13 dead and almost half a billion dollars in property damages as a result of Floods in the Czech Republic

Dear friends of the Czech Republic,

Last week saw big parts of our country struck by catastrophe. Flash floods in Moravia and Southern Bohemia took 13 lives and caused almost half a billion dollars of damage. In the middle of the night, hundreds of people were evacuated from their homes, many of them with nothing else but the clothes on their backs.
We are asking you to extend a helping hand.
Czech Canadians in Masaryk Memorial Institute, Sokol Canada, St. Wenceslaus Church and Hearts Open Toronto with the support of the Consulate General of the Czech Republic in Toronto, have created a trust fund to help the victims of the 2009 Floods

We thank you in advance for your generosity.

Please make donations by sending a cheque payable either to:

1. Hearts Open Toronto, re. Flood 2009
401 Richmond Street West, Suite 436
Toronto, ON, Canada M5V 1X3

2. Czech and Slovak Association in Canada
P. O. Box 564, 3044 Bloor Street West, Toronto, ON M8X 2Y8
(Trust fund created by CSAC has our support)

Please note that the financial donations sent to abroad are not eligible for charitable receipts.
For more information, please contact +14169721476, ext. 11 – Michaela Vaclavinek at the Consulate General of the Czech Republic

Find out, what is happening in the czech and slovak comunities. News and entertainment for everyone. Check here.

We did some maintenance and upgrading last night, making more use of the screen space, and hopefully making the user experience a little more pleasant. Over 96% of the site visitors have screen resolution of at least 1024 pixels wide, so we changed the default layout theme and made the pages wider. This also means that we had to re-work some of the graphics. It is a work in progress, and we appreciate any comments we get on the site readability and design.

We recently informed about an event presented by the Consulate General of Czech Republic in Toronto named “How We Escaped Hitler”. The evening is dedicated to commemorate an historic rescue effort to save Jewish children of Czechoslovakia. The programme was initiated by Nicholas Winton, from London, UK. The children then became known as the “Winton Kinder” (Winton’s children).

This may be  a little last-minute notice, but the Consulate and some of the co-organizers are looking for Winton Kinder survivors that they may not be aware of. This came via Facebook from one of my friends there:

Hello my friends of Czech (or nearby) background;

This past Friday, I was contacted by the Consulate General of the Czech Republic in Toronto. They are currently organizing an event called “How We Escaped Hitler”, which is dedicated to two historical events that took place in Czechoslovakia in 1939 – the 70th anniversary of the Nazi Invasion of Czechoslovakia on March 15th, and, the 1st rescue train transport of Jewish children from Prague to London, UK organized by Nicholas Winton (my father was one of those Czech children who was so fortunate to be saved).

This event is to take place less than a month from now, on Thursday, March 26. They have asked me to help them to find any Czech-Canadian “Winton Kinder” survivors that may not be on the “lists”, so that they can invite them to this very important event. So if you happen to know any of these people – or the child of a Winton Kinder (like me), please get in touch with me here and I will make sure that their contact info is forwarded to the Consulate (with these folks’ blessings only, of course.

Chances are, some of our readers may know one of them. The Czech Consulate in Toronto will be able to provide more information.

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We have upgraded to WordPress 2.7.1. There should be no difference, and as far as we can tell, all permalinks and posts work. If you find any problems with the site, please leave a comment to this post.

The last issue of Nový Domov is dedicated to the 90th anniversary of the founding of independent Czechoslovakia (October 28th, 1918). In this issue, we tried something new – it has a four-page English Language Supplement for our readers who may not be fluent in Czech or Slovak. If you are a subscriber to the printed Nový Domov, you can access the two most recent issues here.

Ahoj!

We have a few more registered subscribers, but I noticed that the RSS subscribe has been hidden from the view, at the bottom of your browser window. We have fixed that. If you have a modern browser like Firefox (sadly, the new Internet Explorer has some compatibility issues and many people are still not upgrading), or use a specialized blog reader program, you can use this link to subscribe to the site content.

We are still in a sort of experimental stage, working on a closer integration with www.novydomov.com (which the blog will eventually be part of), and www.masaryktown.org, the publisher of both printed and online edition of Nový Domov. Please bear with us.

Other than that, we have a new author/contributor, George Jirka Grosman. George is a Toronto jazz guitarist, writer, and an overall fun guy to be with. We appreciate his contributions, and are hoping to attract more contributors to bring you the news, events, and their points of view on the life of Czech and Slovak community here in Canada and elsewhere. Stay tuned!