a known racist and antisemite, Laith Marouf. The story broke in July 2022, after several media watchers went public about offensive tweets which Marouf had posted about Jews, Blacks, Indigenous people and French Canadians. While his contract was eventually cancelled and his train...

Philip Kuntz considers himself the first-ever customer of Aroma Espresso Bar’s first-ever Canadian coffee outlet. When the Aroma location opened in 2007 at 500 Bloor Street West in Toronto’s Annex neighbourhood, Kuntz drank the very first cuppa. For a dozen years, the Ontario musician and artist made that Aroma outlet part of his daily routine–– holding court for hours at the now-closed store. (It...

More than five years have passed since the still-unsolved murders of philanthropists Barry and Honey Sherman in their Toronto home. Despite a $35-million reward for clues to solve their killing, the case remains a mystery. Conspiracy theories abound over who did it and why, with fingers being pointed at the Clintons, Big Pharma, the Sherman children, a cousin or even the Mossad. Police haven’t rel...

The popular Israeli chain of Aroma Espresso coffee bars is tied up in a three-and-a-half year legal fight with the Toronto business partners who originally brought the brand to Canada in 2007. Aroma’s foray here had been considered an international success story for the Israeli brand: at its peak, founder Earl Gorman and manager Anat Davidzon grew the branch to 45 franchise locations in and around...

Lev Goldfarb may not realize it, but getting his parents to throw him a birthday party in a Picton, Ont., grocery store was good for the Jews. Not only did he spark a whole lot of goodwill in the tiny Lake Ontario resort town between Toronto and Kingston—now the Metro store manager has promised to start stocking somekosher food items for the Jewish community of about 100 people and counting in the...