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In recent months, the small nation of Azerbaijan has been making a big push to show off their Jews. The leader of the local Jewish community, Rabbi Zamir Isayev, has gone around the world promoting Azerbaijani-Jewish life, making his pitch to Canadians during a visit in November 2022. Here at The CJN, we've received numerous pitches and press opportunities to go on free trips to visit the country's "Mountain Jews". (We haven't taken them up on any.)
There may be grander geopolitical logic behind all this. Sandwiched in the mountainous Caucasus region between Russia and Iran, the dominantly Muslim country has emerged as an important strategic ally for Israel, who threw its support behind Azerbaijan in the last decade during Azerbaijan's ongoing conflict with Armenia. The culmination of all this has been Azerbaijan opening its first embassy in Tel Aviv in late March 2023.
To get a clearer picture about why Azerbaijan is making this push, and to understand the on-the-ground human element underscoring these international trends, we're joined by Rabbi Isayev in Baku, who paints a very glowing picture of Jewish life in his home country.
Credits
Yehupetzville is hosted by Ralph Benmergui. Michael Fraiman is the producer and editor. Our music was arranged by Louis Simão and performed by Louis Simão and Jacob Gorzhaltsan. Our sponsor is PearTree Canada, which you can learn more about at peartreecanada.com. This show is a member of The CJN Podcast Network. Support the show by subscribing to this podcast or donating to The CJN.
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Ralph Benmergui has been hosting Yehupetzville, The CJN's podcast about small-town Jewish life in Canada and around the world, since its debut on Mar. 17, 2021. Since then, we've virtually visited Jews from Glace Bay to North Bay, Jamaica to Jasper, Little Rock to Lethbridge and beyond.
To mark the second anniversary of his successful show, we decided not to look outward, but to turn home—and home, for Ralph, is Hamilton, Ont.
Hamilton is not a small city, nor is its community of 5,000 Jews unimpressive. But its makeup is changing. The long-overlooked industrial city is now exploding with new developments, condos and gentrification, expanding with Toronto expats and new immigrants attracted by a vibrant urban life and (relatively) affordable housing. Local Jewish organizations have been trying to capitalize on this opportunity for years now, and the results speak to how the face of the city is evolving.
On today's episode of Yehupetzville, Ralph sits down with two community leaders who've been at the forefront of Hamilton's transition: Gustavo Rymberg is the CEO of the Hamilton Jewish Federation, and Laura Wolfson leads the Federation's "Welcome Home Hamilton" initiative, which helps newcomers transition smoothly into the city.
Credits
Yehupetzville is hosted by Ralph Benmergui. Michael Fraiman is the producer and editor. Our music was arranged by Louis Simão and performed by Louis Simão and Jacob Gorzhaltsan. Our sponsor is PearTree Canada, which you can learn more about at peartreecanada.com. This show is a member of The CJN Podcast Network. Support the show by subscribing to this podcast or donating to The CJN.
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Oklahoma is know for lots of things—country music, Native American history, tornadoes, Black Wall Street—none of which are particularly Jewish. But if you look into Tulsa, a thriving city of 400,000 people, you'll find a vibrant surge of new developments, incredible infrastructure and an active community of 2,600 Jews. Thanks to its numerous synagogues and organizations like Tulsa Tomorrow, the city is a surprising hotbed of Jewish life.
Rabbi Lillian Kowalski joins to discuss the years she spent in Tulsa during the pandemic, what life is like for a nomadic rabbi, and how she's finding her transition north of the border to Montreal.
Credits
Yehupetzville is hosted by Ralph Benmergui. Michael Fraiman is the producer and editor. Our music was arranged by Louis Simão and performed by Louis Simão and Jacob Gorzhaltsan. Our sponsor is PearTree Canada, which you can learn more about at peartreecanada.com. This show is a member of The CJN Podcast Network. Support the show by subscribing to this podcast or donating to The CJN.
