Tens of thousands of Jews gather for traditional blessing in Jerusalem
JERUSALEM — Tens of thousands of people gathered at Judaism's holiest site in Jerusalem on Tuesday for the traditional priestly blessing prayer.
The 'Birkat Cohanim,' or Cohen's blessing, is a ritual dating back over 2,500 years to when King Solomon's Temple stood on the same site. The blessing is performed by male Jews who can trace their lineage back to the priestly caste, and takes place three times a year during Judaism's major holidays. Jews are currently observing the week-long holiday of Passover.
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Hamilton Spectator
2 days ago
- Hamilton Spectator
He spent nearly 50 years picking the produce you eat. Now the last of the old masters of the Ontario Food Terminal is making his last stand
It was 5 a.m. on a Thursday in May and Marshall Cohen was furious about the state of his cucumbers. He'd ordered them earlier that morning at a farm stand in the Ontario Food Terminal, the biggest wholesale fruit and vegetable market in Canada. As is the custom, Cohen's order was delivered to his truck, parked at a loading bay at the far end of the terminal, just off the Queensway in Etobicoke. But when the cucumbers arrived, Cohen's truck driver noticed yellow spots and bruises. He took photos and sent them to Cohen, who was still walking around the market, now looking for size-25 hothouse tomatoes. 'It's a joke!' Cohen screamed when he saw the photos. He forwarded them to the cucumber salesman, waited a few minutes, then got him on the phone. 'I'd say good morning, but it's not a very good morning,' Cohen said. 'Did you see the pictures I just sent you?' The salesman hadn't seen the photos. 'Well you look at those f——-g pictures,' he said. 'Are you f——-g kidding me? OK, take a look at what you sent me. You should be ashamed of yourself.' 'Oh f—-,' the young salesman said, realizing he'd just sent bad cucumbers to one of oldest and most revered produce buyers at the terminal. 'Yeah, that's right,' Cohen said, 'you should say 'Oh f—-.'' Marshall Cohen, one of the oldest buyers at the Ontario Food Terminal, wearing his typical all-black outfit. For Cohen, layers are important, especially in warmer months, when going back and forth from the outdoor farmers' market to the indoor refrigerated warehouses. If you've lived in or around Toronto in the last 45 years, there's a decent chance you've eaten something that Cohen, 78, personally selected from the thousands of pallets stacked up at farm stands and refrigerated warehouses in the terminal. He has bought produce for fruit markets, restaurants and grocery stores, including Summerhill Market. People here treat him like one of the last old masters of an art form. But he is out of time, still insisting on face-to-face deals in a world of screens, holding out hope that he can pass on his secrets and his methods before he retires, because if he doesn't, it will be a loss for everyone in this city who finds pleasure in a perfect piece of fruit. On the phone, the cucumber salesman tried to explain that they'd sent the wrong pallet by mistake. Cohen interrupted: 'Please exchange it now. Goodbye.' When he hung up, he hit the button on his phone so hard that his arm swung back, as if he'd fired a gun. The food terminal operates as a secret world in the middle of the city. More than two billion pounds of produce flow through the food terminal every year, making it one of the most important hubs in the North American fruit and vegetable trade. The public is forbidden inside, but behind the gatehouse, just off the Gardiner Expressway, buyers are making split-second decisions that determine what people around the province eat. Marshall Cohen speaks to a contact, one of dozens of phone calls he makes in a regular day of buying produce at the Ontario Food Terminal. You can try to pick the nicest fruit at your local grocer, but at that stage, your sense of choice is largely an illusion. Squeeze and taste the green grapes all you want. The whole display probably all came from the same skid, from the same growing region, picked on the same day. On grapes, Cohen can opt for premium, known as number ones, or discounted number twos. There are different varieties, from different countries, sold by different wholesalers at the terminal, who give different deals, depending on the buyer. Each shipment of grapes has spent a different amount of time on a cargo ship, in a truck, waiting at port. They have different levels of sweetness, different sizes and colours, a different pop when you bite down. The strength of your local market's produce section depends on how the buyer navigates those options, or whether they choose to buy at all. Earlier this month, for instance, grapes were caught in a gap in the global weave of growing seasons. The last of the good, late-season grapes from Peru and Chile were gone and Mexico's season was just starting up, so the available grapes were small and sour. Some buyers went for the Mexican crop anyway, because they needed to get grapes on the shelf. Not Cohen. His method, which he learned from the old buyers who mentored him in the early 1980s, is probably best described as: Bite It, Squeeze It, Smell It. If the product does not pass that test, he walks. 