North Star with Ellin Bessner

Canada's estimated 9,000 Jewish post-secondary students have been back at school for barely more than a month—and while things are quieter so far, the culture of rising antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment has not gone away. Just this summer, a student living in a residence dorm at the University of British Columbia had her mezuzah damaged twice, resulting in the police getting called in. A Musl...

The Abraham Global Peace Initiative is a new human rights think tank founded by Avi Benlolo. And If Benlolo’s name sounds familiar, it may be because he’s a prolific writer and commentator about Israel and Jewish issues, including antisemitism and the Holocaust. Benlolo spent two decades as head of the Friends of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre for Holocaust Studies, until his sudden departure in the...

Bradley Okrant grew up in the heavily Jewish community of Thornhill, Ont. Ten years ago, after graduating high school, he was accepted to college in Thunder Bay. Within weeks of arriving, he met Danelle Clark, a First Nations woman. At first, she didn’t know he was Jewish—and he thought she was Asian. Nonetheless, they've been together ever since. The Okrants live in Danelle's hometown of Beardmor...

You might remember the fanfare back in the fall of 2017, when Canada’s Holocaust memorial opened in Ottawa, just west of Parliament Hill. Until then, Canada was the only Allied country without a national monument to victims of the Holocaust. The government paid $4 million for the Daniel Libeskind–designed project, while Canada's Jewish community raised the other $4.5 million. Later that year, a Ha...

Helmut Oberlander came to Canada in 1954. He was married, raised a family and became a successful real estate developer in Waterloo, Ont. But in 1986, a secret spilled out into public, when a retired Quebec judge, Jules Deschênes, held an inquiry into Nazis secretly living in Canada. Deschênes named Oberlander among those who were. Years of legal battles ensued, in which the federal government str...

It sounds like it could be a movie—and maybe, one day, it could become one. In late August, just before the United States pulled out of Afghanistan, an effort began to save some of the athletes on the Afghan women’s national cycling team from the impending Taliban takeover. This mission was partly spearheaded by Sylvan Adams, a Canadian-Israeli billionaire with a passion for cycling. After moving...

Ahead of today's election, the People's Party of Canada is polling at around 10 per cent nationally. Much of their rise can be attributed to leader Maxime Bernier, whose presence at large-scale anti-lockdown rallies across Canada has sparked a grassroots populist movement grounded in distrust of governments, health care systems and public institutions. But working within that same movement have be...

The 44th Canadian election is happening Monday. Up for grabs are 14 ridings that are notable for Jewish voters, either because of their large Jewish populations or high-profile Jewish candidates. Sporting some of the highest profiles are Annamie Paul and Avi Lewis, who will try and make their marks by winning difficult seats; elsewhere, traditional battlegrounds in the Toronto area are proving to...

In July 2021, the Minister of Public Safety Bill Blair attended an event at a Chabad Lubavitch centre in Markham, Ont., where he announced the government would spend $8 million to help non-profit faith community groups update their buildings' security. The money is meant to go towards projects like fortifying doors, installing cameras, erecting fences, training security guards and improving lighti...

Last night, The CJN and CIJA hosted an election debate on issues that matter to the Jewish community. Our participants were Marco Mendicino, the Liberal minister of immigration; Michael Chong, the Conservative shadow critic for foreign affairs; and Hal Berman, a doctor and NDP candidate in Toronto. The subjects ranged beyond Israel and combatting antisemitism. There are Jewish connections to clima...

Tonight, The CJN and CIJA are hosting a federal election debate featuring candidates from the three major parties: Liberal Marco Mendicino, Conservative Michael Chong and New Democrat Hal Berman. The candidates will debate issues relating to the safety of Canada's Jewish community and the country's relationship with Israel. To get a better sense of what those issues are, four Jewish volunteers fro...

This weekend marks the 20th anniversary of 9/11, when al-Qaeda suicide attackers flew four planes into American landmarks, resulting in 2,977 deaths, including 24 Canadians. The planes crashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania. Rabbi Leivi Sudak didn't know any of this when his flight to New York from London, U.K., was ordered to land in Gander, Newfoundland. Ra...

