North Star with Ellin Bessner

On June 24, a 12-storey beachfront condo building collapsed in Surfside, a suburb of Miami, with more than 150 people still missing as rescue operations continue days later. At least three dozen of those missing people are reportedly Jewish—Surfside is actually considered to be the most heavily Jewish district in the Miama area—and the Canadian government believes there were four Canadians in the...

The graduating class of TanenbaumCHAT, a Jewish high school in Toronto, comprises 196 students who haven't actually set foot in their school building for most of the school year. Contrast their experience with those of Grade 12 students at Vancouver's King David High School: there, 58 British Columbians have been attending in-person classes all year, albeit with masks on. The COVID pandemic has up...

This past Monday, just in time for Pride Week, Canadian Blood Services quietly posted an update on their website, recommending the elimination of Canada's "blood ban". The ban forbids gay, bisexual and other queer men from donating blood if they've had sex with men in the last three months. The rule used to require five years of celibacy, before getting truncated down to one year; only i...

How does someone live to celebrate their 114th birthday? On today's episode, Ellin poses the question to Cecile Klein, Canada's oldest person. She tells us her secret to longevity: staying active, doing things for yourself, eating steaks (because you still have all your own teeth) and hopping on a cruise to Mexico at the young age of 103. Klein lived on her own, in her own house in Montreal’s Snow...

Robbie Waisman is a well-known speaker on Holocaust education. When he was 11, he was forced to worked in a munitions factory in Poland; by 14 he was sent to Buchenwald, where he was grouped in the same cohort of teenagers as Elie Weisel. His parents and four brothers were killed in the Holocaust. Eugene Arcand, meanwhile, is now an official with Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and a...

In the past year, an unusual number of Canadian rabbis have changed jobs, even while COVID restrictions make job interviews difficult. Rabbis across the country have left their synagogues, either to change things up or for personal reasons. Some came as a surprise, like Matthew Leibl in Winnipeg, who announced his resignation in April; others left to pursue other projects, like Yossi Sapirman of T...

This week, Israel got its first new prime minister in over a decade: Naftali Bennett, an Orthodox right-wing politician, formed an unlikely governing coalition with centrist and left-wing parties, as well as the United Arab List. Bennett, who spent some formative years living in Montreal as a young child, has staunch positions on controversial domestic issues. He supports settlements in the West B...

The Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, died on June 13, 1994. Each year, to commemorate his death, his Chabad followers visit Scheerson’s gravesite outside New York—it's known as the Ohel—where they leave letters and prayer notes for him. This year, a large celebration features guest speaker Elie Wiesel’s son, Elisha, and a musical performance by Itzhak Perlman. One prominent Can...

Canadian Jewish groups have been pushing the federal government for weeks to create a national emergency summit on anti-Semitism. The calls follow spikes in angry anti-Israel protests around the country in the wake of the latest violent flare-ups in the Middle East, as well as an outpouring of online hatred that extends beyond anti-Zionism and into anti-Semitism. Late last Friday afternoon, Bardis...

If Anne Frank had survived the Holocaust, she would have been celebrating her 92nd birthday on June 12. Elly Bollegraaf can empathize with Frank's experience. When Bollegraaf speaks to students in Ottawa about her experiences being a hidden child during the Holocaust in the Netherlands, she usually gets asked whether she knew the famous diary writer. Each time, she disappoints the crowd by informi...

This year, June 10 marks is the 54th anniversary of the end of Israel's Six Day War, which claimed the lives of nearly 800 Israeli soldiers. It was hardly the only war that led to sacrifices by Israeli men and women. According to official estimates, about 25,000 Israelis have died for their country, spanning from the years before, during and in the aftermath of the establishment of the State of Is...

Last night, a public vigil was held at the London Muslim Mosque in London, Ont., for the victims of what is being described as a murderous hate crime. Five members of a Pakistani Canadian immigrant family, out for a Sunday evening stroll, were deliberately mowed down by a hit-and-run driver. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Ontario Premier Doug Ford and other federal and provincial leaders showed up...

Last month brought two tragic reminders to Canadians' attention. One was the one-year anniversary of George Floyd's murder, and the second was the discovery of the remains of 215 children in a Kamloops residential school. While Canadians may finally have woken up to their country's history of racism against Indigenous people, it bears asking: how have things changed for Canada’s Jews of colour in...