'You can't buy over the phone,' he told me recently. 'I don't trust anybody. I want to see.' I met Cohen in 2021, when I was working on a story and needed a guide at the food terminal. Since then, he's called me regularly, asked about my family, sent holiday greetings and let me shadow him for dozens of hours at the terminal, where he has made me eat an immense amount of fruit. He carries a knife on him to cut into the larger specimens, like melons. One morning, during a frenzied lecture on why his tomato provider is the best in the terminal, he pushed a little tomato into my hands and barked, 'Put that in your mouth.' A while later, a tomato flew past my head. I looked up and saw two buyers rummaging through a case of discount hot house tomatoes, flinging the rotten ones into the air without looking where they were going. Another came at me, and another. I don't think Cohen even noticed it was happening. As we walked around the farmers' market, a driver on the back of a power jack called out to us. Power jacks, the delivery carts that are central to the terminal's chaotic ballet, are always buzzing around with skids of produce, reversing at high speed into impossible parking spots. 'Marshall!' the man yelled. Cohen barely even noticed the chaos. A power jack would come within centimetres of him and he wouldn't flinch. 'They know not to hit the old man,' he said. Earlier in his career, a power jack clipped him so badly he thought it snapped his ankle. It didn't, but he couldn't walk for four days. I asked what he said to the driver. 'What do you think I said to him?' This spring, he introduced me to growers, salespeople and other buyers, and gave each a similar instruction: 'Tell him the truth. No bulls—-.' Then Cohen would walk away so I could ask them about him. But he never went far and I'd hear him in the distance, shouting on the phone. 'Marshall is part of the elite club,' Pino Prosa, a salesman at Canadian Fruit & Produce told me. 'The new way of buying is this,' Prosa said, pointing to his cellphone. 'They're just texting orders.' As Prosa talked, I could see Cohen in the edge of my vision, wandering around Prosa's sales floor, slapping melons. Marshall Cohen smells a melon at the Ontario Food Terminal. He prefers melons from later in the growing season, because they tend to have higher sugar content than the early-season fruit, which tastes like cucumbers. He was in his usual black baseball cap, with dark glasses, a black puffer jacket and a black vest over top, which one of the wholesalers had gifted him years back. Before it faded, the vest had Cohen's nickname, 'Legend,' emblazoned on the breast, but now you could only make out the L. I asked him why he was slapping melons. He said some of the honeydews were early-season, so they'd be low in sugar content and taste almost like cucumbers. He picked up a honeydew from another region, that was later in its growing season, and shoved it in my face. 'Take a deep breath,' he said. 'Sniff it in hard.' It smelled syrupy. 'See?' he said. 'There's sugar. There's flavour.' After Cohen's blow-up with the cucumber salesman, his anger evaporated. It was a special morning, not to be spoiled by yellow-spotted cucumbers. One of his favourite farmers had finally arrived at the market. Welsh Bros., a farm out of Scotland, Ont., produces what Cohen considers to be the finest asparagus in the province. He had been anticipating for it for weeks. That day, Welsh Bros. was selling for $90 a case. Before Welsh Bros. arrived, asparagus was going for as much as $130 a case. Now no one would dare charge more, Cohen said. In early May, Marshall Cohen at inspects the first asparagus of the season from one of his favourite growers, Welsh Bros., at the Ontario Food Terminal. On the way to Welsh Bros., Cohen's boss called, asking Cohen to add size-27 kiwis to his list, which at that point included about two dozen items, including four cases of figs, 20 of the fingerling potatoes, two of the watermelon radish, and a case of French beans. 'OK, listen, the French beans are all s—-,' he told his boss. 'They're all spotted. They're garbage.' At Welsh Bros.' farm stand, Cohen waved over the asparagus, like he was warming his hands on its glow. There was no smell to it. Bad asparagus stinks like fish, he said. Each Welsh Bros. bunch had straight spears that were all the same size, so they'd cook evenly. Cohen pulled out a piece and ran his finger up it, tracing the flashes of blue and purple in the tip. 'Just look at this,' he said. 'This stuff talks to you.' Cohen is lean with a wooden walk that makes him look almost like a bird of prey, the kind you see in an enclosure at a sanctuary, slower and gnarled, but still, no one's putting their finger in the cage. There are also days when he says he feels 35, when the weather is right and the arthritis in his shoulders and knees isn't acting up. 'I've looked at people my age, even younger, and they've retired too early. Their brain has gone soft, their muscle tone has gone soft,' he said. 