North Star with Ellin Bessner

While summertime is usually quiet for news, The CJN's obit department (which is mostly veteran reporter Ron Csillag) has been busy at work covering some of the biggest losses in the Canadian Jewish community. In the third part of our recurring segment, The CJN Daily Dead Beat , Ellin and Ron sit down to discuss the lives of six prominent Canadian Jews: Max Eisen, one of the country's most famous H...

The World Zionist Congress turns 125 this week. The international organization bills itself as a kind of global Jewish parliament, setting policies for major Israeli institutions and allocating more than a billion dollars a year to support them. Usually, the delegates meet every five years in Israel; this Sunday, August 28, however, they'll be meeting in Basel, Switzerland, where Theodor Herzl con...

This year, Laith Marouf is touring Canada, instructing broadcasters on how to build anti-racism strategies. His organization received more than $130,000 from the federal government for this work. The problem? Marouf has a lengthy track record of virulent antisemitic and anti-Israel commentary, to the point that his previous Twitter account was suspended—and his new one has been blocked for promoti...

The CJN Daily is on vacation this week, so we're rerunning some of our favourite episodes. This one originally aired Mar. 8, 2022. On March 19, 2022, 12-year-old Naomi Hochman celebrated her bat mitzvah at Winnipeg's Shaarey Zedek synagogue. And while she was the first girl in her family to have a bat mitzvah—her older brothers had theirs, and she just took for granted she would enjoy one too—bat...

The CJN Daily is on vacation this week, so we're rerunning some of our favourite episodes. This one originally aired Feb. 17, 2022. In March 2020, magicians Ben Train and Jonah Babins, like so many other performers, found their livelihoods put on indefinite pause. So they did what any young entrepreneurs would: they pivoted by taking their show to the Zoom circuit. Two years in, it's gotten them n...

The CJN Daily is on vacation this week, so we're rerunning some of our favourite episodes. This one originally aired Aug. 23, 2021. KlezKanada and the Ashkenaz Festival are some of the largest Jewish and Yiddish arts celebrations in North America, and both are being held mostly virtually this year because of COVID-19. As the pandemic has upended cultural events around the country, so too has it fo...

The CJN Daily is on vacation this week, so we're rerunning some of our favourite episodes. This one originally aired July 28, 2022. Update: Averbach has since finished his journey, arriving in Vancouver having trekked 1,000 kilometres across Western Canada. Gary Averbach left Calgary on a mission. The 79-year-old real estate mogul, based in Vancouver, is currently trekking through 40-degree heat w...

The CJN Daily is on vacation this week, so we're rerunning some of our favourite episodes. This one originally aired Jan. 6, 2022. One of the most common new year's resolutions is losing weight. But it's also one of the most difficult—and the reason has less to do with willpower than with neurology. Canadian journalist Mark Schatzker is the author of a new book, The End of Craving: Recovering the...

The CJN Daily is on vacation this week, so we're rerunning our favourite episodes. This one originally aired Dec. 14, 2021. This year, an unlikely Hanukkah party was held at the Canada Pavillion of Expo 2020 in Dubai. The emcee for the candlelighting and kosher dinner was Canada's ambassador to the United Arab Emirates, Marcy Grossman, a Montrealer who's spent the last three years in the Gulf stat...

The CJN Daily is on vacation this week, so we're rerunning our favourite episodes. This one originally aired Oct. 13, 2021. With the Apple Watch, you can monitor your blood oxygen levels, send emails, wear it while swimming—and, thanks to a high school student in Toronto, you can also use it to help recite your daily Jewish prayers. The new free app, called WatchSiddur, shows you which prayers to...

The CJN Daily is on vacation this week, so here's a rerun of one of our favourite episodes. The impact of the Pope's recent visit to Canada—and his apology to Indigenous Canadians, especially on behalf of those who controlled residential schools—is still resonating among First Nation communities. To commemorate that visit, we're re-airing our interview with a Jewish-Indegnous couple about their in...

One of the biggest stories in international relations this week erupted when Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan. For a high-ranking American to visit the disputed country, unrecognized by the United Nations because of its conflict with China, was controversial—perhaps almost as much as when 27-year-old web developer Abe Train decided to include Taiwan in his web game, Globle. Okay, so maybe the two aren'...

