Following the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, not many people know about the historic Canadian anti-semitism against the Jewish community of Quebec City, but it is in my book “Double Threat” about the experiences of Canada’s Jewish community before and during WWII. It is a story my own family knows well.
Why Canada’s 17,000 Jewish fighters served in WWII, and why we should honour their contribution to defeating Hitler and rescuing the survivors of the Holocaust. A new podcast episode by the Juno Beach Centre in Normandy.
The 76th anniversary of the Dieppe Raid will be commemorated in August 2018, but the event is never far from…
Before Beth Tzedec became Canada’s largest Conservative Jewish synagogue, with 7,000 members, it was formed by the amalgamation of two…
Official Toronto launch of “Double Threat” at Beth Tikvah Toronto was on Tuesday night, which was the 73rd anniversary of V-E-Day, May 8. Honoured to meet Ric Levenston, the son of Lt. Col. Gerald Levenston, of Toronto, who handled the German surrender in May 1945. His commanding officer told Levenston “I want a Jew to tell those bastards what to do.”
The nearly 280 Canadian Jewish women who volunteered, put on a uniform, and served in WWII lived their own important wartime experiences, and contributed to help Canada and the Allies win the war, defeat Hitler, and stop the Holocaust. Most of the women also had their own #Time’sUp moments.
How Canadian Jewish servicemen celebrated Purim in Montreal in 1944.
Esther Thorley’s brother Meyer Bubis, who was eleven years older than her, had enlisted in the Toronto-based Royal Regiment of Canada on Sept. 7, 1939, mere days after Hitler’s Nazi forces had invaded Poland to start WWll. Bubis would eventually be part of the ill-fated Allied raid on Dieppe, France in August 1942. After he was killed, Thorley waited for her eighteenth birthday in June 1943, and enlisted. She was one of only 270 Canadian Jewish women to wear a uniform for Canada in WWll. Thorley, an Ajax, Ontario resident, died suddenly on Feb. 13, 2018.
A Toronto artist’s year-long quest to learn the identity of the gregarious Jewish war veteran whose portrait she’d painted last year, brought her and the canvas to a boardroom at Baycrest Hospital last Sunday. There, at the regular monthly meeting of the Royal Canadian Legion Wingate Branch 256, comprising Jewish Second World War and Korean War veterans, the portrait of Jerry Rosenberg found a permanent home.
many times, it is at the end of the evening when I experience some of the most thrilling moments of my six year long journey to uncover the war heritage of Canada’s Jewish fighters.
