Features
Looking back at the life of the late Rabbi Peretz Weitzman
This story originally appeared in our paper in 2010: Lodz-born rabbi celebrating 90th birthday
By PAUL LUNGEN TORONTO – When Rabbi Peretz Weizman used to go on his customary walks down Main Street in Winnipeg,
he often sang an unusual song that puzzled the shopkeepers he had come to know.“What is that tune and why are you always singing it?,” they asked him.
Weizman kept mum about it but in an interview with The CJN last week, he explained the origins of that unusual melody that had puzzled his friends in the prairie city.
It was an old tune sung by a cantor that he had heard as a youth in his native city, Lodz. As a boy, he loved to attend Kabalat Shabbat services at the city’s famous Altshtot, Old City Shul. Although his family attended a simple shtibl, he used to sneak out on Friday night to the ornate and beautiful synagogue, where he was awed by the splendour of the building, the solemnity of the service and the stature of the cantor.
He remembered the cantor’s song welcoming the Sabbath and kept it alive. “That was the song I sang on Main Street,” he said. “I never walked alone. I saved something from the Old City Shul. I rescued the melody. This Hitler could not destroy.”
Rabbi Weizman, who has moved to Toronto to be closer to his family, will celebrate his 90th birthday on Nov. 23. A man of the old school, he recalls vividly the life he led in Lodz before the Nazi invasion of September 1939, as well as the subsequent destruction.
The memory of his beloved synagogue going up in flames in November 1939 is burned into his consciousness. It was so beautiful, “I didn’t believe the Temple was nicer than this shul,” he said.
“When I saw the synagogue going up in flames, the entire sky was covered in sparks – a remnant. When I say that, I feel that I was one of the sparks.”
Like other survivors of the Holocaust, Rabbi Weizman represents one of the ever-declining number of Yiddish-speaking European Jews. Surprisingly, he eschews use of the word “survivor” when describing himself, even though he alone from his parents, brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, cousins – more than 60 people in all – escaped the Nazis.
“I am not a survivor,” he said. “Let me explain. I was a nephew, I was a son, a brother. All these titles gone. Only the naked Peretz survived. All the titles are gone. Only a fraction survived, the naked “I” survived… I felt naked, unprotected.”
Rabbi Weizman had three brothers and two sisters. His father, Shmuel, was a successful businessman who manufactured and sold chemicals and some pharmaceuticals. At age three, Rabbi Weizman began to attend cheder at the Yeshiva Yesodai HaTorah, where he learned traditional Jewish subjects along with secular material, which was compulsory. The school days were long, beginning at 8 a.m. and going until 8:30 p.m., with a break for dinner.
At age 15, his family arranged for a private tutor. “In Poland, in my circle, you didn’t study to become a rabbi. If you wanted to be a Jew and respected in the community, you had to be a scholar.”
He didn’t decide to become a rabbi until after the creation of the Lodz ghetto by the Nazis.
“I felt I should contribute to the Jews, that Judaism will need me, if I survive,” he said.
Remembering the cantor’s rendition of Kabalat Shabbat was part of that and later, when he met the cantor in the ghetto, Rabbi Weizman recalled that the man, who had seemed so tall and grand in the synagogue, was “shrunken” and beaten down.
“I sang for the chazzan, Kabalat Shabbat, and tears welled in his eyes and he said, ‘preserve it.’”
Preserve the song, he did, though all around him was starvation, misery, death and destruction. He managed to survive the war as a labourer in a laundry. “We laundered the garments of the Jews who were gassed and sent it back, cleaned, to Germany. We didn’t know they were gassed then, but we noticed five shirts, one over the other, and found diamonds in brassieres, and dollars.”
Rabbi Weizman was liberated by Soviet forces and met his future wife, Riva, after the war. After a few years in Europe, they moved to Israel where she had family, but Rabbi Weizman couldn’t cope with the hot Mediterranean climate. When he learned of an opening at a synagogue in Winnipeg, they left for Canada, arriving in 1953.
In 1960, he became rabbi at the newly formed Bnay Abraham Congregation, and he served there for almost 40 years.
“I love Winnipeg,” he said. “I feel very comfortable there. It has a very nice, comfortable element there. It’s heimishe, a cold climate, but warm people.”
In 1999, he spent a year in Toronto as a replacement rabbi at the Beth Emeth BaisYehuda Synagogue after he received a good response when he delivered a dvar Torah.
He enjoyed the experience at the shul. “We had a common language, and a common expectation and a common past. They could appreciate a newcomer. They appreciated my sense of humour. It’s a Jewishly-intelligent congregation… They like European sechoireh [merchandise].”