June 6 was the anniversary of D-Day, commemorating the fateful amphibious invasion by the Allies on Normandy, France, in the Second World War. Part of that history were 17,000 Canadian troops of Jewish faith who were part of their country's war effort—including, for the first time, women. This year, a new art exhibit from the University of Calgary is highlighting the role of these women in uniform...

On June 5, 1832—189 years ago this weekend—the Canadian legislative assembly in Lower Canada granted full civil rights to people of the Jewish faith. The move was hugely important because it granted emancipation to Canada’s Jews well before most other parts of the British Empire followed suit. It's not a very popular anniversary, but it's one worth remembering. Today, Ellin chats with the newest J...

The late Ruth Goldbloom helped found the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21, which has been a national historic site as the gateway to Canada for more than a million immigrants, including tens of thousands of Jews in the 20th century. When Goldbloom died in Halifax nine years ago, more than 1,500 people came to her funeral. A street has been named after her and the museum at Pier 21 named a...

Last week, news broke that the remains of 215 children were found at a residential school in Kamloops, B.C. Local and national Indigenous communities have been mourning this tragedy for days since the revelation, while also commemorating the lives of these innocent kids, who were taken from their homes under longstanding Canadian government policy. The school operated for nearly 80 years, from 189...

The Farhud was a two-day pogrom against the Jewish community of Iraq in the spring of 1941. Pro-Nazi rioters killed hundreds of Jews in Baghdad and destroyed 900 Jewish homes and businesses. The tragedy marked a turning point in the fate of the Iraq’s 2,000-year-old Jewish community: Zionism was later declared a crime and Jews were turfed from government jobs. Several hundred thousand Farhud survi...

Has there ever been a better home for Jews than Canada? That's the bold question being asked in a new collection of essays, No Better Home?: Jews, Canada, and the Sense of Belonging. The book's editor, David S. Koffman, joins to discuss the merits behind the argument: how Canada might be the most inviting, safe and tolerant country for Jews in the world. Plus: Liberal MP Ya'ara Saks joins to discu...

On the night of May 28, Saskatoon’s Congregation Agudas Israel will host a graduation ceremony for its Hebrew school students—online, of course, because of COVID-19. The three graduates and the rest of the students will take part in evening prayers to welcome Shabbat and celebrate a milestone in the local Jewish community. If it wasn’t for COVID, they could all have been congregating in Agudas Isr...

Faye Schulman lost most of her family in the Holocaust—her parents, aunts, uncles, two brothers and two sisters. But Schulman herself was spared because she was a photographer and had worked in her brother’s studio. She ended up living a life worthy of a Hollywood film, joining and living with a band of Russian partisan fighters in the woods. Schulman died at the end of April in Toronto at the age...

Dr. Nili Kaplan Myrth, a family doctor in Ottawa, has 1,400 patients and 13,000 followers on Twitter. She’s been outspoken in her efforts to make sure marginalized people—like frontline workers, single parents and refugees or those who have trouble accessing transportation—get vaccines. She’s already organized two mass vaccination clinics in Ottawa, called Jabapaloozas, where she gave out more tha...

Three and a half years have passed since the bodies of Barry and Honey Sherman were found dead in their Toronto home. They'd been posed in a macabre position and tied to the railing of their basement swimming pool. The mysterious deaths of the Canadian Jewish billionaire couple shocked the country—and especially the Jewish community, where they had been influential fundraisers and donated millions...

It was a relief to hear news of yesterday's ceasefire between Israel and Gaza. But for many Canadian Jewish students, the 11-day-long conflict has been particularly hard to handle. At Wilfred Laurier University, two pro-Palestinian students shot a distressing video in which they lit a makeshift Israeli flag on fire and made stabbing gestures with Palestinian and Israeli flag emojis. At Queen's Uni...

While plenty of cities and schools around the world take part in "Kindness Days" or promote random acts of kindness, Canada recently became the first country to formally enshrine a "Kindness Week" into law. On May 14, all five parties voted unanimously to pass Bill S-223, An Act respecting Kindness Week , in the House of Commons. Kindness Week was inspired by Rabbi Reuven Bulka...