THEATRE

2023 Winner: The Child You Deserve by Julia Peterson – Saskatoon

It is 1957, and three generations of Jewish women are gathered around a Montreal apartment's kitchen table. Jenny has big dreams for her daughter and a second chance at love with her partner, Rivka. When Jenny's mother crashes into their lives the women have to confront their dreams, fears and responsibilities for their communities, the future and each other. The play serves as a standalone sequel to A Man in the House by Elinore Siminovitch and was written by her granddaughter.

2019 Winner: Elijah by Hannah Rittner - Toronto.

In Elijah, Leora travels from Toronto to Halifax to celebrate the days of awe (the week between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur) with her expecting queer-sister Shira and her non-binary Israeli partner Ariel. A play about the transformative power of forgiveness and how it impacts our ability to move beyond the trauma of the past.

2015 Winner: The Great Divide by Alix Sobler – Winnipeg. 

On Saturday March 25, 1911 at 4:45 pm, someone started screaming “Fire!” on the 8th floor of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory on the lower east side of Manhattan. Within10 minutes 146 workers, most of them young women, most of them recent immigrants from some of the most oppressed countries in the world at the time, lay dead either on the floor of the sweatshop or on the street eight stories below. The Great Divide tells the story of just a few of these doomed workers, the lives they led, and the lessons they learned during their time in the American garment district. Photo of Alix by Matthew Dunivan Photography

2012 Winner: Shiksa by Cairn Moore – Winnipeg
Shiksa tells the story of Emma McTavish, a portrait painter who falls for family lawyer Zack Stein. Zack is a secular Jew and Emma is a non-practising Catholic. When Zack’s overprotective parents discover their only son has secretly married a "shiksa", the honeymoon is on hiatus. Zack’s father declares his son dead, while Zack’s mother goes on a crusade of her own. As Zack moves farther away from his family, Emma finds solace in the most unlikely of places.

2010 Winner: Corpus by Darrah Teitel – Montreal
Megan White is a PHd candidate at The University of Toronto in the Department of Peace and Conflict. She studies genocide and her thesis examines the psychology of the perpetrators of modern genocide. Megan meets Heinrich in a chat room. Heinrich is a squeegee kid living in east Berlin with his grandmother Eva, the ex-wife of an ex SS officer. The illumination of Eva’s story launches Megan’s thesis into unexplored and incendiary territory.

2008 Winner: Strange Land by Alexis Diamond – Montreal
Strange Land is set in Montreal’s Jewish neighbourhood on the Main (Saint Lawrence Blvd.) in 1942, during the Conscription crisis. The play is about how the three women of a struggling Jewish immigrant family attempt to forge a place in the New World after the death of the pater familias, only to be thwarted by conflicting aims and the narratives of identity imported from the Old World. At a time of war, rampant paranoia and virulent prejudice, Dinah risks everything to pull out hatred by its roots and rewrite the story of the New World. Photo of Alexis by Ron Diamond

2006 Winner: Guess Who’s Coming to Sabbath by Phil Pivnick
Guess Who's Coming to Sabbath offers smart and often witty dialogue about Judaism and religion's common stance again homosexuality and same-sex marriage. In the play, a couple anticipates a surprise announcement from their son, Isaac. Peter is Isaac's surprise; he's also Isaac's fiancé. Isaac's normally open-minded father, Morty, is a proud Jewish man and he's furious with his son's choice. Marjory, his dying mother, is doing her best to find joy in her son's happiness.

2003 Winner: Yahrzeit (Memorial) by Alex Poch Goldin – Toronto
Meyer has had a stroke and lost the use of one hand so the entire world must suffer with him, including his pro-Palestinian son, his Serbian caregiver, and his absent, lesbian daughter. Entrenched in his opinions, Meyer knows how everything should be regardless of what anyone else thinks. Beset by guilt however, he lights Yahrzeit candles in memory of his late wife and is secretly sending money to Israel to plant a forest for her. Meanwhile, his son’s marriage is collapsing, his caregiver is giving him tsuris, his missing daughter shows up with only a bus ticket and a boy scout is on the loose in his building. Sooner or later, something’s going to crack and when it does, Meyer will find that life has a few surprises left in store.

2001 Winner: Sara’s Cave by Don Molnar – Toronto
Sara’s Cave is about a woman who hides a Jewish family in her root cellar during the German occupation of Poland. Anna must also billet two German officers. While one is in a desperate struggle with his conscience, the other baits a trap for her, with a sack of potatoes. A man who escaped the German death squad finds Anna’s root cellar and enters looking for help. All this happens during Passover, a time when hospitality, for Jews, means so much.

1999 Winner: Einstein’s Gift by Vern Thiessen – Alberta
Einstein’s Gift follows the life and work of Nobel laureate Dr. Fritz Haber, a man who risked everything for a country that never accepted him. Haber, a chemist who worked hard to enhance life, discovered too late that when his knowledge was put in the hands of the wrong people, millions would die and that his efforts to serve humanity were futile against political will, nationalism, and war.

