North Star with Ellin Bessner

With more than 6,000 candidates running for a council seat in 400 villages, cities and towns, plus 37 school boards, there’s a lot to keep tabs on with Ontario’s upcoming municipal election. But the challenge doesn’t daunt Michael Teper. Teper calls himself an an enemy of antisemitism and a fan of open government. In his private life, he’s a tax expert with a big Toronto accounting firm. But in hi...

In September, newly minted Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre appointed rookie MP Melissa Lantsman to his advisory board, naming her one of two deputy leaders of the party. It's a meteoric rise for a politician who's marking her one-year anniversary as an elected official this fall. Lantsman represents Thornhill, a riding in Ontario with the highest percentage of Jewish voters in Canada. And whi...

Earlier this month, an estimated 50,000 people came out to a rally organized by Iranian Canadians in downtown Richmond Hill, Ont. The event was a show of support for the freedom protests currently going on across Iran being led by women and girls, a reaction to the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who is largely believed to have been beaten to death by police for not covering enough hair with her...

Ontarians head to the polls on Oct. 24 to vote for their municipal governments. And while some storylines seems set—Toronto Mayor John Tory looks poised to win for a third time—races in Vaughan, Ottawa, Hamilton, Richmond Hill and Brampton are far less certain. The outcomes are even less predictable given how low voter turnout was in the province's 2018 municipal elections, when just 38 per cent o...

Back in the 1990s, Martin Rutte earned his most prominent byline co-writing one of the famous Chicken Soup for the Soul books, which focused on incorporating spirituality into the workplace. Now residing in Charlottetown, PEI, Rutte is again working on a spiritual level—and the scale is far greater than just offices. A sought-after speaker and consultant, Rutte's newest endeavour, Project Heaven o...

As the Jewish world prepares for Yom Kippur and Yizkor, The CJN Daily team has been thinking a lot about death and grieving—and how the pandemic upended many rituals familiar to Jews around the world. Among those changes is how technology is changing the death business. One example has been Keeper, a company that puts QR codes on tombstones which link to virtual memorials for the deceased, somewha...

Alan Schwarz was one of 10 Jewish boys in Oshawa who spent 1973 studying for their b'nai mitzvah. It was the biggest coming-of-age cohort the small Jewish community has ever seen. But in the subsequent 49 years, the Hebrew school pals, unsurprisingly, lost touch; many left the city to start careers and families elsewhere. Schwarz, whose family members were seminal in Oshawa's Jewish community, wou...

At 74, acclaimed cookbook author Bonnie Stern has just published her first new cookbook in more than a decade. Don't Worry, Just Cook compiles 125 recipes, many Jewish, marking the next step in Stern's nearly 50-year career. Not only is this the first cookbook Stern has co-written with her daughter, Anna Rupert, 37, but it's also the first book published in the social media age. The food industry...

This week, about 30 members of the Temple Sons of Israel Synagogue in Sydney, Nova Scotia, gathered for Rosh Hashanah services in a building that was cold, wet and lacked electricity. The building was one of many in the Maritimes battered by a post-tropical storm from Hurricane Fiona, pushing winds of up to 170 km/hr and dumping seven inches of rain across the region. But since a rabbi had already...

The Sons of Jacob Congregation, Belleville's only synagogue, has been servicing the town's tight-knit local Jewish community for nearly a century. During the Second World War, its numbers swelled due to the number of Jewish soliders stationed in the area; today, however, fewer than 30 paying members support the historic institution. They managed to keep things going even during the pandemic, but t...

Over the last few days, Canadian border officials blocked a shipment of lulavs bound for Montreal. Why? They believed, erroneously, that the Sukkot staple violated the country's agriculture laws, designed to prevent dangerous diseases or invasive bugs from entering the country. The situation caused a panic among religious communities in Ontario and Quebec, as the fate of thousands of lulavs sudden...

On Sept. 13, 2022, the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board held a special meeting. They were finally set to discuss a brewing fiasco in which the board, last spring, disinvited Irwin Cotler, Canada’s special envoy on combatting antisemitism, from giving a speech to senior staff. In his stead, they invited a professor with a deep background in Palestinian human rights and anti-racism education. T...