Last year, the Winnipeg Jewish community honoured Rabbi Weizman with a tribute dinner and the establishment of the Rabbi Peretz Weizman Holocaust Education Trust fund, housed at the Jewish Foundation of Manitoba. More than $40,000 was raised to support the establishment and maintenance of a Holocaust education display showcase as a lasting legacy.
Today, Rabbi Weizman is a Torontonian. His wife is a resident at Baycrest, and his nine grandchildren and six great-grandchildren live here.
He still studies every day or two at a local yeshiva where the young people “look at me like someone from a different age.”
“I’m a true believer that God has blessed me with a long life. I believe my brothers and sisters and parents gave me their years. I lived their lives, and I must confess that the less future I have, the more the past is taking a hold of me. As the past is taking a hold of me, it robs me of my present. I have such a desire to be with them, to see them. I have this longing. I miss them more than I missed them 50 years ago. They say time cures: no.”
As this reporter takes leave of Rabbi Weizman – I confess that I’ve known him a long time; he “bar-mitzvahed” me years ago – there’s always one more story, one more parable for him to tell, one more mishnaic interpretation to impart.
Like the old shul burning, Rabbi Weizman continues to give off sparks, hoping that a new generation will preserve and pass along the wisdom and flavour of the nearly destroyed Old World.
Features
River Heights home close to school & synagogue
Blending timeless character with thoughtful modern updates, this beautifully maintained River Heights home offers comfort, style, and everyday functionality. Bright living spaces, a finished basement, a private backyard, and a double detached garage make it ideal for families, professionals, or anyone looking to enjoy one of Winnipeg’s most sought-after neighbourhoods. Conveniently located close to schools, parks, cafés, shopping, and everyday amenities, this move-in-ready home is ready for its next chapter.
•
Features
Will the Democratic Socialists of America control the Democratic Party?
By HENRY SREBRNIK On June 23, radical Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) candidates backed by New York mayor Zohran Mamdani won multiple Democratic Party primaries in New York City and elsewhere in the state. They also were victorious in other parts of the country.
The socialist victories in New York far surpassed anyone’s predictions. Who, three years ago, could have predicted that a Muslim anti-Zionist would be elected mayor of a city with 900,000 Jews and would lead insurgents to victories in that party’s primaries in 2026? Yet here we are.
Marxist Third Worldist ideology has moved out of the universities into the polling booths, after campus activism, divestment campaigns, and social media have reinforced an anti-Israeli framework for years. The DSA’s platform states it plainly: It pledges “support for Palestinian self-determination against Israeli apartheid and settler-colonialism.”
The mayor, a long-standing DSA member, worked overtime to appear at countless campaign events for a trio of candidates he dubbed “the Team”: Claire Valdez, Darializa Avila Chevalier, and Brad Lander. The last two unseated incumbent Democratic congressmen. Mamdani has assembled a coalition in New York City that is capable of elevating like-minded candidates to office.
In the Seventh Congressional District, which straddles northern Brooklyn and southwestern Queens, an open primary to replace retiring progressive Rep. Nydia Velázquez saw State Assembly Member Claire Valdez’s’s defeat Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso. She was even further left than Mamdani himself. In the end, it was not even close: Valdez prevailed with 56.1 per cent of the vote to Reynoso’s 35.8 per cent.
In 2019, Valdez joined the DSA after seeing the rise of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and state senator Julia Salazar, both of whom were elected with the DSA’s help. Valdez emphasized her anti-Israel activism as a key part of her campaign. At events, her staff handed out signs that said “Free Palestine.” She launched her campaign alongside Mahmoud Khalil, a key anti-Israel leader at Columbia University that the Donald Trump administration has tried to deport.
Valdez referred to Israel’s war against Hamas as a “genocide” as early as October 13, 2023. She lambasted police for restraining anti-Israel mobs chanting “Globalize the Intifada” and waving Hezbollah flags outside a Brooklyn synagogue last June. “New Yorkers don’t just have the right to protest the sale of stolen Palestinian land — they have a responsibility to,” she declare. She has repeatedly criticized the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). She also boasted on social media of having “wiped my hand on the American flag.”
In the Thirteenth Congressional District, covering the upper Manhattan neighborhoods of Harlem, Washington Heights, and Morningside Heights and parts of the West Bronx, Darializa Avila Chevalier won a much more startling victory over Rep. Adriano Espaillat, a five-term incumbent Democratic Party power broker and chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. Espaillat’s campaign was heavily backed by AIPAC. Chevalier defied expectations and won by gaining 49 per cent to Espaillat’s 46 per cent. She told the crowd at her watch party that she had fought against the “Democratic machine.” Espaillat lost despite the backing of Democratic leaders in Congress and the state, including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, New York Governor Kathy Hochul, and Julie Menin, speaker of the New York City Council.
When Chevalier, draped in a keffiyeh, first announced her candidacy in November of last year, few outside her immediate circle knew her name. But her message was clear: she presented herself as an organiser working to unite families torn apart by the immigration system and against “what we all know is a genocide in Palestine.”
