Although the Second World War was a man’s war, and 17,000 Canadian Jewish men served, a tiny but important group of 270 Canadian Jewish women dared to overcome their family and community’s disapproval, the lower pay, and sexual harassment, and joined the Canadian forces after 1941. That is when the government allowed women to enlist. They served in many jobs at home, and behind the front lines, overseas.
It is with great pleasure that Ellin — the granddaughter of one of Ottawa’s founding Jewish families, the Lieffs —…
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.
Ellin will speak at the Azrieli Herzliah High School, Bialik High School, Hebrew Academy, and at both branches of Ecole…
Tickets are still available for the event: Friday 11thNovember 2016 “How Canada’s Jews Fought WWII” Remembrance Day Service, Shabbat…
Double Threat is a journalistic look at the untold stories of the Jewish Canadian men and women who served in uniform during the dark years of the last great war.
Sai Wan War Cemetery, Hong Kong(courtesy Commonwealth War Graves Commission website) Timing is everything. And the Internet is a miraculous…