Congregation Shaar Hashomayim is older than Canada itself. It was founded by Jews who came from England to what is now Quebec, wanting to create their own space apart from the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue. Decades after the congregation's inception in 1846, a new building was built, in 1922, in Westmount. And in a cornerstone of that building, congregants placed a time capsule—a memento of a b...

This weekend, after spending 15 years as an arts writer for The Globe and Mail , Marsha Lederman is debuting her new opinion column for the paper. The shift comes just a few months after the debut of her book, Kiss the Red Stairs , which chronicled her parents' experiences in the Holocaust and how intergenerational trauma has affected her life. Those themes have led to her having a strong reaction...

As Canadian Jews debate whether to head back to in-person synagogue services for the High Holidays, and parents may fret about their kids' safety at the onset of back-to-school season, security is top of mind for many. While security is not as big a concern as it is in the United States, where shooting and hostage situations in Jewish spaces have become distressingly common, for Canadian security...

The late David Shentow once vowed he would "crawl on his hands and knees to Auschwitz" to tell his Holocaust story, as a way to counter those who deny the Nazis murdered six million Jews during the Second World War. Over the years, until his death in 2017, Shentow spoke to hundreds of schoolchildren and adults about his experiences as a teenage slave labourer under the Nazis, and also as...

As the official mourning period continues for Queen Elizabeth II – who died on Sept. 8 at the age of 96 – the Jewish community is, mostly, remembering her long reign with fondness and admiration. She supported Holocaust survivors and welcomed Israeli leaders, and connected with the Canadian Jewish community, too: in 1973, she laid a cornerstone for Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto; and in 2010, dur...

While RCMP commissioner Brenda Lucki has been in the hot seat all summer, facing an inquiry into the mass shooting that struck Nova Scotia in 2020, she's also been quietly working on another project with a huge impact on Canadian Jews. For the first time in the history of the RCMP, Jewish members and cadets will be permitted to wear a kippah while on duty. It began with a request—which was denied—...

When Vancouver's current Jewish community centre opened in Oakridge in 1962, the local community numbered about 8,000. Today, Vancouver's Jewish community is the third largest in Canada and nearly twice as big as it was back then—about 14,000 people. But the JCC is used by more than just Jews, with about 40,000 regular visitors. That's why the campus is undergoing one of the most expensive renovat...

At 98, Alex Polowin, one of Canada's most prominent Second World War veterans, passed away at his home in Ottawa. He was the last surviving veteran of HMCS Huron, who, after the war, spoke regularly to thousands of people across Canada and Europe about his experience as a 17-year-old Jew fighting Nazis. He saw action on D-Day and served in the Soviet Union and Northern Scotland; he helped sink a G...

This week, the families of the 11 Israeli athletes who were murdered at the 1972 Munich Olympics have finally earned a formal apology by the German president, also reaching an agreement over compensation. The deal comes after months of some victims' family members threatening to boycott the 50th anniversary event, being held on Sept. 5 in Munich. The news is a relief for Francine Zuckerman, a Cana...

Fifteen years ago, Alexandre Matte was working in finance, running a Francophone cultural centre. He admits he was pretty shy. Then he joined a Toastmasters club in Sudbury and began learning how to speak more confidently in public. He ended up quitting his job to make a living as a professional storyteller and speaking coach for kids and adults. On top of this career shift, one of his goals has b...

When 500 members of the Kuklya family got together in England a few years ago for their first-ever reunion, the story got a lot of international attention. They were all descendants of the same man, Aba Kukla, who lived in a tiny village in Lithuania in the late 1700s. He had nine sons and a few daughters, and each went on to produce huge families of their own, creating a sprawling family tree tha...

A few weeks ago, we brought you the story of Raziel and Jeanne Zisman, a Toronto family who lost their only child, Liam, in January. Before his funeral, the Zismans agreed to use the Benjamin Foundation, a charity arm of the Benjamin Group that collects memorial donations to later disperse among charities selected by the family. The Zismans discovered that the Foundation took 10 per cent of the do...

In December 2021, at a Toronto District School Board meeting, Alexandra Lulka Rotman made a rare public statement after being accused by the TDSB of breaking their code of conduct. The story began in May, 2021, when a pro-Palestinian TDSB staff member sent out teaching materials that linked to sources supporting anti-Israel terrorist activities, including suicide bombings. Lulka Rotman subsequentl...