Chevalier has publicly proclaimed her hatred for Israel, the United States, and “Western civilization” as a whole. She has called for the abolition of prisons, open borders and an end to deportations — even for people convicted of violent crimes. As a student at Columbia University, she was involved in Students for Justice in Palestine. In 2024, she returned to her alma mater to help organize an anti-Israel encampment that was ultimately disbanded by the police.
She co-founded Columbia University Apartheid Divest: “We are Westerners fighting for the eradication of Western Civilization. We stand in full solidarity with every movement for liberation in the Global South. Our intifada is an Internationalist one,” it states.
The day after the October 7 attack, Chevalier attended an anti-Israel demonstration in Times Square. “I can only say I have been advocating for the human rights of Palestinians for my adult life,” when asked about her attendance at the rally. Chevalier has said that her conversion to Islam was inspired by the Israel-Hamas war. Mamdani celebrated her win, describing Chevalier as a person “of clarity, of conscience and of conviction.”
The war was also on the minds of voters in former Comptroller Brad Lander’s race against another AIPAC-funded incumbent, Rep. Dan Goldman, in New York’s Tenth District, covering lower Manhattan and part of Brooklyn. Both are Jewish, but Goldman has been a steadfast friend of Israel while Lander is the quintessential anti-Zionist and a key faction of his coalition was anti-Israel. It was a contest that laid bare the party’s divisions over the Israel-Gaza war.
At his son Marek’s bris, Lander gave a speech lambasting Israel. “We pray fervently that by the time you read this, the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, the settlements, the house demolitions, the violence will be history,” which was later reprinted in a 2003 book titled Wrestling with Zion. Lander enjoyed the night’s biggest victory, winning 65.8 per cent of the vote to Goldman’s 34 per cent. Many Democrats have suggested that Lander has proved useful to Mamdani and other leftists who have been accused of antisemitism for singling out the Jewish state for opprobrium.
In the run-up to Election Day, a chain of Brooklyn coffee shops called Poetica posted that it would have barred Goldman entry had they recognized him during a recent visit to their storefront. “We don’t serve racists, fascists, homophobes, genocide enablers,” Poetica declared. “Too bad we didn’t recognize you right away, or we would have turned you away.”
At the state level, seven of the eight candidates endorsed by the DSA for the New York State legislature also won their primary elections. One of them is Aber Kawas, a Queens-based community organizer. If she, as expected, wins in November, she will be the first Palestinian woman elected to state office in New York history.
“Were defeated congressmen Dan Goldman and Adriano Espaillat insufficiently anti-Trump?” asked Will Rahn, a senior editor and writer for The Free Press, rhetorically, in a June 26 column. “Of course not. They lost because they aren’t anti-Israel enough. ‘Free Palestine’ is now the binding issue on the left, the only thing that actually matters.” No matter who you are, how you identify, or what causes you’ve championed, if you refuse to fall in line on Israel, you risk being ostracized from communities you’ve long called home.
For most of the postwar era, support for Israel was one of the least controversial positions in Democratic Party politics. That consensus has not merely weakened; it has collapsed. Once viewed as a righteous anti-colonial cause, Zionism has been reframed by radical thinkers as the ideology of a colonial oppressor of stateless Palestinians. Opposition to Israel is now the litmus test in Democratic Party politics. “There’s a cliff, and we’re heading towards it,” warned Daniel C. Kurtzer, a Princeton University professor who was ambassador to Israel under President George W. Bush.
The DSA has now built an entire ecosystem that runs parallel to the official Democratic apparatus, equipped with their own consultant network, endorsing organizations, donors and even billionaires who back them.
A generation after Pat Buchanan was denounced as an antisemite by all proper liberals for saying things like “Capitol Hill is Israeli-occupied territory,” will the left now embrace him as a “premature antizionist”? Even satire can’t match this.
Think about it: Since October 7, Israel has done what every other country viciously attacked by implacable enemies throughout history has done: It has lashed back in a defensive war. This is a policy that any state that cared for the life of its citizens would have to adopt.
Yet Israel has become the “omnicause.” That’s why antisemitism and antizionism are two sides of the same coin: hatred of Jews. Jews around the world aren’t being attacked because of Israel. Israel is itself being condemned because it’s Jewish.
American Jews have been blindsided by this, as the French writer Simone Rodan-Benzaquen, senior envoy for Europe at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, tells us in a brilliant article, “Stand Up,” Tablet, July 6, 2026. “When anti-Jewish hostility arrives wrapped in the language of liberation, antiracism, decolonization, and human rights –when it emerges among allies, colleagues, students, professional peers, or other minority communities — the disorientation is deeper. It is inside the world in which one has built a life. It speaks in familiar accents. It borrows cherished values.”
