North Star with Ellin Bessner

Canada's usually festive long weekend was marred this year by a massive thunderstorm, which left at least 10 people dead, cut power to nearly one million homes and saw gusts of 131 km/h ravage communities across Ontario and Quebec. Still today, days after the storm, more than 120,000 homes in Ottawa remain without power, while officials in Ottawa called the damage worse than during the tornadoes o...

In the weeks since her second thriller novel came out, Samantha Bailey has embarked on a virtual tour to promote her new book, speaking with book clubs and online author events every week. It’s a long way from a decade ago, when she was pitching her debut novel—a chick-lit story—to a small crowd at her father's synagogue. Things changed in 2019, when Simon & Schuster published Bailey's breakou...

Za’akah, an organization that helps survivors of childhood sexual abuse in the Orthodox Jewish community, recently posted on social media about the arrest of an elderly Quebec rabbi who was charged with sex crimes against a minor that date back 25 years. With a publication ban on the complainant's name, we can’t reveal too many details at this time, except to confirm that there was an arrest warra...

Rachel Cohen Yeshurun grew up in Montreal, where she attended an Orthodox girls' school, which taught that women should never actually hold a Torah scroll. These days, however, after she moved to Israel 30 years ago, she's not only breaking that rule regularly, but teaching other women in Israel to read from the Torah as well. Every month, she attends prayer sessions for Women of the Wall, an orga...

When Lorie Wolf was a student at TanenbaumCHAT high school, her doctor sexually assaulted her. She was 17; he was in his 50s. She visited his office alone one weekend to inquire about her acne problem, and she left with trauma, pain and a secret she would hold onto for years. Only after her parents read her secret diary, five years after the fact, did the family take action—but instead of going to...

You've probably heard "Skinnamarink", the classic children's song by Sharon, Lois & Bram. But you probably haven't heard it on TikTok, where Sharon Hampson, now 79, is putting out quick snippets of classics and new material with her newfound family band. She's recruited her daughter, Randi, and grandsons Elijah and Ethan Ullmann, both full-time students at the University of Toronto....

Eighty years ago this month, in May 1942, the Nazis forced all Jewish people in the Netherlands to wear a yellow star on their clothes to publicly identify themselves. This would lead to mass deportations and deaths, eliminating about 75 per cent of the Dutch Jewish population. Now, Dutch researchers are trying to identify those persecuted Jews—and find out what happened to them. This year, the Ne...

Last week, Dan Goldstein called to his wife, Liat Lev Ary, to look out their office window in Montreal. They saw a Jewish man, carrying an Israeli flag from a Yom ha-Atzmaut celebration, attacked by two men in broad daylight. Goldstein then ran out of their office to yell at the attackers, who then ran away. Local police haven't found the suspects, and there have been no developments since the inc...

Starting today, Rabbi Ayelet Cohen, who was raised in Montreal, takes over as the first female full-time dean of North America’s flagship Conservative rabbinical school, the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City. But what should have been a moment of optimism for the rabbi has been tainted by the recently leaked U.S. Supreme Court ruling that indicates how down Roe v. Wade, the landmark 197...

A few weeks ago, Melina Schein of Vernon, B.C., won the final challenge of a new competitive reality show called Wall of Bakers , earning $10,000 as the episode's best amateur baker. Her signature dish was a New York–style black and white cookie with an egg cream drink, harkening back to her childhood growing up in New York. But Schein's Jewish roots go back further. Born in Argentina to the child...

Julia Koschitzky, Malcolm Lester, Boris Brott, Rabbi Benjamin Friedberg, Alex Eisen, Marcia Koven: these are just some of the many prominent Jewish Canadians who passed away in the first few months of 2022. As we kick off Jewish Heritage Month, we decided to introduce a new recurring segment: The CJN Daily Dead Beat, featuring CJN reporter emeritus Ron Csillag. Each episode, we'll give honourable...

Tonight begins Yom ha-Zikaron, Israel's Remembrance Day, in honour of the soldiers and underground fighters who have died helping to create and defend the State of Israel. But ask Zvi Kan-Tor, a retired Israeli general, and he'll tell you it's time his country broadened their remembrance to include the 1.5 million Jewish Allied soldiers who fought in the Second World War. Kan-Tor has spent decades...

