North Star with Ellin Bessner

Boris Brott, who was killed this week at 78, was an iconic Canadian violinist, composer and conductor who tried to make people fall in love with classical music by making it accessible. He brought energy and levity to his performances like few of his contemporaries could. The sudden news of Brott’s death has left his fans, colleagues and students in shock, while tributes and messages have been pou...

Last week, after a fiasco at the Academy Awards resulted in Will Smith assaulting Chris Rock with a slap heard around the world, Rabbi Joshua Corber prepared a special sermon for his congregation at Beit Rayim in Toronto. He revealed that he, like Jada Pinkett Smith and 147 million more people around the world, suffers from alopecia—the autoimmune disorder that causes missing patches of hair and o...

This week, delivery trucks will be rolling out across Canada, driving thousands of boxes of kosher-for-Passover groceries, meals and seder items to people in need across the country. In Montreal, the MADA Community Center is delivering 2,000 Passover food baskets and 8,000 ready-made meals; Jewish Family Service Calgary has prepared 55 packages; Vancouver is sending nearly 600 parcels, plus 400 se...

Every year, starting as early as February, Jeff Dobro calls supermarkets around Toronto for months leading up to Passover. His question? Whether or not they have a special kind of Coca-Cola in stock—the kind that's kosher for Passover. While normal Coke is made with high-fructose corn syrup, Passover Coke is made with cane sugar, as many observant Jews are not allowed to consume corn-based product...

When Stacey Leavitt-Wright, the CEO of the Jewish Federation of Edmonton, booked a vacation to Israel, she had no idea she'd end up in the middle of the worst terror spree the country has seen since 2009. But that's exactly what happened. In the last month, 11 Israelis have been killed in three separate attacks that occurred in Beersheba, Hadera and Bnei Brak. They struck just as Israel's governme...

For legions of mahjong players, this is the most exciting time of year. In the next week or two, the new 2022 version of the official card rules will be arriving from the National Mah Jongg League headquarters in the United States. For untold numbers of mahjong fans—including many Jewish Canadians—the new card poses new challenges, but also brings uncertainty. The COVID pandemic has severely impac...

Every night this week, Daniel Kollek hasn't been at the ER at his usual hospital in Burlington, Ont. Instead, he's been working in wartorn Ukraine, driving between two different clinics near the Polish border for 12-hour overnight shifts. A member of the non-profit Canadian Medical Assistance Teams, the 64-year-old doctor is one of more than a dozen medical volunteers treating exhausted Ukrainian...

It’s estimated that about 50 women currently play hockey in Israel—at any level. There are no professional women's leagues. But despite these challenges, last summer, Esther Silver decided to try to get a national women's team together. The Toronto native used to play goalie in amateur games before moving to the Holy Land. She organized tryouts, and the Canadian embassy came through with financial...

Julia Koschitzky was an internationally recognized philanthropist and community leader in Canada. She died of cancer on March 21 at the age of 78. Koschitzky has been described as Jewish royalty, a giant of activism and philanthropy. She spent many years as a leader with Toronto’s United Israel Appeal, raising money in annual campaigns to pay for community services such as schools, summer camps, l...

Sonia Bazar, an artist and poet, is reaching out to any Jewish Canadians whose relatives are buried in the historic Back River Jewish cemetery in Montreal. She's looking for people whose fascinating stories were buried along with their bodies, in hopes that more Jews will visit the beautifully macabre landmark. During the pandemic, in search of outdoor inspiration, Sonia Bazar decided to visit Mon...

Valentyna Agapova hid in a bomb shelter for four days before making her escape. The 67-year-old hairdresser and widow, trapped in Ukraine after Russia invaded, subsequently went on a 1,000-kilometre trek by bus, train and foot to reach the Polish border from her apartment in the Zaporizhzhia area. She didn't live far from Europe’s biggest nuclear power plant, which came under attack early in the w...

Only two Canadians joined a recent trip to Ukraine put together by the Jewish Federations of North America. Linda Frum, board chair of Toronto's Federation, and Adam Minsky, its president and CEO, travelled to the Polish-Ukrainian border to see firsthand where the millions of dollars raised by Canadians—including $4 million by Jewish Canadians alone—are going. The United Nations now says 10 millio...