In “A Profound Question Haunting Jews Today,” New York Times, July 6, 2026, Nicholas Lemann, the former dean of the Columbia University Journalism School, agrees. He writes that for half a century or more, American Jews could achieve, “through being successful, culturally Jewish, Zionist, liberal and not especially observant,” a status that elsewhere has persistently eluded them.
“This set of certainties has evaporated. Today, Israel is the pariah nation of the world, and ‘Zionist’ has become an epithet, something it’s unacceptable to be, at least in progressive circles,” where most Jews have usually found themselves.
So, are the Democrats going to become America’s anti-Israel party? And then what?
Henry Srebrnik is a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island.
Features
Discover Your Ultimate Smooth at Sets on Corydon: Nanoplasty vs. Keratin vs. Japanese Straightening
Are you ready to wake up with flawless, effortless hair every single day? While standard straightening methods try to fit everyone into the same box, your hair has its own unique structure, strength, and history.
We offer three distinct, state-of-the-art smoothing and straightening systems. Finding the perfect match depends entirely on your hair type, your lifestyle, and your ultimate hair goals.
Here is exactly how they compare so you can choose the path to your most beautiful, resilient hair.
The Treatment Breakdown
1. The Elite Standard: Nanoplasty (Our Premier Selection)
Nanoplasty is a revolutionary, high-technical smoothing treatment that works at a deep cellular level. Using nanotechnology, nutrients and amino acids are deeply integrated right into the hair cortex (the inner core of the hair strand). It heals, seals, and straightens from the inside out without harsh chemicals.
- How it works: It uses an acidic formula triggered by specialized infrared heat to realign the hair bonds. It does not just coat the cuticle; it restructures it while infusing massive hydration.
- The Finish: Ultra-glossy, high-shine, sleek, and straight, while retaining natural movement and zero frizz.
- The Big Benefit: Formulated without formaldehyde or harsh chemicals. There are no fumes, no burning eyes, and you can wash your hair or tie it up the very same day.
- Longevity: Lasts up to 4 to 6 months.
2. The Classic De-Frizzer: Keratin Treatment
The traditional choice for managing unruly texture. Keratin acts like a protective shield, filling in the cracks along a compromised or distressed hair cuticle (the protective outer layer).
- How it works: A liquid keratin formula is sealed into the outer layer of the hair with a flat iron.
- The Finish: Soft, smooth, and incredibly manageable. It reduces curl volume by roughly 50 to 70% and completely deletes frizz, but leaves some of your natural body and bounce.
- The Big Benefit: Ideal for hair that has undergone chemical stress or bleaching. It acts like a temporary protein bandage to restore softness and cut your blow-dry time in half.
- Longevity: Lasts 3 to 4 months, gradually washing out over time.
3. The Permanent Sleek: Japanese Straightening (Thermal Reconditioning)
For those who want absolute, pin-straight hair that defies high humidity and never reverts.
- How it works: This is a permanent chemical process that physically breaks down the internal bonds of the hair, which are then precision-ironed perfectly flat and neutralized to lock in the new shape forever.
- The Finish: Mirror-smooth, pin-straight, glassy hair with zero wave or curl.
- The Big Benefit: It is completely permanent on the hair that is treated. Rain, humidity, and workouts will not change it. Only your new root growth will need touching up.
- Longevity: Permanent (requires root touch-ups every 6 to 9 months).
Which One Is Right For You?
| Feature | Nanoplasty | Keratin Treatment | Japanese Straightening |
| Primary Goal | Deep cellular repair, sleek straightening, intense gloss. | Frizz elimination, volume reduction, softer texture. | Permanent, absolute pin-straight results. |
| Hair Condition | Healthy to moderately sensitized or colored hair. | Highly compromised, bleached, or heat-distressed hair. | Healthy, resistant, coarse, or virgin hair only. |
| Chemical Type | Amino acids & organic acids (No formaldehyde fumes). | Cuticle-coating formulas (May contain standard preservatives). | Traditional alkaline straightening solution. |
| Post-Care Window | Wash or style immediately. No waiting period. | Must wait 48 to 72 hours before washing or tying up. | Must keep completely dry and straight for 48 to 72 hours. |
An Important Note on Hair Integrity: Beautiful hair is healthy hair. Because Japanese Straightening permanently alters the internal architecture of the hair strand, it is completely unsuitable for heavily highlighted, bleached, or fragile hair. If your hair has a history of heavy chemical processing, a customized Nanoplasty or Keratin Treatment will give you the breathtaking, smooth results you want while respecting and preserving the strength of your hair structure.
Let’s curate your perfect look. Book a structural hair analysis with us today, and let’s design a smoothing protocol tailored exactly to your hair’s unique signature.
