Features
A visit to the Children of Israel Cemetery in Transcona – the Jewish community’s first cemetery
By SHARON LOVE My first visit to the Children of Israel Cemetery was in August 2008. A descriptive article about this group visit, written by Matt Bellan (zl), then editor of The Jewish Post & News can be found in the Aug. 20th, 2008 edition.
Over the years I hadn’t thought very much about going there again. This past year I was a student in the Yiddish Literature and Language class instructed by Professor Itay Zutra. The class was part of the Judaic Studies curriculum held at the University of Manitoba. We were reading “Motl Peysi the Cantor’s Son” in Yiddish, which was written by the renowned Yiddish author Sholem Aleichem.
Towards the end of the spring term I started thinking about the cemetery because Nissel Rabbinovich Zimmerman is buried there. He was the uncle of Sholem Aleichem, whose real name was Solomon Naumovich Rabinovich. I knew that Professor Zutra and possibly other class members had never been to the cemetery and would probably find it very interesting.
To make arrangements for the visit I called Bill Croydon, the long time building and maintenance supervisor at the Shaarey Zedek Synagogue. The synagogue has maintained the cemetery since the 1950s. Bill suggested that we wait a few more weeks after the initial phone conversation until the nearby fields and the cemetery would be fairly dry.
Our group met Bill in the Kildonan Place Shopping Centre parking lot on Reenders Drive in Transcona on Thursday, June 23rd at 11.00 am. An open field separates the cemetery from the main road. It was a hot, sunny morning. We all ‘dressed’ for the mosquitoes. Luckily there weren’t any around to bother us. Bill had seen that the grass was cut short and the cemetery, surrounded by a mesh fence and gate is basically treeless. Trees are on the outer sides of the surrounding fence. This does help to make the cemetery fairly hidden.
Over the years there has been some vandalism. The tombstones have been purposely flattened to discourage such events. It is believed that at most there are 113 graves there. However, due to flooding and loss of original wooden markers, records are incomplete. This is disappointing for current family members who know that they have family buried there but cannot find their graves. There are indeed impressions in the ground in various spots sadly missing markers.
The cemetery was opened in 1883. The last burial was that of Frank Druxerman, which took place in 1933. Some tombstones are rather ornate. The lettering on some has faded and is hard to read. Some have cracks in them, with grass coming up through the cracks. Most have English writing along with Hebrew and some with what looks like possibly Romanian lettering.
Nisl or Nathan Rabbinovich Zimmerman has a very ornate stone as well as a description attesting to his leadership roles in Jewish community life at the time. He passed away in 1898, aged 64. His wife, Hudel, who passed away in 1910, aged 77, is also buried there.
According to Ron and Audrey Zimmerman, Nathan – Ron’s great-grandfather, bought a passport in order for their family to come to Canada. The name on the passport was Zimmerman. Both surnames are on his tombstone. Nathan continued to use Zimmerman for his surname for the rest of his life. Today there is at least a sixth generation of the Zimmerman family.
Sadly, I spotted the tombstone of Samson, the 10-day-old son of H. Bronfman, who passed away on Jan. 4th, 1910. The renowned Bronfman family was on the prairies before most of the family moved east.
I also came across the tombstone of Sarah, the 19-year-old daughter of J. and D. Pierce who drowned (as printed on the stone) on June 22nd, 1894. There was another tombstone of someone else who drowned as well. The tombstone of Lena Abremovich caught my eye. It reads that she was the wife of Leon, and passed away aged 20 in 1893, along with their infant son.
I did find the stone of Sarah Fainstein, who was murdered in her sleep on August 28th, 1913 at 28 years of age. Sarah was the great-grandmother of Wayne Hoffman, who recently published a book titled “The End of Her,” which chronicles his quest to solve the mystery of why she was murdered. Wayne’s book was recently the subject of a long story in The Jewish Post & News (February 2, 2022 edition.).
I know that we found this visit to be both interesting and thought provoking. Life could not have been easy for the souls who are buried there. Professor Zutra was very helpful with translating the printing on many of the tombstones. As a Yiddish language scholar he was very moved to be standing at the grave of Nisl, both a poet and author in his own right.
Thanks also to Bill Croydon, who was very generous in sharing his knowledge of the history of the cemetery. Final discussions left us with unsure feelings. There is a red large Shindico sign in the field west of the cemetery. My friend Sonia Kaplan and I have both heard of a proposed retail and housing development in the area. Bill told us that he heard that the plan is to build around the cemetery. The thought of this makes me sad. I am pleased to note that in his August 2008 article, Matt Bellan mentions the existence of an undeveloped Shindico property in the area. I hope that those wheels are grinding slowly.
