Features
Yvonne Singer, a Toronto artist who was saved by Wallenberg as an infant, is still on a voyage of self-discovery
By RON CSILLAG
As an artist herself, Yvonne Singer can well appreciate the esthetic merits of the open-air monument to Swedish Second World War hero Raoul Wallenberg that was unveiled over the summer at Churchill Park in Hamilton, Ont.
Though she had not, as of this writing, personally viewed the installation, dubbed “Be:longings,” Singer spoke admiringly of the 10 bronze-cast suitcases dispersed along a gravel path adjacent to the Hamilton aviary. She knows Simon Frank, one of the project’s three creators, and is aware that suitcases have been a potent symbol of the Holocaust.
“I like the fact that the suitcases are scattered,” Singer, a well-established visual artist and teacher in Toronto, said in an interview over lemon tea in her sun-drenched kitchen. “I think the imagery and symbolism are very effective in conveying the idea of displacement and emigration.” The old-timey valises evoke not just Wallenberg, Singer noted, but all victims and survivors of that terror-stricken era.
The outdoor project is also “minimal, which I like. I don’t like public sculptures that scream at you or are clichéd.”
Singer connects to the installation on a whole other level. The 78-year-old resident of Toronto’s Cabbagetown neighbourhood is Wallenberg’s goddaughter. She was born on his bed.
It’s a Hollywood-worthy tale that evolved over time, in a series of eye-popping twists, turns and coincidences—all amid Singer’s own personal voyage of self-discovery.
The backstory is its own blockbuster: The non-Jewish scion of a wealthy Swedish industrial and banking family, Wallenberg, then just 32, was recruited by the U.S. War Refugee Board and dispatched to Budapest to assist and rescue as many Jews in the Nazi-occupied Hungarian capital as possible. He arrived in July 1944, just as the Nazis had shipped some 440,000 Jews from the countryside to Auschwitz. They now set their sights on the Jews of Budapest.
Accorded diplomatic status, Wallenberg famously set off on a frenetic pace. He designed, printed and distributed thousands of the famous “Schutzpass”—an official-looking document that placed the holder under the protection of the neutral Swedish Crown. He also scoured the city for buildings to rent, finding 32, and crammed in as many souls as possible. The “safe houses” flew the yellow-and-blue Swedish flag and were declared protected by diplomatic immunity.
Known for his bluster and bravado, his greatest coup came when he persuaded Nazi commanders to call off the liquidation of Budapest’s Jewish ghetto, with its 70,000 inhabitants. The number of Jews Wallenberg is said to have rescued peaks at 100,000. In any event, he is credited with saving more Jewish lives during the war than any single government.
By January 1945, the Red Army was laying siege to Budapest, and Wallenberg was taken into custody, supposedly on suspicion of being a U.S. spy. He promptly vanished into the gulag. A Soviet report in 1956 stated he had died in July 1947 of a heart attack in Moscow’s notorious Lubyanka prison, but supposed eyewitness sightings and stories of contact with him from former inmates continued well into the 1970s.
In 2012, the diaries of a former head of the KGB, discovered in the walls of his Moscow home, stated there was “no doubt” that Wallenberg was “liquidated” in 1947.
But back to Singer.
On the night of Nov. 3, 1944, a desperate Tibor Vandor, who worked for Wallenberg as a courier and liaison to the underground, needed help for his wife, Agnes. She was in labour and had been turned away from Budapest’s hospitals, which barred Jews. Wallenberg allowed the couple to use his own room, while he slept in the corridor.
The next morning, he was called in to see a newborn girl. Asked by the grateful parents to name her, Wallenberg chose Nina Maria Ava (Nina was his half-sister’s name, Maria his mother’s). The couple changed the first name to Yvonne, and Wallenberg agreed to be the child’s godfather.
Singer knew nothing of this until she was 34 years old.
It was October 1979 when she read an article, reprinted from a U.S. newspaper, in the Toronto Star about Wallenberg’s plight. The story included a reference to Singer’s unusual birth taken from a Hungarian book on the Swedish hero written after the war. The baby with the Toronto connection, the parents, the godfather—were all there, mentioned by name.
