Windsor veterans memorial features multimedia stories
A new display commemorating 317 Jewish war veterans from the Windsor area is more than just names on a wall
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
A land far away: Jewish Mitteleuropa
The Hotel Years traces Joseph Roth’s travels, with attention to lobbies, cafés, window views, and the people met along the way
ESSAY: Death with a blue ribbon
When 11-year-old Irene Cahen d’Anvers sat for Renoir’s masterpiece known as Girl with a Blue Ribbon, she could not have known that the painting would be embroiled in a monumental tragedy, culminating in the murder of her entire family in Auschwitz a few decades later.
BOOK EXCERPT: The four horsemen of human rights
Strictly speaking, I am not a survivor of the Holocaust, since all four of my grandparents came to Canada before World War I. Yet, in a very real sense, I and every Jewish person are survivors of the Holocaust. Six million Jews were killed. All Jews were targeted. It is only the fortunes of war that gave us an Allied, rather than an Axis victory in World War II. If the Axis powers had won, not I, not one Jewish person would be alive today.
PERSPECTIVES: Il Duce’s Jewish love affairs
Although victory often eluded Benito Mussolini on the fields of Mars, it seldom abandoned him in the boudoirs of Venus.
A latter-day Casanova, Mussolini revelled in his deserved reputation as the quintessential Latin lover. His insatiable appetites led to two wives, hundreds of affairs, and numerous casual encounters. “There was a time when I had 14 women and took three or four of them every evening, one after the other,” he once said.
Remembering their names
“In Eternal memory to the men, women and children of Yaltushkow who perished at the hands of the Nazis in the summer of 1942”
These words are inscribed over an archway leading to graves of the Yaltushkower Landsmanshaft Benevolent Society, located in a vast city of the dead in Queens, N.Y. This is where my father-in-law and mother-in-law are buried with others who came to the United States before war swept the rest away.
BACKSTORY: Einstein’s Zionist and Jewish awakening
Albert Einstein’s parents were assimilated German Jews who considered themselves “Israelites,” which was typical of westernized Jews in Germany in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Einstein, who was born in 1879, did not have a bar mitzvah, though as a young man he did show a keen interest in religion and for a time adhered to Jewish dietary rules.
Son of Canada’s first black Jew recalls happy childhood
WINNIPEG — Like most other Jewish kids growing up in Winnipeg’s north end in the 1940s and ’50s, Bill Mahon attended public school by day and cheder in the evenings, went to shul with his dad on Shabbat, had a bar mitzvah, went to St. John’s Tech for high school (where he was president of the student council) and hung out with his friends.
The only difference between Mahon and his friends was that his father was a black man – Emerson Swift Mahon.
FEATURE: In praise of the landsmanschaft
In a series of articles written for this newspaper about four decades ago, the late CJN columnist J.B. Salsberg reminisced with great affection about the “Apter Shtibl” in downtown Toronto, which he had frequented in his youth during World War I.