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Kingston's Jewish community is unique in Canada, doubling in size—from approximately 1,500 year-round to 3,000—with the influx of students studying at Queen's University each year. The result is a stable patchwork. The main synagogue transitioned from Orthodox to conservative; the Reform synagogue has no building; Chabad and Hillel dominate the campus space. Meanwhile, Jewish South Africans and Israelis have moved there in droves, finding jobs around the university, an affordable cost of living and burgeoning immigrant communities.
With so much transience, what's the roadmap for growth? How do you create a stable sense of identity when half the Jewish population leaves every four years? Who chooses to stay—and why? Ralph Benmergui is joined by Richard Kizell, a lifelong Kingstonian, to learn more about this one-of-a-kind community sitting at the mouth of the St. Lawrence River.
Credits
Yehupetzville is hosted by Ralph Benmergui. Michael Fraiman is the producer and editor. Our music was arranged by Louis Simão and performed by Louis Simão and Jacob Gorzhaltsan. Our sponsor is PearTree Canada, which you can learn more about at peartreecanada.com. This show is a member of The CJN Podcast Network. To learn how to support the show by subscribing to this podcast, watch this video.
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When Heidi Coleman moved to Kamloops from Montreal in 2012, she had to deliberately seek out its Jewish members—asking around, searching for information that was not widely available. Once she found them, however, they welcomed her warmly... and then quickly asked her to become their president.
A charismatic natural leader who is the CEO of the Royal Inland Hospital Foundation, Coleman has remained the community's president ever since, mostly because, as she says, nobody else wants to do the job. On this episode of Yehupetzville, Coleman joins to describe the beauty of their faraway Jewish enclave, the struggle of being more visible for newcomers, and how Kamloops Jews interact with their neighbours—including the Indigenous Canadians who infamously stood at ground zero of the unearthed mass graves sitting under residential schools.
Credits
Yehupetzville is hosted by Ralph Benmergui. Michael Fraiman is the producer and editor. Our music was arranged by Louis Simão and performed by Louis Simão and Jacob Gorzhaltsan. Our sponsor is PearTree Canada, which you can learn more about at peartreecanada.com. This show is a member of The CJN Podcast Network. To learn how to support the show by subscribing to this podcast, watch this video.
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Canadian-born Rabbi Mark Biller has moved around a lot. But his latest adventure has taken him on his biggest leap so far: in the fall of 2021, he headed south to become the rabbi of Agudath Achim, one of a few synagogues in Arkansas, a state home to just 2,500 Jews. The community is so tight-knit that part of his job interview process was sitting down with rabbis from the local Chabad and Reform congregations for an hour to make sure they'd get along. (They did.)
In this episode of Yehupetzville, The CJN's podcast about Jews in small communities, Biller describes what he's found as striking similarities between Southerners and Canadians—politeness reigns supreme—and how local Jews interact with the overhwelming Christian majority.
Credits
Yehupetzville is hosted by Ralph Benmergui. Michael Fraiman is the producer and editor. Our music was arranged by Louis Simão and performed by Louis Simão and Jacob Gorzhaltsan. Our sponsor is PearTree Canada, which you can learn more about at peartreecanada.com. This show is a member of The CJN Podcast Network. To learn how to support the show by subscribing to this podcast, watch this video.
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When Hadas Brajtman moved from Tel Aviv to Picton, Ont., she knew it would be challenging. But she didn't realize quite how difficult it would be. With no family or organized Jewish community to fall back on, she decided to try and make something happen herself, putting a call out to locals to join her family in their backyard for a sunny Shavuot celebration.
She expected a few people would show up—and then 50 did, mostly local Jews.
That kicked off Brajtman's new identity as a focal point of Jewish life in Prince Edward County, where the only Israelis are tourists and nearby Belleville has been struggling to keep its synagogue open during the High Holidays. With an influx of young families fleeing Toronto housing prices and a beautiful wine-country setting, Picton is one of the rare small Canadian Jewish communities that's on the rise—and doing things their own way.
