Upcoming Events

For Liberation75, Ellin will share stories of how Canada's fighting men in uniform acted with great compassion on their sacred mission as liberators of Europe, and their efforts in the face of the horrors of the Final Solution. With the participation of Bob Delson, son of an RCAF photographer at Bergen-Belsen, and the children of Jack Marcovitch, and others.

As Canada, and indeed the world, marked the Liberation of Holland and V-E Day in the spring of 1945, thousands of Canadian military personnel were still hard at work overseas, but some, in particular those of Jewish faith, had a new, humanitarian mission: rescuing the survivors of the Hitler’s Final Solution. From helping to restore Jewish places of worship in freed Dutch cities such as Tilburg, to tracking down relatives of prisoners at the newly liberated Bergen-Belsen Nazi death camp…

When the Canadian troops began cleaning out the remnants of Nazi Germany's occupation forces across Holland in the spring and summer of 1945, they were met with joyous welcomes by the Dutch people who had endured starvation and brutality under Hitler's forces. But the Canadians also came face to face with the truth about the fate of Europe's Jewish community, as they liberated concentration camps and Nazi death camps from the defeated German guards. Journalist and author Ellin Bessner's book…

Just ahead of Remembrance Day, join Canadian author and journalist Ellin Bessner on October 26, 2021 for a “Zoom” talk on The Untold Story of Canadian Jewish Women who helped win the Second World War. As a guest of the Lindsay, Ontario's Women's Probus Club, Bessner will take a fascinating look at the Canadian Jewish heroines, both at home and at the front, who helped Canada win WWII, but whose contributions to history have never been properly recognized. “Meet” Bessner’s…

As the world commemorates the 76th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, and Holocaust Education Week, Canadian author and journalist Ellin Bessner says we still have work to do to fight the rise of antisemitism in our time.  Bessner is the author of “Double Threat”, published by the University of Toronto Press, about the contribution of Canada’s tiny wartime Jewish community to defeating the Nazis. When the prime minister of the day, Mackenzie King, called the Second…