Canada’s Jewish community is a little larger this high holiday season. In July, 11 adults and two young children officially converted—and all of them live in Kelowna, B.C., with a Jewish population of about 500. Well, about 513 now. This was a unique conversion process for many reasons. Being virtual, of course, classes were led by rabbis from across the country over Zoom. Since Kelowna doesn't ha...

Soon after COVID-19 vaccines began rolling out, clashes erupted between authorities and the Hasidic community in Montreal. Police officers raided a synagogue that violated the lockdown curfew in January 2021; court battles ensued; more illegal gatherings took place in March, blowing past attendance limits. But there has been a shift in tone this summer, especially since vaccine passports became ma...

Since she was nine years old, Hannah Alper has been blogging and speaking all over the world about climate change, clean drinking water, education, homelessness and discrimination against Black and Indigenous communities. She's interviewed Malala Yousafzai, travelled to Africa three times, written a book and been the subject of a documentary in 2020, CitizenKid: Earth Comes First . Now 18, Alper w...

Walk down the craft beer section of your local liquor store, and you'll be met by a wall of beautiful designs and bright colours. But if you spot a Shillow beer, something might catch your eye: the certified logo of the Kosher Council of Canada. Being kosher-certified is an extra expense, but it was a necessary one for Ben and Jamie Shillow, the modern Orthodox couple behind Shillow Beer. This mon...

This year, first prize for photographic storytelling at the prestigious World Press Photo awards went to an Italian photojournalist named Antonio Faccilongo. Faccilongo's winning photo essay, titled " Habibi "—which means "my love" in Arabic"—documents the families of jailed Palestinians prisoners serving sentences in Israel. Over the years, many of these men have smuggled...

One year after the separatist Parti Quebecois government won Quebec's 1976 election, they passed Bill 101—better known as the Charter of the French Language—which cemented French as Quebec's only official language and restricted the use of English in private businesses and public schools. A mass exodus of Jews from the province ensued, with as many as 40,000 Jewish Quebeckers leaving the province...

The Museum of Jewish Montreal started out as a digital idea about 10 years ago. When Zev Moses started plotting historic sites of old Jewish Montreal, putting little stories about theses buildings and people on a website, he wanted to showcase the origins of what was, for 200 years, Canada’s largest Jewish community. That concept morphed into a physical museum in 2016, right on Saint Laurent Boule...

Jeffrey Freedman was working for a Toronto tile company when the pandemic hit. The office was deemed an essential service, so Freedman kept going into work. His wife's daycare business was shut down due to the pandemic and money got tight, so he kept going in until he took ill. He started having trouble breathing and was rushed to North York General Hospital near the end of Passover. On April 15,...

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 forced these two renowned annual celebrations to figure out new ways to reach fans of Yiddish and Jewish culture. Despite the hurdles,...

As The CJN Daily continues its brief summer hiatus, we're bringing subscribers another compilation of some of our favourite stories. Today, two episodes in one: Canadians remember the Iraqi Farhud, a pogrom in 1941, as well as Argentina's AMIA bombing in 1994, which remains the country's biggest unsolved terror attack. What we talked about: Learn about the museum in Israel dedicated to the history...

The worst race riot in Canadian history happened on a Toronto baseball field exactly 88 years ago today. Just a few months after Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, in the midst of a global depression, the dictator's ideas were already taking hold in some parts of Canada. By the summer, pro-Nazi agitators showed up to a baseball game where a Jewish team was facing off against a Protestant team. Ag...

While The CJN Daily is on a week-long summer vacation, we're bringing you some of our favourite stories from the past few months. Today, enjoy a compilation of our coverage of Indigenous issues and how the Jewish community can help. Episodes referenced: Mourning in Kamloops: How has the local Jewish community reacted? (June 2, 2021) Meet the Jewish artist painting Holocaust and residential school...

The CJN Daily will be taking a brief summer vacation for the next week, returning on Aug. 23. In the meantime, we have a semi-new episode: here's a re-airing of an episode we ran in May 2021, "The life and legacy of partisan photographer Faye Schulman". We'll have more favourites coming to you during our break. Plus, we have an update on the first Canadian Birthright trip to Israel since...