A 100-year-old nightmare
Backstory is a CJN column recalling some of the most bizarre, unique, and important moments in Jewish history. Click here for last week’s instalment. The summer of 1980 found me in the living room of Helene Gardon in Colombes, a suburb of Paris. I had just come from Chateau Gontier, a town some 200 kilometres […]
The futility of war: Jewish soldiers of World War I
During World War I, from 1914-1918, approximately 2,700 Canadian Jews (and possibly more) served in the Canadian Expeditionary Force, with about 1,200 seeing combat. Of those, an estimated 123 died in battle
Chelm and us
A look at Y. Agnon’s 1963 work ‘Rothschild’s Luck; or, A Tale of Two Patrons,’ a brilliant satire that exposes human folly in under a dozen pages
The unexpected rewards of sympathetic behaviour
A look at human interaction from Professor Eli Honig
A miracle amid a death march from Warsaw to Dachau
The story of Rabbi Yekusiel Yehudah Halberstam who witnessed a miracle on Tisha b’Av, of all days, in a place called Sochatchov
A forgotten Jewish poet
A look at the life of likely the first Jewish contributor to German literature
Rabbi Pinchas Hirschprung’s escape to Canada
A look at the life of Torah scholar Rabbi Pinchas Hirschprung
Reflection on hands and intimations of mortality
There are many stages between the extremes of entering and leaving the world, but there are two that are relatively close to the beginning and the end that deserve mention, and both of these powerfully involve hands, writes Eli Honig
Where you go, I shall go
Loyalty may be a troublesome concept for philosophers, but it has never been a question for Jews, writes Rabbi Chaim Steinmetz
How a Jewish farm boy from Sasketchewan became Canada’s best salesman
A look at the life of Philip Kives, the dynamic Winnipeg entrepreneur and founder of K-tel International
