North Star with Ellin Bessner

Thanks to the Netflix action film The Red Sea Diving Resort , many people have heard of Operation Moses, when Israel rescued 30 planeloads of Ethiopian refugees, bringing them to the Holy Land. That covert operation launched almost exactly 37 years ago. But even earlier, another secret mission took place to save several hundred Ethiopian Jews, which brought them not to the shores of the Mediterran...

After years of relative stability and the election of a prime minister who won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2019, Ethiopia has been mired in domestic warfare since November 2020. Sparked by postponed elections and the COVID-19 pandemic, the war sees the Ethiopian government facing off against rural militias, separatist groups and a paramilitary organization slowly advancing across the entire country. Th...

The debut NHL season for the Seattle Kraken has not been kind. They've won just four games so far, losing 10 and tying one. They rank last in their division, and have slunk near the bottom of the entire league. One of the few bright moments, however, came at the expense of the Montreal Canadiens—the Kraken beat the Habs 5-1 in their first-ever franchise victory. It was a bittersweet moment for Mit...

The major international climate conference COP26 wrapped up this weekend. Canadians, now accustomed to seeing headlines about B.C.'s heat dome, wildfires in Northern Ontario and Alberta, melting Arctic ice and irregular farming seasons across the country, have much at stake in the conversation about climate change. The conference produced some worthwhile promises, but the question remains: Will th...

Jules Freedman, Max Sucharov and Archie Adelman have a few things in common. All three served in the Canadian military; all three were killed in 1944; all three were Jews. But history would bind them together in a different way, too: for decades, on each of their gravestones in the Bretteville-sur-Laize Canadian War Cemetery in Normandy, France, was not a Jewish Star of David, but a Christian cros...

After 9/11, Canada sent 40,000 troops to Afghanistan. One of those was Tamar Freeman. She spent 25 years in the military, including a deployment in 2006 to the Central Asian country, where she treated Canadian troops and Afghan women and children who suffered burns and abuse. When she arrived, insurgents were setting off roadside bombs; while Taliban rockets were routinely killing Western soliders...

On this week 73 years ago, Israel officially enacted a law recognizing its new national flag: the classic blue-and-white Star of David we recognize today. Ever since, the Israeli flag has evoked pride and a sense of belonging for Israelis and most Jews in the diaspora. But it has also, increasingly in recent years, become a geopolitical lightning rod, burned by opponents of Israel in the Middle Ea...

As the Canada-U.S. land border reopens today, officials are expecting it will be busy. Canadian snowbirds will begin their annual migration south to places like Florida and Arizona, but government restrictions and social distancing regulations will inevitably slow things down, and traveller hesitance will prevent numbers from reaching pre-pandemic levels for some time. Add the cost of travel insur...

Saul Rubinek has had a prolific career dating back to the 1960s. He's acted at the highest echelons of Canadian theatre, enjoyed stints on popular sitcoms like Warehouse 13 and Frasier, and played supporting roles in classic films such as Unforgiven , True Romance and The Trotsky. Coming off some of his most visibly Jewish roles—a main character in Amazon's Hunters , about Nazi hunters in the 1970...

At age 17, Doris Grinspun moved to Israel, where she enrolled in nursing school in Jerusalem. When the Yom Kippur War broke out in 1973, even though she was still a student, Grinspun was thrown into action anyway, caring for wounded Israeli soldiers in the burn unit. The daughter of a Holocaust survivor who fled to Chile during the war—where she was born and raised—Grinspun was no stranger to gene...

Steven Levitt isn't the first Jew to compete in CBC TV's reality competition, The Great Canadian Baking Show. But he is the only one this season. And so far, he's proven to be a pretty smart cookie, surviving the show's first three weeks. That he won a couple competitions along the way is just the icing on the cake. Not that he's been able to to brag about it—until now. He and his rivals were whis...

Today marks The CJN Daily's 100th episode: a significant milestone for any podcast, but especially one exclusively covering Canadian Jewish issues on a daily basis. We’ve reported on Canada's Wacky Mac shortage, the 2021 war between Israel and Hamas, the anniversary of the MS St. Louis, Canada's first summit on antisemitism and dozens more topics that matter to Canadian Jews. The CJN Daily really...