It seems every Jew in Toronto has spotted Adam Sandler this summer—or knows someone who has. He’s in the area filming a new movie for Netflix, based on a coming-of-age book, called You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah! Sandler stars in the film with his wife and daughters, as well as Idina Menzel and Sarah Sherman, and a whole bunch of local teenagers (and some adults) were paid $100 a day to...

When their only child, Liam, died in January 2022, Jeanne and Raziel Zisman of Toronto had to book a funeral quickly—Jewish law states a burial should happen as soon as possible, usually within 24 hours. Liam was 19. The Zismans, distraught and emotional, met virtually with a representative from Benjamin's Park Memorial Chapel, the country's biggest Jewish funeral home, to make arrangements. Among...

Gary Averbach left Calgary on a mission. The 79-year-old real estate mogul, based in Vancouver, is currently trekking through 40-degree heat waves across the Rockies from Calgary to his home city to raise money for cancer research. He's about three-quarters of the way there—his goal is to arrive home by mid-August, just shy of his 80th birthday, and to have raised $500,000 in the process. The proj...

Last week, an international conservation body declared the monarch butterfly an endangered species. But that didn't surprise Carol Pasternak, who writes under the pseudonym "The Monarch Crusader". For years, she's used her garden in Toronto as a launching pad to teach Canadians about the importance and habits of monarchs, which—like many Canadian Jews—spend their winters flying thousands...

After the Edmonton Oilers lost four straight games in the conference finals to the Colorado Avalanche this past June, star player Zach Hyman returned to his hometown of Toronto with his family. There's plenty filling his busy schedule—including the birth of his second child any day now—but one keystone event was his annual celebrity golf tournament, which aimed to raise $350,000 for Jewish Federat...

The one-year anniversary of Canada's first National Summit on Antisemitism passed quietly on July 21. Last year, after violence resurged Israel and Hamas and Canadians saw a spike in antisemitic incidents, the government convened this emergency summit and appointed Irwin Cotler as its special envoy. The summit lasted seven hours, during which time Cotler met with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and...

Gordon "Gordy" Wiseman—better known as Gabriel Emanuel—wrote Mr. Begin, a one-man play about the life of renowned but controversial Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin, nine years ago. But in May, Israel awarded it and him the prestigious Prime Minister's Prize for 2022, an award that only goes out every year to a select few artists. What's less common is for the award to go to a Canad...

Nick Yudell was a gifted photographer. But at just 26 years old, Yudell, a member of the Royal Canadian Air Force fighting Nazis in the Second World War, was killed in action. He and his five crewmates were shot down by German forces over Tunisia. After he was killed, he left behind a gray hand-painted box full of hundreds of film negatives. Yudell excelled at portraiture and street life, and his...

Eight years ago this week, Dan Markel was killed in his car as he was pulling into his driveway in Tallahassee, Florida. Markel, 41, was a well-regarded professor whose then-recent divorce lies at the centre of this whole saga: his ex-wife wanted to move their two sons to Miami, but the courts sided with Markel. Days after his murder, the children were moved. A messy, complex series of arrests and...

Rick Karp and his fellow Jewish Yukoners have spent the past week carefully monitoring the ongoing wildfires that are raging through their territory. There have been more than 240 forest fires in the Yukon this year, including 182 burning right now—the most in a generation, and five times more than last year—all because of lighting strikes and abnormally hot weather. There were evacuation notices...

Closing arguments have recently begun for the trial of Gabriel Sohier Chaput, a 35-year-old neo-Nazi who's been charged in Montreal with willfully inciting hatred against Jews. But last week, the trial took an odd turn: the judge and lawyers began arguing over whether it was inherent to Nazi ideology to murder six million Jews. The defence lawyer said that, in school, she was taught that Nazis onl...

Ruth Cooperstock had just turned 80 years old when she became the oldest Canadian woman to ever have a bat miztvah. The celebration wasn't common for girls in 1950s Winnipeg, where Cooperstock grew up; but this year, she was determined to make up for lost time. Cooperstock first studied on her own, then with an adult b'nai mitzvah class class at Congregation Dorshei Emet, as part of the Reconstruc...

One of Canada's most acclaimed Holocaust survivors, Max Eisen, died Thursday of cancer at the age of 93. A Holocaust educator and author, Eisen was a prolific speaker who appeared in documentaries and toured the country to spread messages of tolerance and confronting evil. He earned four honorary doctorate degrees, went on 18 March of the Living trips, was one of 25 survivors to be recorded for ho...