This brings to mind the closing lyrics of the song, “If I Were a Rich Man,” with which many of us are familiar from “Fiddler On The Roof.” The song, which is sung by Tevye, is based on the monologue, “If I Were a Rothschild,” written by Shalom Aleichem in 1902. The last two lines of the song ask the question, ‘Would it spoil some vast eternal plan if I were a wealthy man?’
I wonder whether it would spoil some vast eternal plan if those laid to rest so many years ago at the Children of Israel Cemetery could continue to rest there in peace for many years to come.
Features
Statistical Volatility Models in Slot Mechanics: Extended Expert Analysis Informed by Pistolo Casino
Analytical reviews of slot volatility often reference ecosystems similar to those found at Pistolo casino. Within the gambling research community, volatility is understood not as a marketing attribute, but as a technical framework that shapes how digital slot systems distribute outcomes over time. Expanding on earlier overviews, this extended analysis examines the deeper mathematical logic behind volatility classes, as well as their implications for long-term behavioural modelling.
Volatility as a Mathematical Architecture
Slot volatility is commonly divided into high-, medium-, and low-risk models, yet this simplified categorisation hides the structural complexity underneath. Developers configure several layers of probability weighting, which include:
- Event Density Layers – Each slot contains multiple weighted segments representing minor, medium, and rare outcomes.
- Return Frequency Curves – These curves dictate how the distribution of payouts drifts around the long-term equilibrium.
- Reel Weighting Matrices – Symbol appearance probability is shaped not only by frequency but also by conditional dependencies within each reel strip.
Research drawing on examples parallel to Pistolo casino shows that modern slots increasingly use modular probability blocks, making outcome variance more flexible and more precisely adjustable during development.
Behavioural Interpretation of Volatility Signals
From a player analytics perspective, volatility modelling helps identify how different user groups respond to varying risk structures. High-volatility mechanics frequently attract users who seek extended tension cycles and the possibility of occasional strong outcomes, while low-volatility systems are associated with steady-state gameplay and longer average session times.
Analysts also examine “volatility fatigue,” a concept describing the moment when prolonged dry cycles reduce engagement. By tracking these patterns, researchers can map how changes in event spacing affect decision-making, bet sizing, and persistence.
Simulation Methodology for Evaluating Volatility Accuracy
Technical audits rely heavily on large-scale simulations—sometimes exceeding fifty million iterations — to verify that the modelled volatility aligns with theoretical expectations. Key indicators include:
- Hit rate stability across long sequences
- Distribution symmetry, ensuring outcomes do not drift into accidental bias
- Deviation corridors, which define acceptable ranges for short-term anomalies
- Return-to-player convergence, showing whether the model equilibrates over time
When discrepancies appear, developers may adjust symbol weighting, probability intervals, or feature-trigger frequency until the system reaches internal balance consistent with regulatory and mathematical demands.
Volatility’s Role in Market Diversity
Volatility modelling helps explain the substantial variety between slot titles. Instead of relying solely on themes or graphics, modern game design differentiates titles by emotional rhythm and progression speed. This technical approach has led to more deliberate pacing structures where reward cycles, anticipation building, and event clustering are calibrated through mathematical systems rather than subjective intuition.
Conclusion
Volatility remains one of the most precise and data-driven components of slot design. Its study provides insight into outcome diversity, behavioural responses, and long-term predictability. Research frameworks referencing platforms comparable to Pistolo Casino highlight how volatility models shape modern gambling environments through measurable probability engineering and large-scale simulation.
Features
Bias in America’s Colleges Produced Modern Anti-Zionism
By HENRY SREBRNIK Jon A. Shields, Yuval Avnur, and Stephanie Muravchik, professors at the Claremont Colleges in California, have just completed a study, “Closed Classrooms? An Analysis of College Syllabi on Contentious Issues,” published July 10, 2025, that draws on a database of millions of college syllabi to explore how professors teach three of the most contentious topics: racial bias in the criminal justice system, the Israel-Palestine conflict, and the ethics of abortion.
They used a unique database of college syllabi collected by the “Open Syllabus Project” (OSP). The OSP has amassed millions of syllabi from around the world primarily by scraping them from university websites. They date as far back as 2008, though a majority are from the last ten years. Most of the data comes from universities in the United States, Britain, Canada, and Australia.
“Since all these issues sharply divide scholars, we wanted to know whether students were expected to read a wide or narrow range of perspectives on them. We wondered how well professors are introducing students to the moral and political controversies that divide intellectuals and roil our democracy. Not well, as it turns out.”
In the summary of their findings, “Professors Need to Diversify What They Teach,” they report that they found a total lack of ideological diversity. “Across each issue we found that the academic norm is to shield students from some of our most important disagreements.”
Teaching of Israel and Palestine is, perhaps no surprise, totally lopsided, and we’ve seen the consequences since October 7, 2023. Staunchly anti-Zionist texts — those that question the moral legitimacy of the Israeli state — are commonly assigned. Rashid Khalidi, the retired professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia, is the most popular author on this topic in the database. A Palestinian American and adviser to the Palestine Liberation Organization delegation in the 1990s, Khalidi places the blame on Israel for failing to resolve the conflict and sees the country’s existence as a consequence of settler-colonialism.