Early last year, The Times of Israel launched a daily news podcast called The Daily Briefing. It runs Sundays to Thursdays. Episodes rarely run past 20 minutes. Sound familiar? Swap out the Israeli angle for a Canadian one, and you've got a pretty good summary of The CJN Daily . We launched this show one year ago this week. And with more than 270,000 listens and 200 episodes under our belts, we're...

A historic debate took place in the House of Commons on Wednesday. With two nearly identical proposals tabled to ban Holocaust denial, members of Parliament tackled the one put forth first, by Conservative MP Kevin Waugh. They spent an hour debating it, though most of them agreed to support it, at least in principle. It may all be moot—the bill may be thrown out if and when the federal budget gets...

It's highly unusual that eight family members would not only survive the Holocaust, but all end up living in Canada after the war. Yet that's what happened to the Veffers. The Dutch family withstood appendicitis, scurvy and Nazi raids while hiding for nearly three years, only to wind up moving to Canada after the only Veffer daughter married a Canadian Jewish soldier, who helped the whole family c...

As Parliament resumed Monday after a two-week break, politicians jumped straight into debating the recently revealed annual budget. Tucked inside the Liberals' hefty document, on page 275, is a proposal that would ban Holocaust denial. This might normally be welcome news across the aisle, except that the Conservatives already presented a nearly identical bill back in February. Kevin Waugh, the MP...

For Robert Foxman, this photograph has become family lore. It's a shot of hockey legend Guy Lafleur sporting a kippah, draped in a tallit and holding a siddur, as if in prayer. Foxman snapped the shot in 1981, when he was a 19-year-old photography student. Foxman showed up to a Montreal Canadiens practice and asked Lafleur, who, incredibly, agreed to pose for this kid he'd never met. Foxman has be...

Four years ago, Rabbi Avraham Plotkin was writing a book about bereavement when, in a horrible coincidence, his own 14-year-old son died. Rather than let that derail his project, he pushed forward, drawing from 35 years of working funerals and shivas, and understanding what helped people move on after the shiva period ends. He says the advice in his book actually helped him move forward on a perso...

The Green Party of Ontario has only one seat at Queen's Park right now, but Dianne Saxe is hoping to change that. The high-profile environmental lawyer, who was sacked by Premier Doug Ford shortly after his election in 2019—he in fact scrapped her entire office, dissolving the independent environmental commissioner role—has since decided to continue her crusade in the political fray. Saxe has spen...

When Sara Davis began exploring her Jewish roots, she decided to order a bunch of items from an online Judaica store based in Israel. She bought two shofars, two necklaces with a Star of David, a tallit and an Israeli flag. Her package finally arrived in early March, but it felt lighter than it should have. When she tore the box open, she found the shofars were missing—replaced, instead, with a no...

Canada's most recent budget earmarks $70 million dollars for the Jewish community, with a specific focus on fighting antisemitism and Holocaust denial. Millions of dollars are designated for educational projects like Holocaust museums. But way down, on page 275, is a promise that essentially makes Holocaust denial outright illegal. The move would see Canada join 17 other countries that have alread...

We're taking a short break for Passover, and will be returning on Monday. In the meantime: we want to hear your stories. How did you handle the seder during the sixth wave of COVID? Were masks mandatory? Did you hand out rapid tests with a side of maror? Did you keep the door open all night, both for Elijah and air flow? Send your stories, either video or audio, to Ellin at ebessner@thecjn.ca and...

Historically, Canada's Reform movement has been most prominent in Toronto and Montreal. Head east of Quebec, for example, and all you'd find are Orthodox and Conservative shuls. But that history isn't stopping Rabbi N. Siritsky from challenging the status quo. After working in Kentucky and holding virtual services for congregants in Florida, the Canadian-born rabbi has joined the thousands of home...

On Wednesday, the student council at Simon Fraser University will vote to approve a motion entitled "Establishing an SFSS Issues Policy on Palestinian Liberation". The motion supports resisting "Israeli settler colonialism" and pushes for the end of "colonization of all Arab lands"—though it doesn't define what those lands are. Regular listeners of this podcast can be...

A few weeks ago, out of the blue, Harvey Engelberg received a letter from a farmer in Bassenville, in northern France. The writer was looking for information about a downed Second World War plane that had crashed into her fields on D-Day, back in 1944. She wondered if he knew anything about the event. Reading the letter from his home in Montreal, Engelberg couldn't believe it. That plane carried h...