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It was a trip down memory lane this weekend for hundreds of former residents of Bathurst Manor, a Toronto neighbourhood that was built starting in 1954 on the northern limit of the city. The Manor, as it's fondly known, became home to scores of Holocaust survivors and also to Canadian-born Jewish families looking for space, greenery and safety in single family homes that cost under $25,0000. It's estimated that of the 9,000 people who moved in, 7,000 were Jewish.

During the pandemic, the Ontario Jewish Archives collected stories and artifacts from the generation of Baby Boomers who grew up in Bathurst Manor. And on Sunday May 28, the archives threw a block party at the Prosserman JCC to launch their new exhibit. Visitors strolled past a series of panels showing the landmarks such as The Plaza where the Dominion grocery store was (later Sunnybrook), the nearby Wilmington Park with the playground and swimming pool and tennis courts, and the Forest Valley day camp, which attracted nearly a thousand kids every summer in the ravine south of Finch Avenue West and Bathurst.

Organizers and former residents tell The CJN Daily why Bathurst Manor was unique: because nearly everyone was Jewish, many spoke Yiddish, it was cut off from the rest of the city by geography, and it felt like a safe shtetl for immigrants from wartime Europe to begin new lives.

What we talked about


Read more about the Bathurst Manor exhibition at the Ontario Jewish Archives website
When the Bathurst Manor Plaza closed for good, in The CJN from 2016.
Our CEO Yoni Goldstein’s memories of The Manor, from The CJN, in 2016.

Credits

The CJN Daily is written and hosted by Ellin Bessner (@ebessner on Twitter). Zachary Kauffman is the producer. Michael Fraiman is the executive producer. Our theme music is by Dov Beck-Levine. Our title sponsor is Metropia. We’re a member of The CJN Podcast Network. To subscribe to this podcast, please watch this video. Donate to The CJN and receive a charitable tax receipt by clicking here.

Hartley Garshowitz went to England this past week to represent his family at the 80th anniversary ceremonies for the famous Dambusters Raid on Hitler’s Germany in 1943. His uncle, Warrant Officer Albert Garshowitz, of Hamilton, was a wireless operator and air gunner on board one of the Lancaster bombers tasked with a top-secret raid that had never been tried before: to bomb three hydroelectric dams deep inside German territory. It’s an operation that many historians today say changed the course of the Second World War. They also say it was a suicide mission.

Albert Garshowitz was one of 133 hand-picked airmen from Canada, the U.K. and other parts of the Commonwealth who trained for two months in England with the RAF’s #617 Squadron. They weren’t told their target until just hours before the raid began on the night of May 16, 1943.

The 19 heavy Lancaster bombers each carried a newly devised 9,000-pound “bouncing bomb” that had to be dropped precisely on the water near the dams. The crews had to fly low and without lights to avoid detection. Nearly half the men didn’t come back, including Albert Garshowitz. His plane crashed en route, the bomb exploded, and all seven men on board were lost. He was 22.

Hartley Garshowitz, an insurance broker in Toronto, has spent decades researching his uncle’s life and honouring his memory. Garshowitz joined The CJN Daily from England, where he met with other Dambusters descendants at the 80th anniversary memorial service.

What we talked about


Read more about the Dambusters Raid and Warrant Officer Albert Garshowitz of Hamilton, in The CJN from 2018
The Garshowitz family traces its roots in Canada back over 115 years, in The CJN.
Watch a scene from the 1955 The Dam Busters film on YouTube

Credits

The CJN Daily is written and hosted by Ellin Bessner (@ebessner on Twitter). Zachary Kauffman is the producer. Michael Fraiman is the executive producer. Our theme music is by Dov Beck-Levine. Our title sponsor is Metropia. We’re a member of The CJN Podcast Network. To subscribe to this podcast, please watch this video. Donate to The CJN and receive a charitable tax receipt by clicking here.

On May 29, Albertans will go to the polls in an election that will either return sitting Premier Danielle Smith of the United Conservative Party for a full second term, or turf her in favour of former premier Rachel Notley, who ran Alberta under an NDP government from 2015 to 2019.
Smith was sworn in just seven months ago in October 2022, after the resignation of her predecessor, Jason Kenney.
She’d already been in politics for years, but even outside of that realm, she has never shied away from voicing her opinions, writing columns for the Calgary Herald before her political career and hosting a talk radio show since 2015. In recent years, some of Smith’s comments have outraged Jewish groups, especially the Calgary Jewish Federation, B’nai Brith and the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center. She has posted links from her blog to antisemitic websites and has likened people who took COVID vaccines to the followers of Hitler. Smith has apologized for those remarks, but the impact still reverberates.
She’s also been dogged by a slew of other controversies: a UCP candidate compared transgender people to feces; a Muslim multiculturalism advisor was found to have posted antisemitic comments on social media; and, on May 18, Smith herself was found to have breached the government’s conflict of interest ethics. She tried to influence criminal proceedings against an anti-COVID protestor convicted of blockading the Canadian border at Coutts during the truckers’ convoy in February 2022.
Observers feel the election is too close to call because the outcome depends heavily on which party wins key ridings in and around Calgary and Edmonton. So The CJN Daily assembled a trio of commentators to weigh in on the 31st Albertan election: in Calgary, Maxine Fischbein, a Jewish community leader and journalist; from Edmonton, Abe Silverman, a Holocaust survivor who is also B’nai Brith’s regional representative; and Laurence Abbott, a former Beth Shalom synagogue president who is a professor at the University of Alberta.