Last week on The CJN Daily , we brought you an interview with Canadian writer Rosemary Sullivan. Her latest book, The Betrayal of Anne Frank: A Cold Case Investigation , details a team of historians and researchers that argue it was a Dutch Jewish notary who sold out the Franks to the Nazis. Sullivan defended her work and argued the Dutch need to face the fact that one-third of all Dutch Jews in h...

In 2021, a producer for the game show Family Feud Canada reached out to Rabbi Stephen Wise, hoping to boost the diversity pool of their show's contestants. When asked if he knew anyone from the community who might want to participate, Rabbi Wise didn’t need to look very far: his wife, Cheryl, and her whole family are game show fanatics. That's how he joined his in-laws, the Kestelmans, on live TV...

If you haven't heard, Toronto is getting a new Holocaust museum. The $27-million institution will be located in the new Prosserman Jewish Community Centre, and will do more than simply commemorate the past: it aims to make the Holocaust relevant to modern visitors, world events and Canadian life, using augmented reality, tablets and video of survivors to tell its stories. But work began only recen...

What do Seth Rogen, Dave Barrett and Cornelia Oberlander have in common? They're three of hundreds of notable people featured in a new coffee table book celebrating British Columbia's Jewish community. Looking Back, Moving Forward: 160 Years of Jewish Life in BC comes out today. It was created to mark the 50th anniversary of the Jewish Museum and Archives of British Columbia, and recounts the fasc...

For some Jews, just the thought of returning to Poland—let alone to help Ukrainians—stirs up complicated feelings, given the two countries' fraught Holocaust legacies. But this week, three Canadian rabbis did exactly that, confronting the past and engaging with the present emergency. Rabbi Mark Fishman, Rabbi Adam Scheier and Rabbi Reuben Poukpo travelled to Poland on a mission to help Ukrainians...

Rosemary Sullivan, the Canadian author of more than a dozen books, knew she'd get some pushback for her latest non-fiction endeavour, a book that casts the Anne Frank story in a troubling new light. But she never expected it to be this bad. The city of Amsterdam demanded 100,000 euros back from the subjects of Sullivan's story; Dutch newspapers issued bold retractions on their front pages; the boo...

On March 19, 12-year-old Naomi Hochman will celebrate her bat mitzvah at Winnipeg's Shaarey Zedek synagogue. And while she's 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 mitzvahs are in fact a relatively new phenomenon. Naomi's bat mitzvah actually takes place on the 100-year anniversary of the very firs...

For weeks now, we here at The CJN have been reporting on a wave of antisemitic incidents being reported at public schools across Toronto. Mostly they involve Nazi salutes and swastikas, and the targets have been both students and teachers. Three new incidents happened late last week—all on the same night. Earlier this year, students made Nazi salutes at two separate schools in Toronto; at a third...

In December 2021, baking entrepreneur Amy Rosen made a splash on the CBC reality show Dragons' Den. The pastry specialist and accomplished cookbook author pitched them a stake in her line of bake-at-home cinnamon buns. While the dragons loved her foods, she stumbled when asked about her sales figures. Rosen calls that moment a national embarrassment—and also unfair. But she's moving on. She landed...

In late February, The CJN published a first-person essay by 17-year-old Talia Freedhoff about antisemitism and ignorance at her Ottawa public high school. It wasn't the first time she spoke out about these issues. She's done TV interviews and delivered speeches to school board trustees to try and open the public's eyes about the reality of Jewish student life. She's had teachers schedule tests on...

Of the 200 people protesting across the street from the Russian embassy in Ottawa on Sunday, most held up signs coloured yellow and blue, in solidarity with Ukraine. But there was one sign in black and white with a menorah on it and the words "Let Ukraine live. We are family. Canada's Jews ." Holding the sign was 77-year-old Alti Rodal, a historian and the daughter of Holocaust suvivors....

On Sunday, thousands of people in cities across Canada gathered in solidarity with Ukraine. The support may comfort Anatoliy Shengait—as the head of Kyiv’s Jewish community, he's spent the past week fielding worried WhatsApp calls, keeping tabs on the war and trying to communicate with his own family, including his brother, who's trapped with no electricity or running water outside the capital cit...

Meet Primrose Madayag Knazan. She's the winner of the Canadian Jewish Playwriting Competiton, and her new play, Precipice , is about a Filipino-Canadian woman who converts to Judaism—just like she did. The Winnipeg resident’s play debuted in 2021 at the Winnipeg Jewish Theatre's So, Nu? Festival, beating nearly two dozen entries to claim the top prize. Madayag Knazan calls Precipice a love letter...