North Star with Ellin Bessner

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East, better known as UNRWA, provides health care and education for more than five million displaced Palestinians in the Middle East. But UNRWA has been in the news a lot in the last few years, as several of its employees and teachers have been accused of sharing violent or disturbing antisemitic and anti-Israel conten...

On Aug. 8, 2021, officials in Edmonton unveiled the first sculpture of Anne Frank anywhere in Canada. The world’s newest memorial to her—a life-sized bronze sculpture gifted by a Dutch-Canadian group based in Alberta—now sits in a park in Edmonton. It's is a replica of one that stands in Utrecht, Netherlands. The unveiling marks the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Holland in the Second World...

Eighty years ago this summer, in July 1941, Nate and Susan Bluman stepped off a boat in Vancouver's port. It had been a perilous journey for the young Jewish couple, who'd escaped from German-occupied Poland to Lithuania, which was then occupied by the Russians. From there, they received transit visas thanks to a Japanese diplomat named Chiune Sugihara. Sugihara is often referred to as the "J...

For 25 years, Nicholas D. Lowry has been one of the experts on the PBS program Antiques Roadshow , where everyday folks bring old furniture, trinkets or artifacts to see if they're worth anything. Lowry is the one with the curly mustache and plaid suits. You wouldn't think he has a connection to the Canadian Jewish community. But this week, Lowry's family business, Swann Auction Galleries in New Y...

Last year, the Edmonton Heritage Festival, one of the city's biggest celebrations, was cancelled due to the pandemic. This year, organizers decided to go ahead—though at half capacity—and invited the Jewish Federation of Edmonton to join with their annual pavilion for Israel. The pavilion could mark the only Israel-themed public gathering in Canada this summer, as many other large-scale events rem...

Last week, a local modern Orthodox Jewish man in Toronto, Sam Brody, recorded a video that he posted to Facebook. In it, he described being assaulted near Yonge and Eglinton, where he lives, specifically for being Jewish. Brody says a stranger bodychecked him into a wooden fence and yelled, “F— you, you Jew! You will never take Israel. Free Palestine!” Brody wears a light-blue knitted kippah and a...

Of the 5,000 Jewish residents in Hong Kong, Canadian chef Matt Abergel is pretty recognizable. You might spot him riding his skateboard while hanging off a bus driving down the street, or you could find him wearing a T-shirt with the stark black-and-white logo of his famous restaurant, Yardbird. He's the expat whose path started at the Calgary Jewish Academy, spending summers at Jewish sleepaway c...

Becca Ignace's family homestead burned down two weeks ago. It's where she was raised after her parents moved from Montreal to British Columbia a half-century ago. Mendel and Paula Rubinson built that homestead, raised Becca and her two brothers and still continue to run a popular organic vegetable farm west of Kamloops. Ignace, meanwhile, married an Indigenous man and moved onto his reserve, where...

In May, Sheikh Jarrah became famous as the central neighbourhood in a land dispute in East Jerusalem. The Israeli government recently allowed Jewish settlers to build homes in the area, which has deep significance for religious Jews. But their settlement meant evicting Palestinians whose families have been living in there for generations. Jewish settlers say those homes actually belonged to Jews b...

For Canadians who took a chance this past winter and ventured south to the southern United States, winter may not have felt so bad. Many had the opportunity to get vaccinated sooner than if they'd stayed in Canada; they got to enjoy beautiful weather, as usual; and they may have appreciated local governors refusing to lock down their economies, as was the case in Florida. Of course, the downsides...

The government's much-touted day-long National Summit on Antisemitism took place virtually on July 21, 2021. Among the attendees were members of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s cabinet, Jewish Liberal MPs, municipal leaders and representatives from the country's main Jewish organizations. They spoke at length about concrete strategies to combat antisemitism and heard firsthand accounts of how anti...

For the past year, Laura Whitney Sniderman, armed with a Master's degree in psychology, has been helping people find and make new friends during the pandemic. She started a new community-driven company, Kinnd, which connects people online with a forthcoming app and a Facebook group of more than 10,000 people. During the pandemic, Kinnd also held several virtual meet-ups over Zoom, where members pa...

Naomi Krajden didn't go to medical school to become a front-line health care worker, even though many of her family members work in the field. Her father and brother are doctors; her mother is a nurse. So it wasn't surprising that the Toronto-born Jewish artist gravitated toward the medical world. Krajden—a trained theatre actor, singer and dancer—is the only Jewish pro therapeutic clown in Canada...

