The CJN Daily

A few of the recent news stories reported by Ellin Bessner

A new chairlift on a Canadian ski hill was named after two Holocaust survivor brothers

Saul Fenster and his older brother, Henry—two siblings from Poland who had survived the Holocaust—bought a swampy plot of land an hour north of Montreal in 1961. And so, the Belle Neige ski hill in the Laurentien mountains was born. Saul had learned to ski after the war, in Switzerland, where he had been sent to try and cure his tuberculosis after the pair survived a half-dozen death camps. A 25, which

This 4-year-old got his dream birthday party—at a Metro grocery store in Picton, Ont.

Lev Goldfarb may not realize it, but this event was good for the Jews. Not only did he spark a whole lot of goodwill in the tiny Lake Ontario resort town between Toronto and Kingston—now the Metro store manager has promised to start stocking some kosher food items for the community of about 100 people. Lev’s fascination with the supermarket prompted his mother, Hadas Brajtman, to approach the managers with an unlikely request. The result was beyond the Israeli expatriate family’s wildest dreams.

The horror movie writer who used to watch Jewish bodies before burial in Toronto

Hanina “Hank” Hoffman originally didn’t want to accept the offer to write a macabre flick with a Jewish theme. But he changed his mind once he realized he could help change the way Hasidic Jews are so often portrayed on screen. The resulting film is called The Devil’s Offering. Hoffman channeled his upbringing in Toronto as the son of a former ritual director at Adath Israel Congregation, who held his own teenaged job at a shomer who sat with the recently deceased at Benajmin’s Park Memorial Chapel.

YidLife Crisis have translated their very Jewish humour into Chinese (and French, too!)

The popular Montreal comedy duo of Jamie Elman and Eli Batalion is betting that they’d have worldwide appeal if what they’re saying in Yiddish was more widely understood. That’s why a 2015 video explaining why some Jews eat Chinese food on Christmas Eve has been translated… into Mandarin. The revamped video premiered on a social media platform in China around the same time that Radio-Canada’s streaming service brought YidLife to francophone audiences with subtitled episodes like “Le schmaltz.”

Who gets to tell the murder story of Barry and Honey Sherman?

While conspiracy theories abound over who did it and why, interest heated up this winter as two major Canadian news outlets gave the story the true-crime audio treatment, although the two shows took very different approaches. Toronto Star investigative journalist Kevin Donovan brought five years of reporting to The Billionaire Murders around the same time Kathleen Goldhar unveiled The No Good, Terribly Kind, Wonderful Lives of Barry and Honey Sherman, a podcast production being distributed through the CBC.

Why did Israel’s ambassador to Canada quit his job on Twitter?

Ronen Hoffman announced on Jan. 21, just over a year after he moved to Ottawa, that he plans to leave his post this summer due to “the transition to the new government and to different policy in Israel.” The political shift was also covered this winter in interviews with former McGill University law student Dan Illouz, who’s now a member of the ruling Likud government, expressing his support for court reform—while Canadian philanthropist Charles Bronfman talked about signing an open letter in opposition to it.

The Jewish policy expert who says 2023 will be ‘brutish and nasty’

Irvin Studin used to be a professional soccer player, and the policy expert, academic and think-tank head likes sporting terminology. Which means, in the aftermath of the pandemic, this nation needs to win the next game. He shares 10 theses for our survival between the covers of Canada Must Think for Itself

Shining a new light on Rudolf Vrba, the Canadian who escaped from Auschwitz

While credited with saving the lives of 200,000 Hungarian Jews, the killing of more than a million victims at Auschwitz haunted him until his death in Vancouver in 2006. The Escape Artist, a new book by British journalist Jonathan Freedland, makes the case for Vrba being one of the greatest Holocaust heroes.