Credits
Yehupetzville is hosted by Ralph Benmergui. Michael Fraiman is the producer and editor. Our music was arranged by Louis Simão and performed by Louis Simão and Jacob Gorzhaltsan. Our sponsor is PearTree Canada, which you can learn more about at peartreecanada.com. This show is a member of The CJN Podcast Network. To learn how to support the show by subscribing to this podcast, watch this video.
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Baltimore is more than 16,000 km away from Hobart, the biggest city on the Australian island of Tasmania. It's quite a distance—and one happily travelled by Jeff Schneider, the current president of the Hobart Hebrew Congregation, Australia's oldest synagogue.
But if you'd told a young Schneider he'd one day be president of a synagogue in Tasmania, he wouldn't have believed you. While the former penal colony island is now a pleasant home to more than half a million people, just 376 of them are Jewish, down from the community's peak of 454 in the 1850s. As Schneider learned when he moved to Tasmania and began raising a young family, the island's Jews feel obligated to practice their faith, continue their traditions and share their stories—which Schneider does here on today's episode of Yehupetzville.
Credits
Yehupetzville is hosted by Ralph Benmergui. Michael Fraiman is the producer and editor. Our music was arranged by Louis Simão and performed by Louis Simão and Jacob Gorzhaltsan. Our sponsor is PearTree Canada, which you can learn more about at peartreecanada.com. This show is a member of The CJN Podcast Network. To learn how to support the show by subscribing to this podcast, watch this video.
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Mark Abraham comes from a long line of Jewish community leaders in Windsor, Ont. His grandfather, a Holocaust survivor, arrived in 1953, simultaneous to a great population boom migrating to the area for jobs in the auto industry; Mark's father became deeply involved in the local Congregation Shaar Hashomayim, acting as president and sitting on its board of directors; and his mother was president of her B'nai Brith Youth Organization chapter, among taking other roles over the years.
While past generations inform Mark of his responsibilities to the community, he's more focused on the future: specifically, getting more Jews in his native city. The Jewish population has stayed stagnant at 1,500 people for years now, but with housing prices skyrocketing elsewhere in the country—and remaining relatively affordable in Windsor—the border city faces a unique opportunity to pitch an affordable lifestyle for young families and retirees looking to flee the Greater Toronto Area.
Mark Abraham shares his family's story and explains his community's situation on this week's episode of Yehupetzville, The CJN's podcast about Jews living in small communities across Canada and the world.
Credits
Yehupetzville is hosted by Ralph Benmergui. Michael Fraiman is the producer and editor. Our music was arranged by Louis Simão and performed by Louis Simão and Jacob Gorzhaltsan. Our sponsor is PearTree Canada, which you can learn more about at peartreecanada.com. This show is a member of The CJN Podcast Network. To learn how to support the show by subscribing to this podcast, watch this video.
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Built in 1937, Niagara Falls' only synagogue—Congregation B'nai Jacob, later renamed B’nai Tikvah—has stood dormant in recent years. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the congregants agreed to sell the building to a nearby developer, who plans to tear it down to build hotels in the near future.
But the spirit of the community is not entirely lost. Despite the shul's numbered days, its stained glass windows, installed during a renovation in the 1970s, will be relocated to a nearby cemetery as part of its Holocaust memorial. It may not attract many of the 13 million tourists who visit the Niagara Region every year, but it will remind locals, and the city's remaining Jewish population, of what stood before.
In the meantime, the community still has work to do—services, gatherings, community outreach for which they don't need a physical structure. Bob Muller, head of the congregation, joins Ralph Benmergui to share his city's story on Yehupetzville, our podcast highlighting Jews in small communities around Canada and the world.
Credits
Yehupetzville is hosted by Ralph Benmergui. Michael Fraiman is the producer and editor. Our music was arranged by Louis Simão and performed by Louis Simão and Jacob Gorzhaltsan. Our sponsor is PearTree Canada, which you can learn more about at peartreecanada.com. This show is a member of The CJN Podcast Network. To learn how to support the show by subscribing to this podcast, watch this video.