When she read the piece, “I burst out crying,” she told the Star after contacting the paper. Her story spilled forth a week later in a large Saturday Star article headlined “Swedish hero saved my life: Metro woman.”
Singer is still struck by “the incredible coincidence of it all. Here I am in Toronto in 1979, reading the paper… it boggles the mind. I could have easily gone through life not knowing the story. Suddenly, I had a connection to this man, who sounds like he was fascinating.”
Her parents had not told her the story. And there was another missing piece of the puzzle: their Jewishness.
At war’s end, the Vandors went to Switzerland and Holland before settling in Montreal in 1949, where the parents shed their Jewish identities, doubtless seeking to forget. Tibor Vandor even became an elder in the United Church.
“I always pressed them for more information, and they always refused,” even following the revelations in the Toronto Star, Singer recalled. “They told me very, very little.” Her parents never revealed being Jews. Their silence encompassed “anything to do with the war. They were just not forthcoming.”
Singer graduated from McGill University and went on to teach English and French at local high schools. She converted to Judaism to marry her husband, Ron Singer, a theatre director and educator, in 1966. A few years later, a cousin in England recalled being a flower-girl at Yvonne’s parents’ wedding, which she said took place in a synagogue. The parents denied it but their daughter believed it.
Singer’s feelings of alienation as an immigrant child would evaporate on discovering that she had been born Jewish, whether the knowledge came from a cousin or the Toronto Star. “I felt like I’d come home, part of a history that goes back thousands of years. I no longer felt rootless.”
The Singers moved to Toronto in 1971, where Yvonne later began a prolific art career in various media and teaching visual arts at York University. Raising three daughters and a busy life meant there was little time to get involved in the Wallenberg file (though she was pleased when he became Canada’s first Honorary Citizen in 1985 and when Canada Post issued a stamp commemorating Wallenberg a decade ago).
It’s little surprise that Singer’s art has explored themes of identity, history and memory. The outsider status she felt in her early life “is what made me think about ways of expressing that, either through language or visual imagery. So you go to what you know when you’re an artist.”
In 2016, the Swedish government declared Wallenberg officially dead, but to Singer, that offered no finality. “From what I learned, the Swedish government is not exempt from blame for trying to get Wallenberg out. I cannot reconcile the fact that [Wallenberg’s family] could not exert any kind of leverage over the Russians to find out what happened to him.”
In Judaism, being a godparent carries little or no religious obligation. Singer considers the godfather connection to Wallenberg an honour, “but I’m also very sad that I never met him. I think he would have been a fascinating person to talk to. The story is just very, very tragic.”
The grandmother of nine sighed. Over the decades, the story for her was obviously very personal, “and I was still processing it. Maybe I’m still processing it, for a long, long time.”
A version of this article originally appeared in the Hamilton Jewish News. It is reprinted with the author’s permission.
Features
Is This the End of Jewish Life in Western Countries?
By HENRY SREBRNIK “Globalize the Intifada” has been the chant echoing through streets since October 7th, 2023. It was never a metaphor, and we now see the gruesome results across the western world, from Australia to Canada: the rise of groups of large, active networks of Islamist and anti-Zionist organizations.
Jews in the West are discovering that the nations they defended, enriched, and profoundly shaped have become increasingly inhospitable. After the Holocaust, explicit Jew-hatred became unfashionable in polite society, but the impulse never disappeared. The workaround was simple: separate Zionism from Judaism in name, then recycle every old anti-Jewish trope and pin it on “the Zionists.”
We have seen the full legitimization of genocidal anti-Zionism and its enthusiastic adoption by large segments of the public. The protests themselves, as they began immediately on October 7th, were celebrations of the Hamas massacres. The encampments, the building occupations, the harassment campaigns against Jewish students, the open calls for intifada, the attacks on Jews and Jewish places have become our new norm. History shows us that antisemitism does not respond to reason, incentive or the honest appeals of the Jewish community.
