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…
Despite mounting questions about his credibility and criticism that he may be supporting terrorism, a Canadian businessman says he is more determined than ever to continue his controversial quest to buy the freedom of Yazidi and Christian women and girls enslaved by the brutal terrorist group, Islamic State. In a September 1 interview with the…
Jacques Parizeau, the former separatist Quebec premier who blamed the Jewish and other ethnic communities for the narrow defeat in a bitter provincial referendum on seceding from Canada, has died. Parizeau died Monday. He was 84. Parizeau later acknowledged that in the razor-thin loss on Oct. 30, 1995, for which he blamed “money and the…
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