The problem is not the teaching of Khalidi itself, as some on the American right might insist. To the contrary, it is important for students to encounter voices like Khalidi’s. The problem is who he is usually taught with. Generally, Khalidi is taught with other critics of Israel, such as Charles D. Smith, Ilan Pappé, and James Gelvin.
Not only is Khalidi’s work rarely assigned alongside prominent critics, those critics seem to hardly get taught at all. They include Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn by Daniel Gordis, a professor at Shalem College in Israel. Gordis’s book appears only 22 times in the syllabus database. Another example is the work of Efraim Karsh, a prominent historian. His widely cited classic, Fabricating Israeli History, appears just 24 times.
For most students, though, any exposure to the conflict begins and ends with Edward Said’s Orientalism, first published in 1978. Said is the intellectual godfather of so many of today’s scholars of the Middle East, thanks in no small part to this classic book. Said was a Palestinian-American academic, literary critic, and political activist from a prominent Christian family. Educated at Princeton and Harvard Universities, two of America’s most distinguished centres of higher learning, he taught at Columbia University, another Ivy League institution, until his death in 2003.
Said was no crude antisemite. His writings were aimed at academics and intellectuals and he has, in my opinion, done more damage to the Jewish people than anyone else after 1945. Said claimed to be the first scholar to “culturally and politically” identify “wholeheartedly with the Arabs.” But he was also a political activist for the Palestinian movement opposing the existence of Israel.
Said warned PLO leader Yasir Arafat that if the conflict remained local, they’d lose. Join “the universal political struggle against colonialism and imperialism,” with the Palestinians as freedom fighters paralleling “Vietnam, Algeria, Cuba, and black Africa,” he advised.
(In this he was not the first, though. Fayez Sayegh, a Syrian intellectual who departed for the United States and completed his Ph.D. at Georgetown University in 1949, preceded him. Also an academic, his 1965 monograph Zionist Colonialism in Palestine stands as the first intellectual articulation of Zionism as a settler colonial enterprise, arguing that the analytical frameworks applied to Vietnam and Algeria apply equally to Palestine. The treatise situated Zionism within European colonialism while presenting it as uniquely pernicious.)
Israel’s post–Six-Day War territorial expansion helped Said frame Israel as “an occupying power” in a 1979 manifesto titled The Question of Palestine. Alleging racial discrimination as the key motive was a means of transforming the “Zionist settler in Palestine” into an analogue of “white settlers in Africa.” That charge gained traction in a post-Sixties universe of civil rights, anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism, and Western self-abnegation. The work sought to turn the tables on the prevailing American understanding of Israel: It is not, in fact, an outpost of liberal democracy or refuge from antisemitism, but an instrument of white supremacy.
Orientalism popularized a framework through which today’s advocates on behalf of Palestinians understand their struggle against the state of Israel and the West generally. Said casts the Western world as the villains of history and peoples of the East as its noble victims.
The essence of the book, Said concluded, is the “ineradicable distinction between Western superiority and Oriental inferiority.” It falsely affirms “an absolute and systematic difference between the West, which is rational, developed, humane, superior, and the Orient, which is aberrant, undeveloped, inferior.”
So it was impossible to take Zionism seriously as one among the myriad nationalist movements that emerged in the nineteenth century, much less to see Israel itself as a land of refugees or the ancestral homeland of Jews. And, indeed, Said’s Orientalism singles out Israel for special rebuke, suggesting that the state could be justified only if one accepted the xenophobic ideology at the core of Western civilization. Israel’s defenders, particularly those who lament the lack of democracy in the Middle East and fault Arabs for their militancy, represent the “culmination of Orientalism.”
Said is widely acknowledged as the godfather of the emerging field of postcolonial studies, and his views have profoundly shaped the study of the Middle East. Said also inspired – and in some cases directly mentored – a generation of anti-Zionist U.S. scholars whose dominance in the academic study of the area is unquestionable today.
The political left that emerged trained itself to read every conflict as the aftershock of colonialism. The ideological narrative of oppression and resistance allowed even the jihadist to become a post-colonial rebel.
It’s hard to overstate the academic influence of Orientalism. The authors note that “As of this writing, it has been cited nearly 90 thousand times. It is also the 16th most assigned text in the OSP database, appearing in nearly 16 thousand courses.” Orientalism is among the most popular books assigned in the United States, showing up in nearly 4,000 courses in the syllabus database. Said’s work appears in 6,732 courses in U.S. colleges and universities.