On July 18, 1994, a car bomb blew up the Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires, Argentina, levelling the city's main Jewish federation building. Now referred to as the AMIA bombing, the terrorist attack killed 85 Jewish people and injured 300 more. It was the worst terrorist attack in the history of Argentina and the worst attack against Jews outside Israel since the Holocaust. What's more troub...

July 14 was a hectic day for Jews looking for ways to combat anti-Semitism: there were at least three large-scale events held on the subject within 24 hours of each other. One was a virtual town hall organized by the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, which aimed to gather input from Jewish leaders and ordinary people on the current rise of anti-Semitism. Another happened in Jerusalem, where di...

If you haven’t heard of Josh Zilberberg, you're clearly not one of his nearly 2 million followers on TikTok, nor one of his 438,000 Instagram followers. Certainly Zilberberg himself never expected this when he started posting videos about life as a 27-year-old living with his parents during the pandemic. Yet Zilberberg has quickly ascended to social media stardom. He burst onto the scene from his...

In 1947 and '48, thousands of foreign military personnel—including 300 from Canada—flew to the emerging State of Israel to fight for its survival against hostile Arab forces. Most volunteers were experienced Jewish veterans of the Second World War. Their vital military skills helped reinforce existing troops in prewar Palestine, then later the State of Israel; in the case of the air force, they ac...

Israel's national airline, El Al, halted flights to Canada when the pandemic broke out globally in March 2020. But more than a year later, on June 28, 2021, El Al quietly started service up again on the Toronto–Tel Aviv route. On the first planeload, they handed out teddy bears to kids. There were nearly 100 empty seats. The next flight is scheduled to depart from Toronto today—Monday, July 12—but...

Max Shoham has been making movies since he was a little boy growing up in Toronto. This month, the 18-year-old's most ambitious project—an animated short called Sophie and Jacob —debuts on CBC Gem, after screening at numerous international film festivals. The short is based on the true story of his great-grandparents' escape from Romania in 1939 and their perilous voyage to Palestine. Shoham start...

Few Canadians know the name Morris Saxe. He was a Jewish dairy farmer who lived in Georgetown, Ontario, having moved to Canada in 1902. He was a hard worker and one of the founders of Beth Tzedec Congregation in Toronto, but his greatest accomplishment came in the 1920s. He convinced the Canadian government, still quite anti-Semitic at the time, to open its doors to 79 Jewish teens from one partic...

Canada's Minister of Foreign Affairs, Marc Garneau, became the first foreign minister to visit Israel since Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s government was sworn on June 13. Garneau arrived on Canada Day and spent the weekend meeting Bennett and Israel's foreign minister, Yair Lapid, among others. Garneau's main goal was to lower "the temperature" regarding the conflict between Israel an...

Once upon a time, when the Montreal Canadiens still played at the Forum, their unofficial team mascot was a trumpet-blowing super fan known as Kid Mercury. The trumpeter was a fixture in Montreal, and his siren's call could be heard blaring during the Habs' last two Stanley Cup victories, in 1986 and 1993. Kid Mercury has been retired for a few years... until a couple of weeks ago, when he got thr...

Etel Ergun Avimelek hasn't been able to meet very many people in Winnipeg yet. They arrived just last summer from Turkey, hoping to escape rising anti-Semitism there, but getting settled hasn't been easy. First they had to quarantine, then find a house, then get the kids settled in their new school—a Jewish high school in Winnipeg, Gray Academy—all while working new jobs and navigating pandemic li...

It’s not every day that the Israel Philharmonic performs private birthday concerts from the stage of the Charles Bronfman Auditorium in Tel Aviv. But if you happen to be Charles Bronfman—and it's your 90th birthday, which it was on June 27, 2021—and you’ve got your name on the building because you were the main donor when the cultural centre was renovated—then you get Schubert, Brahms, balloons an...

As many have now heard, Rabbi Reuven Bulka died on June 27, 2021. Rabbi Bulka was a beloved public figure in Ottawa, once called "Canada's Rabbi" by former prime minister Stephen Harper. He was being treated in a New York State hospital for terminal pancreatic and liver cancer. He had just turned 77 on June 6. His funeral, held on June 27, was a massive event. As many as 800 people atten...