2021 Winner: Precipice by Primrose Madayag Knazan - Winnipeg

Precipice follows Sharrah’s conversion story to Judaism, a journey that takes her from her future in-laws’ Seder table to a synagogue in the Philippines. Caught between her Filipino mother’s expectations and her brother’s estrangement from the family, she wonders if she’s ready to walk the path of the Torah.

2017 Winner: The Covenant by Alice Abracen - Montreal. 

The Covenant is set in June 1944, as Red Cross dignitaries are marveling at the lively town of Theresienstadt: a haven for the Jewish people in the heart of Czechoslovakia. Little do they know that this paradise is a ghetto and a concentration camp, elaborately staged in order to conceal Nazi crimes against humanity. Forced to participate in the terrible charade, the ambitious politician Peter and the dedicated doctor Hilde find their idealism, their faith, and their love put to a terrible test. Inspired by a true story. The Covenant’s dramaturges were Sarah Elkashef and Brian Drader.

2013 Winner: The Girl Rabbi of the Golden West by Jennifer Wise – Victoria.  

Written for the 150th anniversary of Canada's oldest continuously active synagogue, The Girl Rabbi of the Golden West uses comedy and cross-dressing to solve a real-life historical mystery: how did it happen that in 19th-century Canada, an orthodox congregation hired a woman as their rabbi? Throughout the High Holiday season of 1895, Miss Ray Frank of California made history by officiating from the pulpit of Congregation Emanu-El in Victoria, BC. Written for seven female actors who impersonate, by turns, the women and the men of the synagogue, this site-specific comedy celebrates the surprisingly progressive values that brought a woman to the bema in a gold-rush town, and healed a bitterly divided community while inspiring the man who would go on to become Canada's first Jewish judge.

2011 Winner: Haunted by Daniel Karasik – Toronto
When Abby’s husband dies she starts attending synagogue. She befriends David, the young rabbi, and now that friendship is turning into something more. Meanwhile, her daughter claims she’s begun to spend time with her father’s ghost. A play about rational people intoxicated by the unseen. 

2009 Winner: Martyrs Street by Misha Shulman - New York/Israel/Toronto
Through the story of two neighbours, Martyrs Street depicts the rise of religious and nationalist radicalism, both Palestinian and Jewish, in the West Bank city of Hebron. 

2007 Winner: The Bleeding Season by Brandon Marlon – Ottawa
During the First Intifada in Israel (1987-1993) Koby Mandola was an ambulance paramedic and his best friend Talia Gidoli was a police officer. Fresh out of the IDF, they dealt together with the violence and casualties that seemed without foreseeable end. Ten years later arrives the Second Intifada (2000-2005), and Talia is now a Mossad agent who, with her partner Levy Tzion, tracks down a key Hamas operative in Canada who shared his childhood with Koby in Khan Yunis before the uprisings so severely polarized Jewish Israelis and Palestinian Arabs. Facing each other under such special circumstances, both sides confront their choices and hold the other to account in a mutual crucible of principle, memory, and faith.

2005 Winner: Lost Daughter by Tara Goldstein – Toronto
Lost Daughter is an historical drama inspired by William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. It is set in the Canadian city of Toronto in the summer of 1933, a summer of intense heat and widespread unemployment. A summer when Gentile youth wore swastika badges to keep the city’s Jews out of public parks and away from beaches. Lost Daughter engages with the themes of Canadian xenophobia and anti-Semitism in the summer of 1933, but also portrays the rich tradition of forgiveness in Jewish thought and culture. In the summer of 2008, on the 75th anniversary of the Christie Pits riot, the play had its Canadian premiere as part of the Toronto Fringe Festival.

2002 Winner: Remember Me by Irene Watts – Vancouver
Marianne Kohn arrives in England on the first Kindertransport allowed to leave Nazi Germany. At Liverpool Street Station she waits for a sponsor. Finally, a woman whose expected young domestic, has not arrived is persuaded to take in the eleven year old refugee. Her refugee status is belittled by her hosts. Only the resident maid and a friend she makes at school, give her some measure of stability. At the outbreak of World War 2, Marianne is evacuated to Wales, and a series of unsuitable billets. Marianne never gives up hope of a reunion with her mother who on the day of the great evacuation, arrives in England on a domestic permit.

2000 Winner: Gordin in America by Beth Kaplan – Ontario
Jacob Gordin, a writer, educator, and socialist reformer, is forced to emigrate from Russia to New York in 1891, at the age of 38. He quickly becomes the leading playwright in the heated world of the Yiddish theatre on the Lower East Side and subsequently around the world. Gordin’s wife and many children, who follow later, have a difficult time adjusting to the new world. With his bull-headed zeal, he makes dangerous enemies, one of whom, Abraham Cahan of the Jewish Daily Forward, embarks on a poisonously destructive vendetta. Gordin dies at the age of fifty-six, bitter that his life’s work has been undone. But there is hope a descendent will tell his tale. Jacob Gordin’s eighth child, Nadia or Nettie, was my grandmother. This is the true story, told in brief scenes, of the extraordinary life of playwright and rabble-rouser Jakov Mikhailovich Gordin, known in his time as the Jewish Shakespeare.