If horror films ever have religious themes, they’re almost always Christian ones: good and evil, exorcisms, crosses and vampires, satanic cults. But as Halloween approaches, a Jewish horror-aficionado power couple is arguing that should change. Canadian horror writer Ariel Fisher and her husband, Jonathan Barkan, believe Jews have been reluctant to mine their real-life horrific experiences for art...

In the spring of 1944, Eva Olsson's family—along with the rest of her town’s Jewish population—was deported to Auschwitz. Her parents were killed, along with her brothers and all but one sister. A year later, after being moved to Bergen-Belsen, Olsson wound up liberated as the war ended, and subsequently moved to Sweden, where she met and married a Swedish man. The family ended up moving to Canada...

Tova Moradi is in her late 70s. After the Taliban came to power and threatened to stone her, one of the last remaining Jews in Afghanistan, she knew she had to leave the country. Weeks ago, a joint Canadian-Israeli rescue mission snuck Moradi and some of her extended family out of the country. But even though it happened weeks ago, details are only now being released, since Moradi and her family h...

Back in the 1990s, after directing Schindler's List , Steven Spielberg kickstarted a global effort to film the testimony of as many Holocuast survivors as possible. Teams of interviewers were sent out to film survivors in the U.S., Israel, Canada and beyond. Today, more than 50,000 videos sit in the archives of Spielberg's Shoah Foundation at the University of Southern California. It has become th...

The Atlantic Jewish Council is unique in North America, as the only federation that deals with Jews who live in different cities—even across provincial borders. The organization represents an estimated 4,000 Jews who live in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland and Labrador. And this month, its executive director, Naomi Rosenfeld, is leaving her post after five years i...

When hostilities broke out in May between Israel and Hamas, 13 Israelis were killed and more than 300 others were wounded. Staff from OneFamily, an Israeli charity with strong Canadian roots, which offers support to terror victims in Israel, swung into action, visiting hospitals and figuring out what resources were needed. It’s been this way for 20 years, over which time their annual hike across I...

On Oct. 17, at the Canadian Jewish Literary Awards, Montrealer Sigal Samuel won an award for her new children’s book, Osnat and Her Dove: The True Story of the World's First Female Rabbi . It tells the real-life story Osnat Barzani, a Kurdish-Jewish scholar who lived about 400 years ago in Mosul—and had an unconventional upbringing. Barzani's father ran a yeshiva, but didn’t have sons to share his...

Over the past few weeks, Canadian grocery stores in Jewish neighbourhoods have been ravaged by a bizarre calamity: they're all out of Wacky Mac. From Kosher Quality in Montreal to Savours in Toronto to the Sobeys on Taylor in Winnipeg, Wacky Mac—a kosher staple for families craving macaroni and cheese—has completely disappeared from store shelves. The cheese-powder drought has led Jewish Canadians...

On Oct. 2, a plane of Afghan refugees touched down in Albania after a five-day journey. The group included 120 women—police officers, judges, cyclists and others. It's the second effort coordinated by Israel's largest relief agency, IsraAID, along with Canadian-Israeli businessman Sylvan Adams and a few friendly Arab countries, such as the United Arab Emirates, to rescue Afghan refugees from the T...

The latest Apple Watch is being released worldwide this week. With it, 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 read each day and at what times, so you don't have to carry around a physic...

In the recent election, David Freiheit stood out as arguably the most popular candidate running for the People's Party of Canada—apart from its leader, Maxime Bernier. The Montreal-based lawyer spends most of his days recording YouTube videos for his more than 400,000 fans across YouTube, Twitter and other social platforms, who know him as "Viva Frei". These days, in his videos, when Fre...

On Oct. 6, in a downtown park in Toronto, a ceremony was held to unveil a new plaque commemorating the Phillips garment factory fire of 1950. The plaque was installed near the site where 9 people were killed more than 70 years ago. Among the victims was the factory’s owner, Phillip Chikofsky. His 18-year-old son, Sidney, managed to escape—but ran back inside to help, and ended up dying as well, al...

Last week, Israel's prime minister, Naftali Bennett, made his debut on the world stage at the United Nations General Assembly. Bennett has just passed the 100-day mark of his administration, after his coalition came together in June. How has Bennett's government fared in those hundred-odd days? Canada's former ambassador to Israel, Vivian Bercovici, would give the new team an A if she were writing...