But although it was a major source of controversy, both then and now, it is rarely assigned with any of the critics Said sparred with, like Bernard Lewis, Ian Buruma, or Samuel Huntington. Instead, it’s most often taught with books by fellow luminaries of the postmodern left, such as Frantz Fanon and Judith Butler.
All these ideas are now embedded into diversity, equity, and inclusion identity politics, and “humanitarian” outrage over supposed Israeli “settler-colonialism,” “genocide,” and “apartheid.”
The ground for the massive pro-Hamas college and university encampments, and attacks on Jewish students, was prepared decades ago. The long march of progressives through American institutions over the past decades has taken its toll on society.
Henry Srebrnik is a professor of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island.
Features
Exchange Rate Factors: What Global Events Mean for Savvy Investors
When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, it created ripples in all financial markets, including currency markets. The Euro weakened while the dollar surged and emerging market currencies wobbled. Global factors can quickly affect financial markets and shake established trends. Apart from such rare events, currencies tend to change their price because of interest rates, inflation, and overall investor confidence. For investors managing money abroad, understanding these movements is critical to avoid losses and mitigate risks.
Below, we will break down how global political, economic, and cultural events influence exchange rates, with insights for savvy investors.
Economic factors
There are several key exchange rate factors with a consistent history of shaking financial markets. These factors include inflation, interest rates, trade balances, employment rates, and so on. Since economic factors are shaping markets almost daily, we start with those.
Inflation and interest rates
Inflation and interest rates are closely connected as one can easily affect the other. When inflation rises, central banks step in and raise interest rates to reduce inflation, and when inflation is lower, central banks can lower interest rates to make borrowing money cheaper. As a result, investors closely monitor these two metrics to anticipate changes in interest rates. Higher inflation makes currencies weaker, and whenever banks change the rates, the changes are immediately reflected in global currency rates. In the United States, the Federal Reserve is the central bank that sets interest rates in the country.
Trade balances and economic growth
A country that exports more than it imports has a stronger demand for its currency. More demand equals a stronger currency. However, the Japanese yen was always weaker against the dollar because the BOJ of Japan tends to have super low rates near 0 to support its exporters. Economic growth also increases demand for local currency as more investors try to invest in the country’s economy. Long-term investors often track this data to detect early signs of any changes in currency strength.
Political and geopolitical factors
Elections, sanctions, and overall political stability are also crucial factors. If the country gets under sanctions, its economy crumbles and its currency becomes inflationary, losing its value quickly. Elections are also crucial for a currency’s strength. Geopolitical events can have a serious impact on the currency as well. The most obvious example is the 2016 Brexit events that made GBP lose its value rapidly and violently. Global conflicts, such as wars, can seriously impact global financial assets, especially currency markets. When tensions are high, safe-haven currencies like USD and CHF (Swiss Franc) become very popular among investors as they seek a safe place to protect their capital.
Cultural and social factors
People like tourists, workers, and diaspora communities can shape currencies as well. Tourism usually drives seasonal demand, and countries that are popular destinations during certain seasons experience their currency appreciation as demand spikes. The perception matters as countries seen as safe and opportunity-rich tend to attract more investors, solidifying their currency strength.
Technology and innovation
Technology is seriously affecting everything, especially the financial sector. Digital payment systems, blockchain technology, and fintech startups have made it easy and swift to move money around. Cryptos and stablecoins enable investors to protect their capital using stablecoins during volatile times. The latest trend among banks is to work on CBDCs, which signals a new era where national currencies are blended with technology and blockchain. Despite this, currencies, even in their crypto form, will continue to be influenced by all major factors mentioned above, and knowing how these factors impact your currency is key to keeping your capital safe from risks.
Practical lessons for savvy investors
So, what do all these factors teach us about global currency rates and investing strategies? The key lies in proper preparations and anticipation. Monitoring macro trends, policy announcements, and major geopolitical and political developments is critical.
Diversify
The number one method which is used by professional investors is diversification. This simply means to spread your risks across a basket of assets. By not investing all your capital in one instrument, you can mitigate risks. If one asset experiences a loss, other ones will counter it with returns. Building a diversified portfolio is key to properly diversifying. For example: divide your capital to buy stocks, commodities, currencies, and cryptos so that if one fails to perform, others will counter it. This ensures a stable income without unnecessary losses in the long run.
Hedge
Forex options and ETFs are great hedging assets. Forex options let investors lock in an exchange rate for a future date, which is very useful if you expect volatility but want stability. Currency ETFs, on the other hand, track specific currencies or a basket of currencies and allow easy trading or protection without trading forex directly, but they are still risky.
Monitor the economic calendar
Economic calendar is a free online tool that aggregates important macroeconomic news data such as interest rate decisions, CPI, inflation, employment rates, central bank announcements and speeches, and other crucial information. By monitoring them, investors can always know when important news data will be released, and they can postpone their investment decisions to avoid volatile times and only invest after the main trend is determined.