From Immigration To Integration
The Canadian Jewish Experience:
A Millennium Edition
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From Immigration To IntegrationThe Canadian Jewish Experience:
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Stephen J. Scheinberg
Every immigrant group in Canada has established its own unique institutions, but the Jewish combination of religion and ethnicity, along with the continuing persecution of their European brethren, encouraged the founding of a broad variety of self-help institutions within the Jewish community from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. In a second stage of development that began in the mid-1930s, the community turned its attention to building defence organizations against antisemitism. In a further evolution of community activism, some of these organizations took on an even broader role after World War II, as - without eschewing their defence role - they assumed the task of promoting human rights in the wider Canadian community, as well as further afield. This latter role was and is unique within the context of Canadian ethnicity, with Canadian Jews identifying their own welfare with working towards a more tolerant Canadian - as well as global - society.
In Montreal, Toronto, and most of the smaller centres of Canada the original thrust for philanthropic work grew out of the synagogues. A chevra kadisha (burial society), along with a cemetery association, were among the first needs of a Jewish community.1 Social welfare on a broader scale developed when population increased and especially when new groups of poor immigrants taxed the resources of more informal means of help. Montreal’s Hebrew Benevolent Society was created in 1844, and evolved into the Hebrew Philanthropic Society by 1847. Among other good works, the organization aided German Jewish immigrants on their way to the United States. Then, in 1863, thirty young Jewish men came together to form the Young Men’s Hebrew Benevolent Association. Their purpose was “to assist needy and unfortunate co-religionistsÉand to relieve the elder members of the families, from the onerous task of attending to the wants of the poor.” This group raised $200 to $500 annually to help the poor within Montreal’s small Jewish community. In 1891 it would be renamed the Baron de Hirsch Institute and assume an extensive charitable role.2
In 1881 an Anglo-Jewish Association commenced operations with a dual focus that anticipated later developments. The first function was the defence of Jewish rights and the second was to provide aid to refugees from the pogroms initiated in the Russian Empire after the assassination of the Czar Alexander II. These pogroms resulted in an influx of Jewish immigration to Canada.
A Citizen’s Committee Jewish Relief Fund began a year later - probably as an outgrowth of the Anglo-Jewish Association - which also solicited gentile contributions to aid the refugees. The Montreal Gazette urged the broader community to support the Jews who “will of course do all that is in their power for the succour of their unfortunate brethren.”3 This is early testimony that the gentile community recognized Jewish philanthropic efforts on their own behalf. This sentiment was echoed in Winnipeg, where the Free Press reported in May 1882 the arrival of nineteen Jewish refugees in a city with only eight Jewish families, yet noted that these few were “doing all in their power to provide for the immediate wants” of their co-religionists.4 Thus, even in smaller centres that lacked the resources and infrastructure of the Montreal community, the public took note of Jewish philanthropic efforts.
The Toronto Jewish community developed a broad network of charitable associations similar to those of Montreal. Many of the first philanthropic efforts came out of the Holy Blossom congregation, including a Toronto branch of the Anglo-Jewish Association, a branch of the Ladies’ Montefiore Society, and a branch of the Ladies’ Aid Society in 1899. There was also a wide range of mutual aid or benefit associations that took three forms: landsmanschaften (groups with a common point of eastern-European origin), political societies such as the Workmen’s Circle (Yiddishist social democrats), or non-partisan organizations such as the Toronto Hebrew Benefit Society. All these groups offered sick benefits, often insurance, and lodge doctors. The prevailing antisemitism encouraged Jewish doctors to establish practices based on the security of serving a lodge clientele and, for their part, the lodge members were offered cheaper access to basic health care.5
Toronto women shouldered an important part of the charitable burden. The Hebrew Ladies’ Sewing Circle became the Hebrew Ladies’ Maternity Aid and Child Welfare Society, a name better reflecting its purpose. The National Council of Jewish Women came to Toronto in 1896, while three years later eastern-European women started their own Hebrew Ladies Aid Society.6 These institutions were not only of benefit to the Jewish poor, but gave the participating women important experience in administration and fundraising, as well as a forum in which their voices might be heard.
Montreal’s women also played an important philanthropic role beginning in 1877 with the Ladies Hebrew Benevolent Society, which received an annual grant from the province, a yearly donation from the City and District Bank, and raised additional funds through concerts and bazaars. The Montreal Council of Jewish Women affiliated with the American-based National Council in 1918 and carried on a wide range of charitable works including juvenile aid, clubs for immigrant girls, and summer recreation centres.7
Across the Dominion, Hadassah was the most active of the Jewish women’s groups, but its activities - while also often taking a philanthropic bent - were largely guided by its Zionist outlook to aid charities and institutions in Israel. Many of the members of Hadassah also took part in other organizations that had a more Canadian focus.