'I have my cappuccino in the morning, talk to the guys. It's sort of like a way of life.' Until last year, he was the buyer for Summerhill Market, a long stint that owner Brad McMullen said helped elevate the chain's produce department. Before that, Cohen was the buyer for his own small chain of stores, Eglinton Fine Foods, for almost 25 years. He sold cars for a few years before Summerhill brought him back to the terminal. Lately, he starts at about 4 a.m. and works four or five hours a day, buying for what's known as a jobber, a company that supplies restaurants, grocers and institutions. Marshall Cohen leaves one of the produce showrooms at the Ontario Food Terminal, holding his handwritten list of more than two dozen items he needed to buy that morning, which included fingerling potatoes, French beans, limes, figs and watermelon radish. Over the course of his career, Cohen has watched the terminal change. Since the 1950s, the terminal has been the main stock exchange for fruit and vegetables, a central gathering place for farmers from all over the province. More recently, major grocery chains have opened their own giant produce distribution centres and left the terminal. The big grocers still do business here when their own warehouses run short on items. But the terminal is now a lifeline for independents, who can't rely on sprawling corporate supply chains — the family farmers, regional supermarket banners, chefs, caterers, ethnic grocers and start-up food manufacturers. 'It feels like it's from a different era,' said University of Toronto assistant professor Sarah Elton, who studies the terminal. 'It's so vital and important for today, also.' Marshall Cohen on the phone at the Ontario Food Terminal. The warehouses operate like big refrigerated showrooms, with pallets of product on display from all over the world and salespeople roaming the floor. 'I might get lucky with limes here,' he said, digging into a box at one of the showrooms. 'Woah, woah, I'm going to buy these. These are beautiful. These are nice. They're firm, clean.' I asked if they were the right size. 'That's the perfect one,' he whispered at me as we approached the salesman to negotiate a price. 'Don't say nothing.' A lot of the time, I felt like the new boyfriend at someone else's family dinner. Cohen played the helpful uncle, leaning in to add the necessary context to what was going on in front of me: That salesman used to be the toughest guy at the terminal. That man just lost his wife. That kid shouldn't have bought all those watermelons. In the hall, Cohen flagged down a young guy who'd worked his way up at one of the wholesalers. 'What do you call me?' he asked. 'The Legend?' the man said. 'No, besides that,' Cohen said. 'Oh! Uncle Marsh,' the man said. I got the sense that Cohen sees Uncle Marsh as his last great role, his King Lear. 'He still calls some of my friends, to this day, to check in on them,' said Cohen's 51-year-old son, Justin. 'He would call my business partner when I was out of town just to check in and make sure I was doing a good job.' When Justin was at university, before cellphones, Cohen would call Justin's house. 'I would hear my roommates answer the phone and be on the phone for 10 minutes talking to someone,' Justin, the eldest of Cohen's three sons, said. 'And then finally they would say, 'Hey it's your dad, he wants to talk to you.' ' A few times this spring, usually in the late morning when his buying was done, Cohen confessed to me that something was nagging at him. It was part of the reason he was still working at 78. He wanted to find an apprentice, but he had left Summerhill too abruptly to properly train one. 'I don't think that's ever going to happen now,' he said. 'It's too late.' The best he can do, at this point, is slowly let his secrets slip, here and there. 'Did you see the Rainier cherries?' he told some younger buyers recently. 'Go look at them.' It would have taken at least a year, likely two, to pass on all his rules and stratagems. One of them has to do with spreading your business around to different suppliers. If there's a fire on a banana ship and you haven't been spreading your banana business around, you probably won't have a relationship with the one supplier at the terminal who still has bananas that day. Another rule, he told me, is to 'never give a guy a third chance.' I thought at first it must have something to do with fear and respect. But it was actually about forgiveness. Don't give a guy a third chance, but you've got to give him a second. About an hour or so after the ugly phone call, Cohen looped back around to see the cucumber salesman face to face. His name was Khushal Bhinder, one of the younger produce dealers at the farmers' market. 'I've got to give this guy credit,' Cohen said on the way to see Bhinder. 'He started with nothing.' Bhinder smiled when he saw Cohen coming. Cohen pulled him into a hug. 'I'm sorry,' Cohen said softly. 'I'm sorry.' 'Hey, it's OK,' the salesman told him. 'You can say anything.'
Boston Globe
5 days ago
- Boston Globe
She's 90. As part of the last generation of Holocaust survivors, she's racing to tell her story.
