Local

Beth Israel is hoping to be home for the High Holidays

photo - Beth Israel and its parking lot under construction.

Congregation Beth Israel’s former parking lot will be replaced by an underground parking garage with a 200-vehicule capacity. The roof will be an interconnected series of courtyards. (photo from Beth Israel) This September, when construction is complete and Congregation Beth Israel…

Limmud to hear from Ruth Messinger

Major studies like one from the Pew Centre last year suggest that fewer Jewish people are participating in Jewish-specific activities. This would seem like a difficulty for groups like American Jewish World Service, a humanitarian and emergency relief agency with…

Wallenberg Day honors heroes

photo - Henry Ross-Grayman, Thomas Gradin and Mayor Gregor Robertson.

Left to right, Henry Ross-Grayman, Thomas Gradin and Mayor Gregor Robertson. (photo by Wendy Fouks) There was a full house at the Norman and Annette Rothstein Theatre for the community’s marking of Wallenberg Day on Jan 19. Sponsored for the…

First-ever B.C. Limmud

Yiddish erotic poetry. It’s not a phrase that trips off the tongue, perhaps because Celia Dropkin may have been its only practitioner. There were Yiddish poets and writers in Eastern Europe and America who addressed risqué topics, but few, if…

Children’s Hearing and Speech Centre celebrates 50th

photo - Children's Hearing and Speech Centre

The Children’s Hearing and Speech Centre of British Columbia. (photo from childrenshearing.ca) Imagine not being able to hear. The silence. The isolation. Now imagine the sounds of kids singing, playing, asking questions at story time – even though they are…

Stamp collector Ed Kroft wins awards

Collect postal history and you learn not just how mail has traveled in years past, but also how people lived and functioned. Just ask Ed Kroft, a collector and historian of postal history from Israel who was recently awarded the…

Nicholas Winton’s kindertransport

The Wallenberg-Sugihara Civil Courage Society will mark Vancouver Raoul Wallenberg Day on Jan. 19 with the screening of the documentary Nicky’s Family, about Holocaust hero Nicholas Winton. Now 104 years old, Winton lives in England (where he was born). The…