There’s an important new book out by the Canadian Jewish News. It’s called Northern Lights: A Canadian Jewish History. It tells the history of Canada’s Jewish community through the archives and photos of the country’s award-winning Jewish weekly newspaper.
As the world commemorates the 75th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, author and journalist Ellin Bessner brings her new book “Double Threat” to the Scugog Shores Museum Village and Archives. As Canada, and indeed the world, marked the end of the fighting in the spring of 1945, hundreds of Canadian airmen and soldiers were still hard at work overseas with a new humanitarian mission: rescuing the survivors of the Holocaust, including in Germany at the site of the notorious Nazi death camp Bergen-Belsen.
Although Canada’s Jewish community was a tiny minority in 1939 when Canada declared war in 1939, the Jewish community of…
When most people think about Jews and the Second World War, they think about the victims of the Holocaust. But now a new book by Canadian journalist Ellin Bessner tells the untold story of how and why more than 17,000 Canadian Jews put on a uniform and served in the war, as the liberators. And how Canada’s tiny Jewish community mobilized men, money, and equipment to win the war.
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.