She's tired, but the 90-year-old just napped in the hourlong rush-hour ride from her home in Sharon. She isn't nervous because her daughter (and manager), Deb Milley, 'hyped her up,' but mostly because she has told her story to groups like this for the past 40 years. While the audience sizes vary from fewer than 50 people to more than 1,000, Applefield begins each speech in a similar way. 'I speak about the Holocaust because, as a result of World War II, between 50 million and 60 million people were killed,' Applefield says. Six million Jews, including 1.5 million Jewish children — and millions of non-Jews — were murdered during the Holocaust. Only about 11 percent of Jewish children in Europe survived. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up She was one of those surviving children. Advertisement At the end of WWII, there were an estimated 3.5 million Jewish survivors. Today, only about 220,000 are alive, some 6 percent, according to the April 2025 'Our time is almost up,' Gideon Taylor, president of the Claims Conference, says in the report. 'Our survivors are leaving us and this is the moment to hear their voices.' Applefield feels the urgency of the call. Last year, she spoke 90 times. But this year, she has already booked 60 speaking engagements at schools and community spaces — she sometimes gives as many as eight presentations in a week. She's driven by a feeling that if she can still tell her stories and those of people no longer here, they will not die with her. Advertisement 'I'm a witness of history,' Applefield says, 'and those who hear me are becoming witnesses also.' A photo of Applefield at age 4 flashes on the screen behind her. She's grinning mischievously, chubby legs emerging from a dress with bows. 'My birth name was not Janet. My birth name was Gustawa.' Before the war in Nowy Targ, Poland, Janet Applefield's mother, Maria Singer, holds her. From Janet Applefield In her hometown of Nowy Targ, Applefield lived a happy life with her mother, father, baby sister, grandparents, aunts, and uncles. She remembers flashes of her early childhood: riding on the back of her uncle's motorcycle to the candy store, and helping her mother and grandmother bake challah to eat on the Sabbath. But on September 1, 1939, when she was 4 years old, she tells the students, Hitler invaded Poland. Applefield's parents were each forced to wear an armband embroidered with the Star of David to identify them as Jews. The Gestapo took all of their valuables. Her family tried to escape several times. On the first attempt, they fled to Russia but were forced to turn around. On the journey, her 18-month-old sister contracted diphtheria, and, with no access to medical care, died. Upon their return, her father was arrested for being an alleged Communist because he had come from Russia. When he was finally released from jail days later, he knew they had to leave again. Their town had been designated 'Judenfrei' by the Nazis — 'free of Jews.' Advertisement They fled next to Krakow. Applefield remembers her father trying to cover her eyes as the train passed a gallows hung with three men in long beards, wearing signs that read 'Kosher Meat.' From Krakow, they passed from place to place, hoping to find friends or family to shelter them. Finally, traveling by horse-drawn wagon, they were spotted by Polish police and chased, then brutally beaten. Once again, they were forced to return to Nowy Targ. 'At that point, my parents realized that they had run out of all options,' Applefield says from the front of the room. 'They decided that in order to hopefully save my life, they would give me away.' Janet Applefield with a pet dog in an undated photo. From Janet Applefield One student in the room gasps. Others watch with their mouths open. Everyone's eyes are fixated on the woman seated at the front of the room. No phones are in sight. Applefield continues, explaining that she moved around through a series of homes — at first staying with her cousin's former nanny, then with a different cousin named Lala who changed Applefield's identity to obscure her Jewish roots. 'You are no longer Gustawa Singer,' Lala told her. 'Forget her. She is dead.' Lala had managed to obtain the birth certificate of a 7-year-old Polish Catholic girl who was killed alongside her parents when a bomb fell on their house in Warsaw. 'I took on this little girl's identity. I became her. Her name was Krystyna Antoszkiewicz. That was my new name,' Applefield recalls. She says her cousin verbally and physically abused her, including striking her with an iron poker and beating her so badly that her nails fell off. Advertisement Lala told Applefield to wait in a nearby church one day while she met a boyfriend at a coffee shop in Krakow. The Gestapo raided the cafe, and Lala never returned. At 7 years old, Applefield was on her own. She had wandered the streets for hours when she ran into a woman who was concerned to see a young girl alone. Applefield told the woman her fake story about being 'Krystyna.' The woman believed it and took Applefield to a farm where she would live for the next two years. Applefield with her father, Lolek Singer. Handout After the war, Applefield was brought to an orphanage. One day, the head of the orphanage visited a Jewish committee center in Krakow where there was a community board that posted a list of names of those who had survived. She overheard a man asking about his daughter. She had green eyes, he said, blond hair in braids, and a birthmark on her inner left thigh. The head of the orphanage immediately knew he was looking for Applefield. 