Hasidic Jews in the tony Montreal borough of Outremont could get penalized again this Purim for driving through its streets with kids on buses handing out traditional mishloach manot treats. Since 2013, police have slapped tickets totaling hundreds of dollars on the bus company hired by the Hasidim, for breaking a borough bylaw barring buses…
MONTREAL (JTA)—Students at Montreal’s McGill University failed to ratify a pro-Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions motion against Israel. The controversial motion, which passed in the university’s student society on Feb. 22 by a vote of 512 to 357, and was seen as a blow by pro-Israel students, could not be ratified after being rejected by an…
At five o’clock in the afternoon, the lights are still on at an elementary school in Montreal. The school looks like any other school. It is a four-story red-brick building with a playground in the front and a parking lot in the back. A curtain in a third-floor window moves aside, and a little boy…
A former contractor for the main Jewish hospital in Montreal has been accused of overbilling untold thousands of dollars. Gilbert Leizerovici was arrested last week by the Quebec province’s permanent anti-corruption unit, helped by tax authorities, and is facing 65 charges of fraud, according to the news website tvanouvelles.ca. If convicted, he could get two…
My mother and I arrived in Montreal, Canada in September 1941 following a death-defying escape that took us from bombed-out German-occupied Warsaw in the winter of 1940 to surviving a Nazi firing squad, to Lithuania’s Vilno (which in June 1940 was occupied by the Soviets). Then a 12-14-day Trans-Siberian train ride to Vladivostok and the…
Sigal Samuel and I grew up in the same city, attended the same college and ended up in the same office. Before that momentous event, our paths had never crossed. (Full disclosure: since then, we have become attached at the hip — or the byline.) I grew up in a secular, if proudly Sephardic, environment….
The Mystics of Mile End, Forward editor Sigal Samuel’s debut novel about a dysfunctional Jewish family, will be published by HarperCollins on October 13. Told from multiple perspectives, the story takes place in an iconic Montreal neighborhood that is home to hipsters and Hasidic Jews. In this excerpt, we see the family and their neighbors…
Montreal’s main Jewish federation has apologized for posting an article containing Jewish stereotypes on a non-Jewish website. Federation CJA pulled its supposedly tongue-in-cheek article — “10 Realities of Having a Jewish Best Friend in Montreal” — from the MTLBlog, a commercial website for young people, several days after receiving complaints from members of the Jewish…
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