Outside the United States, there is no Western political establishment with either the will or the capability to address this problem, let alone reverse its growth. I’m sorry to say this, but the future of Western Europe, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand is likely to be increasingly Jew-free.
Today, police stand and watch mobs chant for Israel’s destruction, call for the genocide of its people, harass visibly Jewish citizens, and drive antisemitic intimidation deep into urban life. They now believe their job is to enforce the law only if it does not risk upsetting violent constituencies. This makes Jews expendable, because defending them risks confrontation. This was very clear in the Bondi Beach massacre.
Jews are again donning caps instead of kippot, dressing generically with no cultural markers, and avoiding even a tote bag with Hebrew on it. A corrosive creep toward informal segregation in retail and service sectors is occurring, as Jewish customers report being refused service. A mezuzah hanging from a rideshare mirror leads to cancellations. When Jews express frustration, they are accused of exaggeration or attempting to suppress criticism of Israel. Jewish fear is not treated as a real problem.
“Jews Are Being Sent Back into Hiding,” the title of a Dec. 15 article in the New York Free Press by David Wolpe and Deborah Lipstadt, asserts that the attacks on Jews, including physical assaults, social media campaigns and, most tragically, the recent murders in Australia, are part of a purposive campaign designed to make Jews think twice about gathering with other Jews, entering a synagogue, going to kosher restaurants, putting a mezuzah on the doorpost of their apartments or dorm rooms, or wearing a Jewish star around their necks.
“We know of no one who would consider giving a niece, nephew, grandchild, or young friend a Jewish star without first asking permission of their parents,” they write. The unspoken, and sometimes spoken, question is: “Might wearing a star endanger your child’s well-being?”
Recently, a prominent American rabbi was entering a Target store in Chicago with her grandson, whom she had picked up from his Jewish day school. As they walked into the store the 10-year-old reached up and automatically took off his kippah and put it in his pocket. Seeing his grandmother’s quizzical look, he explained: “Mommy wants me to do that.”
Borrowing a phrase from another form of bigotry, they contend that Jews are going “back into the closet.” No public celebration of Hanukkah took place in 2025 without a significant police presence. Some people chose to stay home.
Lipstadt and Wolpe know whereof they speak. They are respectively a professor of history and Holocaust studies who served as the Biden administration’s ambassador tasked with combating antisemitism, the other a rabbi who travels to Jewish communities throughout the world, and who served on Harvard’s antisemitism task force in the aftermath of the October 7, 2023 pogrom.
What the world has seen over the past two years is a continual, often systematic attempt to terrorize Jews. When political leaders fail to condemn rather than merely “discourage” chants of “globalize the intifada,” we are seeding the ground for massacres like the Hannukah one in Sydney.
If each Jewish holiday will now be seen by antisemites as an opportunity for terror, then the prognosis for diaspora Jewry is bleak. There will be fewer public events, more alarms, more bag checks at doors; there will have to be more security and more police. Unless things change, Jewish life in the diaspora will become more sealed off from the larger society.
Why has this failure come about? Confronting antisemitism, stopping the mobs, challenging the activists, and disciplining antisemitic bureaucrats all carry electoral risk for politicians; Jews are demographically irrelevant, especially compared with Muslim voters, with the U.S. being the only partial exception.
There are those who suggest Jews stop donating funds to educational and other institutions that have turned against us. At this point, I doubt very much that withdrawing dollars will have an impact. For every dollar withdrawn, there will be 100 from Qatar and other sources in its place.
Throughout history, the way a society treats its Jews predicts its future with unerring accuracy. If Jews leave, it will be because a civilization that will not defend its Jews will also defend next to nothing and may itself not survive.
Henry Srebrnik is a professor of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island
Features
Canadian Travel Trends 2025 and the Forecast for 2026
Canadians planning to travel in 2026 should keep an eye on shifting trends and learn what’s coming their way in the new year.
Canadian travel has seen a fair amount of change and instability over the last few years, thanks mostly to the country’s southern neighbours. In 2025, and likely into 2026, travel trends in the Great White North have stabilized significantly, with more Canadians than ever choosing to travel within their own borders. And with 2026 nipping at our heels, let’s take a look at what trends in 2025 have been the most prevalent and how these will shape travellers’ decisions and travel plans in the new year.