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Over the past generation, the Jewish community of Quebec City has been decimated—first by the Quebec Referendum, slowly by an outward migration of young people, and finally by COVID-19, which coincided with a loss of funds to keep any paid staff. The outlook for the couple dozen active remaining Jews looked grim.
Debbie Rootman wouldn't accept that. She moved there in September 2019, and swiftly took it upon herself to revitalize the newsletter, organize events and galvanize community members as best she could. After facing extreme challenges in the last two years, Rootman felt so inspired by a recent episode of Yehupetzville that she reached out to share her own story—and share the proud, centuries-old Jewish history of her adoptive home city.
Credits
Yehupetzville is hosted by Ralph Benmergui. Michael Fraiman is the producer and editor. Our music was arranged by Louis Simão and performed by Louis Simão and Jacob Gorzhaltsan. Our sponsor is PearTree Canada, which you can learn more about at peartreecanada.com. This show is a member of The CJN Podcast Network. To learn how to support the show by subscribing to this podcast, watch this video.
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Across North America, Jews are increasingly migrating to large urban centres, abandoning smaller towns for more opportunities and a more convenient Jewish life. One rabbi is on a mission to change that.
As a student at the Jewish Theological Seminary, Rabbi Rachel Isaacs was assigned to a one-year stint in Waterville, Maine, with one small synagogue and a handful of Hillel students at a local liberal arts college. She quickly realized that the disparate, dwindling community had a chance at surviving through innovative thinking and consolidation: bring together the students and older families to make a minyan, get Hillel kids going to local homes for Shabbat, and foster a cross-generational, non-denominational community that would inspire younger Jews to get engaged.
Today, Rabbi Isaacs is the head of the Center for Small Town Jewish Life, a university program that runs events and brings together Jews from across the Pine Tree State. She's now expanding the concept to cities across the United States, from Honolulu to Lexington. Her pitch: if you believe Judaism is not a privilege to be enjoyed exclusively by those living in the densest cities in the country, the impetus is on you to help redistribute wealth and opportunity.
Rabbi Isaacs joins Yehupetzville to share her story, describe her project and explain why small-town Jews are so often primed to become community leaders.
Credits
Yehupetzville is hosted by Ralph Benmergui. Michael Fraiman is the producer and editor. Our music was arranged by Louis Simão and performed by Louis Simão and Jacob Gorzhaltsan. Our sponsor is PearTree Canada, which you can learn more about at peartreecanada.com. This show is a member of The CJN Podcast Network. To learn how to support the show by subscribing to this podcast, watch this video.
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If you've heard of Sioux Lookout, a largely First Nations town of fewer than 6,000 people in Northern Ontario, you probably wouldn't expect it to be home to any number of Jews. The rural community, nestled between clear blue lakes and verdant forests, is an attractive summer getaway—but living there full-time can be difficult.
It's that much harder to practice medicine there, with little support or infrastructure, travelling north to fly-in First Nations communities with sometimes no resident physician of their own. But these are the challenges that attract a certain kind of doctor—and, as it happens, several of them are Jewish.
After Benji Goldstein, an Israeli-born doctor, became perhaps the town's first practising Jew, Ben Langer moved next door, on a mission to help underserved communities as a rural family doctor. Together, and with a few other Jews in the area, they began baking challah, celebrating Shabbat and building an ice hanukkiah every winter, becoming an unexpected focal point of Jewish life. Both men join Yehupetzville to chat about the risks and rewards of making a life so far from home.
Credits
Yehupetzville is hosted by Ralph Benmergui. Michael Fraiman is the producer and editor. Our music was arranged by Louis Simão and performed by Louis Simão and Jacob Gorzhaltsan. Our sponsor is PearTree Canada, which you can learn more about at peartreecanada.com. This show is a member of The CJN Podcast Network. To learn how to support the show by subscribing to this podcast, watch this video.
