North Star with Ellin Bessner

You may have heard of Jenna Lewinsky, who brought her flock of Canadian Jacobs sheep to Israel back in 2016. Today, the former resident of Abbotsford, B.C., lives in Efrat—a disputed Jewish settlement on the West Bank near Bethlehem. Despite the economic hit she's taken from the COVID-19 pandemic, and being urged by Israeli police to move because they couldn't ensure her safety during the current...

Robert Gasner is a Canadian who recently moved to Ashkelon, Israel, about 10 km north of the Gaza Strip. When a rocket hit his neighbour's house, the 63-year-old ran into the burning building to save a mother and her children, who were trapped inside. In this exclusive Canadian interview, Gasner recalls the event on The CJN Daily , from the moment the bomb dropped to his recovery in the hospital....

David Ben Gurion announced Israel’s independence on May 14, 1948—73 years ago today. (Although this year the event was marked in April, according to the Hebrew calendar.) The anniversary comes as Israel is in an eerily familiar situation, heading into another weekend with Arab fighters launching a barrage of rockets from Gaza. Meanwhile, violence between Jews, Palestinians and Israeli Arabs has br...

Today marks the 82nd anniversary of the ill-fated voyage of the MS St. Louis, which carried more than 900 Jewish refugees across the Atlantic, from Europe to North America. After being denied entry to Cuba, the United States and Canada, the ship returned to European soil, where at least 200 passengers would later be killed by invading Nazi forces. Gilda Spitz, whose husband's father, aunt and gran...

Camp BB Riback sits on the shores of Pine Lake, Alberta, about halfway between Edmonton and Calgary. This summer was supposed to mark the camp’s 65th anniversary. But with Alberta having the highest active-case rate of COVID-19 per capita of all provinces and territories in Canada—and as the camp itself faced ambiguity from the provincial government about whether or not they could legally open—BB...

According to the 2016 census, Canada's Jewish population dropped by half. This year, Jewish groups want to fix the problem by making sure Jewish Canadians know how to correctly fill out the long-form census. Questions 23 and 30 are at the centre of that campaign: one asks what religion you are; the other, your ethnicity. On today's episode of The CJN Daily , Morton Weinfeld, a professor at McGill...

It's Yom Yerushalayim, a day to celebrate Israel's holiest city. But the holiday is being marred by the threat of ongoing violence between Palestinian protesters and ultra-nationalist Israeli extremists. The situation grew so dire that Canada's minister of foreign affairs, Marc Garneau, issued a statement over the weekend calling for "immediate de-escalation of tensions." Meanwhile, the...

Clean Speech Ottawa is a movement backed by more than 25 Jewish organizations. Their goal: encourage people to be mindful of the ways in which their flippant, offensive, condescending or insulting language can hurt other people. Their goal is to spread peace across communities "one word at a time." One of the founders, Rabbi Zischa Shaps, joins the show to talk about the birth of the mov...

While no one knows the number of Canadian Jews who died from the COVID-19 pandemic, the editorial team at Maclean's is casting a wider net. They've teamed up with journalism schools across the country to write an obituary of every Canadian who died from the virus for a massive collection called They Were Loved . Dafna Izenberg, the managing editor of special projects at Maclean's , talks about a f...

With so many Jewish cultural events happening in May—film festivals, literary celebrations and the Walk with Israel, not to mention the Israeli holidays of Independence Day and Yom HaShoah—it’s no accident that the Canadian government, in 2018, announced May would be Canadian Jewish Heritage Month. On the show today, Conservative senator Linda Frum and former Liberal MP Michael Levitt join to disc...

Welcome to the first episode of The CJN Daily. Today, host Ellin Bessner focuses on the tragedy that killed 45 people and injured more than 150 others during what was supposed to be a celebration for Lag b'Omer on Mount Meron. Ellin talks with Dr. Oded Oron, a visiting scholar with the Israel Institute , who explains what the event is supposed to be—and how it all went wrong. After that, Dr. Ira R...

Introducing The CJN Daily, a new bite-sized daily newscast for Jewish Canadians.