True-crime biographies depict reviled criminal behaviour

Five years ago, while researching a book on the history of the Jewish community of London, Ont., I uncovered an obscure and remarkable personality from the past, someone who blazed a bright meteoric trail through the world and then seemingly disappeared.Back in the 1920s, Charlie Burns (originally Bernstein) took over the local Carling brewery and ran a bootlegging operation into the United States, providing huge quantities of booze to gangster Al Capone and others. One of London’s wealthiest residents, he rode around town in a magnificent Cadillac worth $15,000. 

Halifax rabbi is leaving the only shul he’s ever served

HALIFAX — Ari Isenberg was only 19 years old, a Concordia University student and a young man from Montreal enthralled with cantorial and secular Jewish music, when he heard of a High Holiday cantorial position at Halifax’s Conservative Shaar Shalom Synagogue and took the job.

Fourteen years later, he’s leaving Shaar Shalom, “saying the hardest ‘yes’ I’ve ever said” after being offered a new position. “I’m leaving a cherished, beloved community, an adopted family more so than congregants.”

Week of June 18, 2015

Good news from CHAT

The big news for the Jewish future in Toronto is that next year’s Grade 9 class at TanenbaumCHAT is on track to be larger than the current Grade 9. Our goal is to continue that trend, despite the precarious state of Jewish day school education.

COVER STORY: Are Jewish neighbourhoods too expensive for families?

Chani, like many young Jews in the Greater Toronto Area, is desperate to move out of her three-bedroom starter home to accommodate her growing family.

But in today’s record-breaking real estate market, unless you’re in the top one per cent of earners, buying into an established Jewish community in the GTA can seem impossible.

Four years ago, Chani, 32, and her husband bought a three-bedroom home on Esther Crescent in Thornhill in order to be in an established Jewish neighbourhood with other young Jewish families, one with an eruv and near synagogues.

Montefiore seniors home in Montreal set to close

MONTREAL — Manoir Montefiore, an upscale private kosher seniors’ residence in Côte St. Luc, will close within 18 months, but its owner promises to help find new homes nearby for the 78 residents and to compensate them, according to the law.

General manager André Grégoire told The CJN that 72 of the 132 apartments are currently occupied, and that the average age of the residents is 90. Most have lived in the facility for at least 10 years, he said.

Assisted death forbidden, rabbi tells ethics conference

MONTREAL — If physician-assisted suicide becomes legal, at least 13,500 Canadians will die that way each year, a Montreal rabbi argued at a Jewish medical ethics symposium on end-of-life care.

Rabbi Raphael Afilalo, director of pastoral services at the Jewish General Hospital (JGH), said the figure is his “conservative projection” based on statistics in the Netherlands where it has been legal for doctors to provide lethal drugs for several years.

Gatineau renames streets honouring Nazi sympathizers

Gatineau, Que., is renaming two streets, Alexis Carrel and Philipp Lenard, after a resident pointed out that the two Nobel Prize-winners had Nazi sympathies.

The council for the city, across the river from Ottawa, voted on June 9 to rename them after two other Nobel winners: Alexis Carrel will become Albert Einstein Street and Philipp Lenard will become Marie Curie Street.

The change follows on an almost two-year quest by resident Benoit Beaulieu to drop the names because of the link to Nazism.

Jacques Parizeau’s legacy divides us

Across the political spectrum, tributes are pouring in for the late Jacques Parizeau, the former Quebec premier best remembered as head of the independence movement in the 1995 referendum. He led the “yes” option to a very narrow defeat in what is widely seen as one of the most important events in Quebec politics. 

Le Dr Haim Abenhaim élu Président d’Or Hahayim

Le nouveau Président élu de la Congrégation Or Hahayim, le Dr Haim Abenhaim, souhaite que cette Institution synagogale sépharade remplisse aussi la fonction de Centre communautaire pour les jeunes familles sépharades résidant à Côte Saint-Luc.

Parizeau had difficult relationship with Jewish community

MONTREAL — The mention of Jacques Parizeau over the past two decades has sent a shiver through members of the Jewish community, not only because of his hardline separatism, but also because they felt he really meant Jews when he blamed ethnics and money for the 1995 sovereignty referendum defeat.

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