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Despite Jews living on the island of Jamaica for more than 200 years, the Caribbean island isn't a logical hotspot for Jewish life. Yet Jewish life has thrived over the years. One man at the centre has been Ainsley Henriques, a longtime leader of Jamaica's Jewish community—he's worn many hats, including as the Honorary Consul of Israel in Jamaica, and met with many important figure, including Louis Farrakhan, whom he once took to a Shabbat service at the synagogue in Kingston.
To share that story and others, Henriques joins to discuss Jewry in Jamaica, the future outlook and the Jewish origins of Jamaica's tradition of "Saturday soup".
Credits
Yehupetzville is hosted by Ralph Benmergui. Michael Fraiman is the producer and editor. Our music was arranged by Louis Simão and performed by Louis Simão and Jacob Gorzhaltsan. Our sponsor is PearTree Canada, which you can learn more about at peartreecanada.com. This show is a member of The CJN Podcast Network. To learn how to support the show by subscribing to this podcast, watch this video.
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Simon Kreindler was born in Barbados, where he lived until he graduated high school. After that, it was off to Canada—he left behind the Caribbean island's few dozen Jewish families and studied medicine at McGill University. But decades later, in 2013, he felt an urge to revisit memories of his old home and his family's settlement there.
He began researching his parents' journey from Europe to Barbados, and reached out to acquaintances who shared their own family histories. Kreindler stitched these tales together into a self-published book, Peddlers All: Stories of the First Ashkenazi Jewish Settlers in Barbados, released in 2017.
Kreindler joins to discuss his research, what's left of Barbados's community and what it was like growing up Jewish under the Caribbean sun. Credits
Yehupetzville is hosted by Ralph Benmergui. Michael Fraiman is the producer and editor. Our music was arranged by Louis Simão and performed by Louis Simão and Jacob Gorzhaltsan. Our sponsor is PearTree Canada, which you can learn more about at peartreecanada.com. This show is a member of The CJN Podcast Network. To learn how to support the show by subscribing to this podcast, watch this video.
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In big cities, Jews have large organizations that can advocate on their behalf. In small towns, it's the locals themselves that need to step up. That's what happened when antisemitic incidents were recently revealed to have happened at a school in Stratford, Ont.—just one of a rash of similar incidents in Ontario schools this year.
After Carrie Wreford heard about Hitler salutes and inflammatory videos at her son's school, she wasn't satisfied by the school's reaction, which focused on this specific incident—but didn't get at the root of the problem. So she initiated class tours of a local Holocaust museum exhibit on loan from the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, which she hopes will educate local kids about the dangers of hatred and bigotry against all people, not just Jews.
Wreford shares her story, and describes life as one of the few Jews in Stratford, with Ralph Benmergui on Yehupetzville, The CJN's podcast about Jews in small-town Canada and beyond.
Credits
Yehupetzville is hosted by Ralph Benmergui. Michael Fraiman is the producer and editor. Our music was arranged by Louis Simão and performed by Louis Simão and Jacob Gorzhaltsan. Our sponsor is PearTree Canada, which you can learn more about at peartreecanada.com. This show is a member of The CJN Podcast Network. To learn how to support the show by subscribing to this podcast, watch this video.
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Sheina Lerman has moved around a lot in life, but never has she wanted to live in a big city. After moving to Newfoundland some years ago, during the pandemic, she decided to settle in Deer Lake, a town of 5,000 people—perhaps none of them Jews. She found a nice house across from a sandy beach. Life, for the most part, is quiet.
Except when it isn't. Like in 2021, when she decided to stand for the provincial New Democratic Party in the Liberal stronghold that was home to former premier Dwight Ball, who handed it over to his successor, Andrew Furey. Furey won with 2,838 votes; Lerman came in third with 107. But when you're a come-from-away Jew in small-town Newfoundland, you're no stranger to being the odd person out in a crowd.
Lerman sits down with Yehupetzville host Ralph Benmergui to chat about why she chose this quaint and coastal life, and why she believes more Jews need to leave urban centres and make their presence known across the country.