What we talked about


Read Josh Lieblein on Danielle Smith’s comparing COVID-vaccinated Albertans to followers of the Nazis, in The CJN
Why a member of Danielle Smith’s new multicultural council had to resign over antisemitic social media posts, in The CJN
B’nai Brith wants Alberta man charged with hate crimes over anti-Semitic articles, in The CJN

Credits

The CJN Daily is written and hosted by Ellin Bessner (@ebessner on Twitter). Zachary Kauffman is the producer. Michael Fraiman is the executive producer. Our theme music is by Dov Beck-Levine. Our title sponsor is Metropia. We’re a member of The CJN Podcast Network. To subscribe to this podcast, please watch this video. Donate to The CJN and receive a charitable tax receipt by clicking here.

An Ontario court judge has sided with former Conservative senator Linda Frum and dismissed a $2.5-million defamation lawsuit brought against her by a Montreal-area newspaper, the Journal Sada Al Mashrek. The judge ruled on May 15 that the lawsuit violated Ontario’s anti-SLAPP laws, which are designed to protect people from long and expensive court cases that would effectively gag them from commenting on matters of public interest.
The lawsuit dates back to the summer of 2022, during the federal Conservative leadership campaign. Frum posted two tweets calling out then-candidate Patrick Brown for comments he reportedly made about Israel and Palestine during his interview with the Montreal newspaper, which were later published online. Frum—whose husband, Howard Sokolowski, is one of the key supporters of the politician who won the leadership, Pierre Poilievre—accused the newspaper of being an organ of Hezbollah, a terrorist organization.
The defamation lawsuit was thrown out because the judge ruled it was a blatant attempt to silence Frum. She now joins The CJN Daily to describe why she fought back, why she had to consult personal security experts while the court proceedings were underway, and what may come next.

What we talked about


Read why Frum resigned her seat in the Senate of Canada in August 2021 to focus on fighting antisemitism in the Jewish community of Toronto, in The CJN
Learn more about Frum calling out a newly appointed colleague for being anti-Israel, in The CJN from 2021

Credits

The CJN Daily is written and hosted by Ellin Bessner (@ebessner on Twitter). Zachary Kauffman is the producer. Michael Fraiman is the executive producer. Our theme music is by Dov Beck-Levine. Our title sponsor is Metropia. We’re a member of The CJN Podcast Network. To subscribe to this podcast, please watch this video. Donate to The CJN and receive a charitable tax receipt by clicking here.

On May 16, the House of Commons’ Foreign Affairs and International Development Committee adopted a motion introduced by the NDP’s Heather McPherson, a vocal critic of the Israeli government. Her motion—which passed with the support of four Liberal MPs, the NDP and the Bloc Quebecois—will now see the committee hold hearings on how Canada can foster peace between Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, in light of the recent upswing in violence that has killed at least 89 Palestinians and 14 Israelis this year.

McPherson’s views have sparked deep concern from some Jewish MPs and Jewish advocacy organizations, who fear the hearings will give a platform to Israel-bashing and pound a wedge between Jewish and Muslim groups in Canada. The Canadian government hasn’t held hearings on its policies on Israel and the Palestinian crisis for years. (Ottawa still supports a two-state solution and sends millions in financial support to the region, mostly earmarked for Palestinians.)

On today’s The CJN Daily, we get the behind-the-scenes story of how this motion came about and hear reaction from Ya’ara Saks, Liberal MP for York Centre and Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Families, Children and Social Development; Melissa Lantsman, MP for Thornhill and deputy leader of the Conservative Party of Canada; and Shimon Koffler Fogel, the CEO of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs.

What we talked about


Read the original NDP statement from April 20 from MP Heather McPherson calling on Canada to study the Israel-Palestine question
Read her statement on Israel extremism from January 2023.
Find us on May 22 at the Walk with Israel in Toronto: come by our CJN booth

Credits

The CJN Daily is written and hosted by Ellin Bessner (@ebessner on Twitter). Zachary Kauffman is the producer. Michael Fraiman is the executive producer. Our theme music is by Dov Beck-Levine. Our title sponsor is Metropia. We’re a member of The CJN Podcast Network. To subscribe to this podcast, please watch this video. Donate to The CJN and receive a charitable tax receipt by clicking here.

The group is calling itself the Network of Engaged Canadian Academics, or NECA, and its founders are two professors from Ottawa: Deidre Butler, director of the Zelikovitz Centre for Jewish Studies at Carleton University and Cary Kogan, a clinical psychology professor at Ottawa U.
Each has personally experienced anti-Israel or antisemitic incidents in recent years at their workplaces: Butler was not permitted to fundraise to help her religion students accompany her on a study trip to Israel this semester, while Kogan’s faculty association voted to oppose the IHRA definition of antisemitism.
The pair say it’s about academic freedom because they are finding that there is no room on campuses anymore for professors who are pro-Israel; only for those who condemn the Jewish State, including many of their Jewish colleagues who are in that camp. And so while there are plenty of existing groups that support Jewish students on university campuses, academics like them also need help to better face the widespread normalization of anti-Zionism in higher education.
The co-chairs join The CJN Daily to reveal they have already signed up 100 members and are looking to expand across the country.

What we talked about


Learn more about the Network of Engaged Canadian Academics in their mission statement.
Read why an anti-IHRA network of Jewish faculty was formed in 2021 in The CJN
Find us on May 22 at the Walk with Israel in Toronto: come by our CJN booth.

Credits
The CJN Daily is written and hosted by Ellin Bessner (@ebessner on Twitter). Zachary Kauffman is the producer. Michael Fraiman is the executive producer. Our theme music is by Dov Beck-Levine. Our title sponsor is Metropia. We’re a member of The CJN Podcast Network. To subscribe to this podcast, please watch this video. Donate to The CJN and receive a charitable tax receipt by clicking here.