Canadian Travel in 2025
Thanks to many factors, including politics, inflation, and airline competition, the majority of travellers opted to explore their own country rather than go abroad in 2025. More local travel money is remaining within the local economy, further bolstering it and making it an even more attractive travel choice. Thanks to the accessibility of private jet charter travel across Canada, luxury local travel has increased as well, with more people looking to immerse themselves in luxury from the start of their journey to the end. When travelling abroad, the U.S. is now the least favoured destination for most Canadian travellers, but Europe saw a significant increase in interest as 2025 progressed.
As local Canadian travel increased this year, it brought with it a drive for local tourists to find their own “Secret Canada” destinations. Far more “off the beaten path” trips were taken, resulting in more travel spending going to smaller or more boutique destinations rather than big city experiences. In 2025, travellers have sought out the wonderful diversity in destinations and landscapes, allowing themselves to access more grounded and authentically Canadian experiences.
Canada’s Government has also encouraged and benefited from local tourism, with initiatives like the Canada Strong Pass offering extra benefits. Initially implemented in the summer, but reintroduced from December 12, 2025, until January 15, 2026, this is a ticket to enjoying the richness of their own culture (iconic natural destinations, museums, train trips) at a discounted rate or even in some cases free of charge.
In the second quarter of 2025, locals took a total of 90.6 million trips that included at least some time spent travelling domestically, which indicated a rise of 10.9% on a year-over-year basis. Of these trips, 58.6 million were day trip experiences (an increase of 12.4%), and 32.0 million were overnight trips or longer (an increase of 8.4%).
Between April and June of this year, Canadian residents spent $20.3 billion on local tourism, which represented a 13.5% year-over-year increase. When undertaking day trips, Canadians spent approximately $101 per visit. On overnight trips, locals spent around $449 per trip, with an average trip length of 2.6 nights. The Great White North is clearly holding its own, and then some, in the international travel market.
Canadian Travel in 2026
As we move towards 2026, many trends from 2025 will remain the standard, but some will evolve to fit changing demands. Across the board, though, the outlook for the coming year is that Canadian travel will become a far more personal thing, with trips being customized to fit travellers’ requirements and desires more closely than ever before. From choosing a hotel that they feel smacks of a beloved destination in their favourite novel, to taking a trip to a destination just to try a snack that’s famously made there and only there, travel is stretching and shifting for the traveller rather than the other way around.
Here are some slightly more specific predictions for the coming year based on the answers of polled Canadians.
- One Gen Z-led trend is the idea of “glowmad travel”. Beauty and skincare are now influencing the places that Gen Z travels, and their trips are far more likely to include visits to skincare and beauty destinations like spas and luxury stores.
- Gen Z adults are helping to drive another trend: family travel as a way to save money. 345 of Gen Z adults polled say that they would take this route.
- More than 70% of Canadians are considering some sort of mountainous getaway in 2026, specifically in summer or autumn.
- 48% of polled Canadians say they would book or consider a destination thanks to the influence of literature.
- More travellers than ever are choosing their destinations based on the accommodations available. 44% of polled travellers say that in 2026, accommodation and what it can offer comes first, and the surrounding destination comes second.
The World Is Your Nova Scotia Lobster Roll
Choose something a little different when you vacation this year. Oysters are great, but a Nova Scotia lobster roll might be more to your taste! Canadians know good travel, so take a maple leaf out of their book and experience something new this year.
Features
Fake IDs and Underage Bettors: The Growing Problem for Sportsbooks
The expansion of legalized sports betting worldwide has resulted in sportsbooks grappling with a problem that they can no longer overlook: the increase in underage individuals using counterfeit identification to place bets. As more and more ways to bet through mobile apps and online sign-ups emerge, minors who are set on their goal are inventing ways to get around age limits. The emergence of this trend is a breach of the law and morality; however, it is also an enormous problem that threatens the very existence of the platforms, which are forced to rigorously obey the regulations .