'When she said she had you, my body collapsed,' her father told her when they were reunited. 'I fell to the floor and cried.' Applefield remembers being afraid when she saw him: he didn't look like her father. He looked like a skeleton. He had survived three concentration camps and a gunshot wound to the face — the bullet lodged in his cheekbone. Later, that bullet wound would help her father obtain a medical visa to come to New Jersey, where an uncle lived. And her father would remarry in order for them to stay and build a new life in America. Advertisement At age 11, Applefield went to school for the first time, and was told to choose an American name. She picked Jeanette, the name of a glamorous cousin who painted her fingernails red and lived in Paris. When her uncle introduced her to the administrator at school, he Americanized it, calling her 'Janet.' And that is who she became. Applefield holds a copy of a 1947 visa application for her and her father to enter New York. Shira Stoll Today, as survivor populations are dwindling, antisemitism is on the rise. Since the start of the Israel-Hamas war, the American Defense League has also documented Just over the past month, two attacks on Jews have made national headlines. A young couple — Israeli Embassy aides Yaron Lischinsky, 30, and Sarah Milgrim, 26 — Two weeks later, in Boulder, Colorado, a man threw Molotov cocktails at demonstrators who were calling for the release of Israeli hostages taken by Hamas. The attacker told investigators he was driven by a desire to Advertisement These days, when Applefield speaks in public, her daughter makes sure to have an escape plan. 'I'm very fearful this could happen anywhere at any time,' Milley says. 'It's very targeting for me,' Applefield says. Her grandson lives in D.C. and has attended a Jewish event at the same museum where the shooting happened. She's also watched recent immigration raids with growing alarm, chilled by the images of masked men sweeping people off of the street. 'Years ago, when someone would ask the question, 'Can something like the Holocaust ever happen again here?' And I would say, 'Oh, no, no, never.'' Applefield says. 'I have changed my mind because of what I see that is happening today.' Applefield is not alone in her efforts. Organizations nationwide have made it their mission to preserve these stories and ensure they will not be forgotten. The USC Shoah Foundation has an archive of over 52,000 testimonies from Holocaust survivors — The nonprofit Last year, Janet Applefield had 90 speaking engagements to discuss her experience during the Holocaust. So far this year, she has already booked 60 talks at schools and community spaces. Shira Stoll 'We've seen a number of reasons to feel concerned about the fragility of democracy,' says Elizabeth Carroll, New England program director at Facing History. 'That has created even more of a sense of urgency for our speakers to share their stories.' Over the past five years, the curriculum has been used in more than 62,000 schools nationwide, and over 4,000 schools in New England, according to Carroll. For Jeff Smith, who organizes its survivor speaker program, the work is personal — to honor the memory of his grandparents who were killed in the Holocaust — and purposeful — to bring the history to life for thousands of students. As the survivor population dwindles, Facing History has been proactive in training the children of Holocaust survivors and other atrocities to share their family histories. 'Those stories are not lost to the ages. They're continuing, and they're preserved,' Smith says. Milley, Applefield's daughter, is determined to carry her mother's torch. And she wants to remember not just the extreme cruelty her mother endured during the war — she also wants to keep alive the kindness of those who risked their lives to save a Jewish child. 'It's the most spiritually uplifting way for us as a family to recognize that they all play a very critical role in my mother's survival,' Milley says. It took years for Applefield to share her own story. She was married and had her first child at age 19. Applefield carried her son to classes at Rutgers University, holding on to a promise to her father that she would finish college. She went on to have two more children and earn a master's of social work from Boston University. She was a social worker for over 30 years, helping survivors of trauma as she continued to heal from her own. For much of that time, Applefield thought that because she was not in the concentration camps, she didn't 'fit the bill' as a true Holocaust survivor. But in the 1980s, Applefield was invited to join Facing History. Meeting other survivors made her feel like a part of something. Suddenly, sharing her story felt like an imperative. 'When I'm no longer here, I know that my daughter and my grandchildren will continue my legacy,' Applefield says. 'My story's out in the world.' Janet Applefield receives flowers from students. Malden Catholic school. Shira Stoll As Applefield finished speaking on that Wednesday in May, every person in the Malden Catholic auditorium was on their feet applauding. Afterward, a few students in hoodies and plaid skirts trickled up to the front to present her with flowers and chocolate. Others milled in groups, waiting to talk to Applefield. The girls who made the heart gestures approached her shyly, excited but slightly starstruck. She posed for a photo with them. Sarah Darius, a 15-year-old freshman at Malden Catholic, says Applefield's talk brought home the reality of the Holocaust for her, and the fact that her generation might be the last to hear from survivors firsthand. It's a privilege, she realizes — and a duty. 'I have to educate the younger generation on it,' Darius says. 'I'm taking on the responsibility.' Shira Stoll is a regional Emmy and Murrow Award-winning journalist based in Boston. Send comments to magazine@