Credits
Yehupetzville is hosted by Ralph Benmergui. Michael Fraiman is the producer and editor. Our music was arranged by Louis Simão and performed by Louis Simão and Jacob Gorzhaltsan. Our sponsor is PearTree Canada, which you can learn more about at peartreecanada.com. This show is a member of The CJN Podcast Network. To learn how to support the show by subscribing to this podcast, watch this video.
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Elena Kingsbury grew up in Maitland, Ont., a small town of about 1,200 people—including just two Jewish families. She would hop across the St. Lawrence River into Ogdensburg, NY, where her family were members of the international Anshe Zophen synagogue, which supported congregants from nearby towns on both sides of the border.
In 2000, Kingsbury would be the last bat mitzvah in the now-closed synagogue. The 9/11 attacks made border crossings too difficult, and a declining population led to the regional exodus of many young locals—including herself. Now an education specialist at the Friends Of Simon Wiesenthal Center For Holocaust Studies in Ottawa, Kingsbury joins to recall her years growing up in the tiny riverside town, and how it shaped her conception of what it means to be Jewish.
Credits
Yehupetzville is hosted by Ralph Benmergui. Michael Fraiman is the producer and editor. Our music was arranged by Louis Simão and performed by Louis Simão and Jacob Gorzhaltsan. Our sponsor is PearTree Canada, which you can learn more about at peartreecanada.com. This show is a member of The CJN Podcast Network. To learn how to support the show by subscribing to this podcast, watch this video.
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Years ago, a small group of Orthodox Jews from Toronto decided to start a new community north of the city. They chose Innisfil, a town south of Barrie; plans began to build news houses, import kosher food and leverage a nearby 80-year-old synagogue, Tent City, that's been enjoyed during summers by beach-seeking vacationing Jews for generations. They called the project "FrumCity".
It never happened. The original plan required at least 90 families to buy in—but too few were willing to take the plunge, and housing prices have only risen since then, prohibiting even more off from entering the real estate market.
A handful of Jews, however, took up the mantle, and one of them joins us today. Joseph Friedberg currently has a house being built in Innisfil and plans to move there later this year. And while he isn't yet backed by a mass migration of community support, he's hopeful that between him and a few others making the move, the dream of a simple, traditional, self-sustaining Orthodox community—more affordable and more enjoyable than renting in the big city—will still come true.
What we talked about
Learn about Tent City Shul at tentcityshul.caRead about the original plans for FrumCity, circa 2016, at thecjn.caCredits
Yehupetzville is hosted by Ralph Benmergui. Michael Fraiman is the producer and editor. Our music was arranged by Louis Simão and performed by Louis Simão and Jacob Gorzhaltsan. Our sponsor is PearTree Canada, which you can learn more about at peartreecanada.com. This show is a member of The CJN Podcast Network. To learn how to support the show by subscribing to this podcast, watch this video.
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When Leah Stoch Spokoiny moved to Girona, halfway between Barcelona and the French border, in the heart of Catalan, she finally felt at home. The smells, food and social norms connected with her immediately, even though she wound up there almost by chance.
The irony in her feeling at home is that she sticks out—not just as a Canadian, but as one of perhaps 50 Jewish residents in the city of 100,000 people. Despite Girona being the hometown of the Ramban, Rabbi Moses ben Nachman, today it has barely any Jews living there, especially in its historic Jewish Quarter. That is, Until Stoch Spokoiny moved in.
Since nailing up perhaps the Jewish Quarter's first mezuzah since 1492, Stoch Spokoiny has joined the board of the city's Jewish community, planning communal events and promoting her people's history in the region. She joins Yehupetzville as the first guest in our second season, which will feature Jews living in small communities beyond Canada's shores, anywhere around the world.
Credits
Yehupetzville is hosted by Ralph Benmergui. Michael Fraiman is the producer and editor. Our music was arranged by Louis Simão and performed by Louis Simão and Jacob Gorzhaltsan. Our sponsor is PearTree Canada, which you can learn more about at peartreecanada.com. This show is a member of The CJN Podcast Network. To learn how to support the show by subscribing to this podcast, watch this video.
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