Why Fake IDs Are Becoming More Sophisticated
Conventional fakes used to be quite simple to recognize—low-quality printing, different fonts for the text, and inconsistent holograms would make them not very reliable for any kind of verification. But counterfeit documents have changed significantly over time. Nowadays, fakes are made better with the help of printing technology and software, and they can even copy barcodes and other scannable features, so their IDs look almost real.
This fact complicates things significantly for sportsbooks, especially those operating online. Most of the time, automated identity verification systems capture a user’s photo and perform basic data matching. In cases where a very good fake ID is used by a teenager who looks older, some systems cannot recognize the trick. Therefore, young bettors have found ways to be able to place wagers through these loopholes.
The Influence of Social Pressure and Online Culture
Social media is a major factor in the increase in risky behavior that minors are engaging in. On various platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, and Reddit, teenagers come across betting slips, parlay wins, and big-payout screenshots that are shared, most probably, by other users. The glamorization of sports betting is leading young people to copy the behavior of influencers, older friends, or even celebrities, as they think that it is the right thing to do.
The competitiveness usually associated with sports is one of the reasons some minors decide to bet on sports. For many, betting becomes another way to engage as a fan—by predicting outcomes, challenging friends, and experiencing the same excitement that adult fans enjoy. Unfortunately, only a small number of minors fully understand the financial risks involved, making them more vulnerable to developing harmful patterns that could continue into adulthood. This is why choosing the most responsible sportsbook, which you can discover more here, is essential. Such platforms provide guidance, enforce safe practices, and ensure regulated play, allowing fans to engage with sports betting in a more informed, secure, and controlled manner.
Sportsbooks Facing Regulatory Pressure
The sportsbooks are being given the task of more closely monitoring and preventing minors from betting on their platforms. If they fail, harsh penalties are possible, including severe fines, loss of a gambling license, and negative publicity that undermines a brand’s trustworthiness. As a result, it is becoming increasingly difficult for people to verify their identities, although this also inconveniences those who are, in fact, legitimate users.
Sportsbooks have to decide between two options that are in conflict with each other: on the one hand, they have to keep the registration process as simple as possible, and on the other hand, they have to carry out age verification in a very thorough manner. The work of balancing is tough, and the underage gamblers are trying all methods to find a way out.
The Rise of Identity Fraud Services
An alarming trend is the emergence of online vendors who openly advertise fake IDs and identity documents. These vendors often claim their products can pass standard sportsbook checks. Some even tailor IDs to specific regions, knowing that certain provinces, states, or countries use verification systems that rely heavily on image comparison rather than live validation.
The availability of these fraudulent services not only empowers minors but also exposes sportsbooks to risks related to stolen identities, money laundering flags, and fraudulent accounts that may later become legal liabilities.
The Consequences for Underage Bettors
While a minor might think that gambling is just a bit of fun without any harm, the outcome can be quite serious. If there is a catching, accounts are closed right away, winnings are confiscated, and parents or guardians, in some cases, are made legally liable for any financial disagreements. Besides that, the risk of developing a gambling problem in the future increases with early exposure to gambling, especially since teenagers are more impulsive and less capable of handling financial risks.
The majority of minors are not aware that sportsbooks keep very detailed records of their activities, including device information and IP addresses. In case a fake ID works one time, using it multiple times will definitely lead to getting caught.
A Growing Problem That Requires Joint Action
Fake IDs and underage betting are issues that have become a major challenge in the industry, and no single stakeholder can solve these problems on their own. Sportsbooks need to enhance their identity verifications, regulators should get prepared for new types of fraud, technology providers have to come up with new solutions more quickly, and parents should always be aware of what their children are doing online. The industry’s rapid development is making this problem more and more urgent because the number of minors trying to get around the safety measures is increasing.
Sports betting can serve as a fun and legal form of entertainment for adults, but the need to protect the youth is what defines the industry and ensures its survival in the long run. As the quality of fake IDs keeps improving and the online culture is more and more inclined to consider betting as a normal activity, sportsbooks must ensure that underage users do not have access and that the environment is safe for all users. They need to do this now more than ever.