Yahoo
14-06-2025
- Yahoo
Why King Charles Wore a Black Armband on His Uniform at Trooping the Colour
King Charles added a black armband to his Trooping the Colour uniform to honor the victims of the Air India plane crash on June 12 A moment of silence was also incorporated into the program at Horse Guards Parade A Buckingham Palace spokesperson tells people the adjustments were added "a mark of respect for the lives lost, the families in mourning and all the communities affected by this awful tragedy"King Charles paid a solemn tribute during Trooping the Colour by wearing a black armband with his Coldstream Guards uniform. The gesture, seen during the royal procession on June 14, honored the victims of the London-bound Air India plane crash that occurred just two days earlier on June 12. Buckingham Palace announced the uniform change the day before the King's official birthday celebration, explaining that the black armband would be worn by the monarch, Prince William, Royal Mews staff in livery, and mounted officers participating in the parade. The tribute extended beyond dress. After King Charles inspected the troops and took his place on the dais at Horse Guards Parade, a moment of silence was observed before the sounding of the Last Post — a moving addition to the historic military ceremony. The adjustments were added "a mark of respect for the lives lost, the families in mourning and all the communities affected by this awful tragedy," a Buckingham Palace spokesperson told PEOPLE. On June 12, an Air India flight heading to London's Gatwick Airport crashed minutes after takeoff in Ahmedabad in western India. CNN said that at least 290 people have now been pronounced dead, with a sole survivor (identified as a British national) saying he doesn't know "how" he survived. The King released a statement shortly after the crash to express his sympathies and the changes to the Trooping programming were announced a day later. The royal family has previously shifted things at Trooping to honor victims following tragedy, and a minute of silence was incorporated into the parade following the Grenfell Tower fire disaster in London in 2017 The King is being celebrated at Trooping the Colour, which honors the monarch's birthday each year. While the celebration is taking place on Saturday, June 14, the King won't actually mark his 77th birthday until Nov. 14. The five regiments of the Foot Guards rotate who presents their flag at Trooping the Colour each year, and the Coldstream Guards will have the honor at this year's celebration. The oldest serving regiment in the British Army and part of the Household Division, the Coldstream Guards are tasked with protecting the monarchy. They are also a military unit of which the King is Colonel-in-Chief, giving him an extra special role in this year's event. More than 1,300 soldiers of the Household Division and King's Troop Royal Horse Artillery are participating in this year's Trooping the Colour, which will also feature 300-plus musicians from the Massed Bands and 250 soldiers from the Foot Guards, according to the King's Birthday Parade website. The festive celebration dates back to a different King Charles: King Charles II, who ruled from 1660 to 1685. In 1978, the parade was officially designated as the birthday celebration of the sovereign, and began to take place every year after George III took the throne in 1760. King Charles experienced his first Trooping the Colour as monarch in June 2023, when he participated in the event on horseback. The King arrived on a horse named Noble while carrying out his ceremonial duties as Colonel-in-Chief of the seven regiments of the Household Division of the British Army. The move brought back a tradition last carried out by his mother, Queen Elizabeth. The late monarch rode on her horse Burmese during Trooping the Colour in 1986, after which she arrived by carriage. In 2024, amid his cancer diagnosis and treatment, King Charles took part in the festivities in a horse-drawn carriage rather than riding on horseback. He opted to ride in a coach again this year for his third Trooping the Colour as monarch. Can't get enough of PEOPLE's Royals coverage? to get the latest updates on Kate Middleton, Meghan Markle and more! King Charles attended his first-ever Trooping the Colour in 1951 when he was just three years old. That year, the ceremony was in celebration of his grandfather, King George VI. At the time, Charles arrived in a carriage with his grandmother, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, and his aunt, Princess Margaret, while Queen Elizabeth rode horseback in the procession. Read the original article on People