Winnipeg’s Jewish community, although with a later start than Toronto and Montreal, developed an exceptionally broad aid network. A Hebrew Benevolent Society was established in 1886 to take over the work of earlier groups that had helped to absorb nearly 340 pogrom refugees in the city. The new organization carried out charitable programs for the next fifteen years, assisting needy local families, aiding the Jewish farm settlements, helping transient immigrants to US cities, arranging job placement for newcomers, and contributing to the Winnipeg General Hospital. In 1906 the Hebrew Sick Benefit Society was founded, with its several hundred members deriving not only the usual cemetery plots, sick benefits, and loans, but also cultural advantages such as drama and lectures. B’nai Brith, the Jewish fraternal and charitable organization, had arrived in Toronto in 1875 and Montreal in 1881, while Winnipeg Lodge No. 650 was formed in 1909 and by 1913 had over three hundred members. The lodge’s early activities included action against antisemitism, an employment bureau, and a fresh-air camp. In 1912 the lodge aided the formation of one of two Jewish orphanages that were merged a few years later, functioning as the Jewish Orphanage of Winnipeg until 1948.8
One interesting institution that flourished in almost every Canadian Jewish centre was the Hebrew Free Loan Association. Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg, Regina, Calgary, Ottawa, Hamilton, and Vancouver all established these gemilath chasodim, societies specializing in what would be called today micro-loans.9 These associations loaned small amounts of money and had, reportedly, a very small rate of default. Before immigrants had established credit in their new land, these institutions provided access to modest sums of capital that might enable a small business to be established or a struggling family to survive a rough period.
The remarkable extent of early Canadian Jewish charitable functions is striking. These functions were developed in a laissez faire era, without the social safety net of post-World War II Canada. Perhaps the diversity of welfare efforts was partly attributable to the divisions within the community: Orthodox versus secular, more assimilated and wealthier uptown Jews versus downtown immigrants, or socialists versus conservatives. The charitable efforts were certainly accelerated by waves of pogroms and accompanying refugee flows in 1882-85, 1903-05, and, again, in 1919-20. Each pogrom not only touched the hearts of Canadian Jews motivating them to send aid abroad, but also confronted them directly with homeless, jobless refugees who had to be cared for.
By World War I, the proliferation of Jewish charitable associations was not only the pride of the community, but also a challenge to those preferring more systematic approaches to both the giving and the dispensing of charity. As a result, all of the major Jewish centres witnessed a drive towards the federation of charitable endeavours. While, on the one hand, this could be viewed as a worthy attempt to systematize and bring order to Jewish philanthropy by reducing the number of fundraising efforts and the duplication of services, it also centralized charity and placed its control in the hands of a small band of community machers (leaders). Thus the application for Montreal’s Federation charter in 1915 was signed by a small group, including such prominent individuals as Mortimer B. Davis of Imperial Tobacco, Lyon Cohen, a major clothing manufacturer, Clarence I. de Sola who was active in shipping and construction, Samuel Jacobs, a lawyer who two years later would be elected to parliament, and two rabbis, Nathan Gordon, representing Temple Emanu-El, and Herman Abramowitz of Shaar Hashomayim, the most prominent congregations in the city. By 1924 the new Montreal Federation was dispensing more than $188,000 annually.10
Two years later, Toronto’s Federation of Jewish Philanthropies began to take shape. The temporary organizing committee distributed a resolution that embodied much of the thinking of the federation ideal in three major points: 1) to systematize the collection of charitable funds; 2) to systematize the distribution of charity; and 3) to adjust the community’s charities to the community’s needs.11 The bureaucratic ideal, or search for order, as one scholar has called it, had much to recommend it, but it also brought Jewish philanthropy under the direction of its wealthier citizens and, eventually, delivered its administration into the hands of emerging professionals in medicine, social work, and education.12 It would be unduly nostalgic to lament the passing of a more grassroots approach to charity as the forces of industrialization and urbanization on the one hand, and the growth and complexity of Jewish communities on the other, forced a surrender to bureaucratization, but one should be mindful of the cost.
The move towards centralization also took a pan-Canadian form in the first effort to found a Canadian Jewish Congress in 1919. While the federation movement in the cities was largely spearheaded by the wealthy and prominent, the movement for a “parliament” of Canadian Jewry was more inclusive and, using the prevailing Montreal terminology, combined the “downtown Jews,” who were largely working class and Yiddish-speaking, together with the wealthier, better integrated “uptown Jews.” Prominent among the former were the Labour Zionists (Poale Zion), social democrats who followed the lead of their American comrades in founding the American Jewish Congress. It is likely that the Labour Zionists, with a great deal of political experience in the rough-and-tumble of socialist and Zionist politics, saw the parliamentary form as an opportunity to compete effectively and co-operate on more equal grounds with their uptown brethren.
The Organizing Committee of the Conference of Canadian Jews was initiated by the Labour Zionists and socialist editor Reuben Brainin of the Veg. Its secretary was Louis Fitch, considered a friend of the workers, and the committee also included Samuel W. Jacobs, viewed by the downtown Jews as “a consistent rebel against the Jewish aristocracy of the city.”13
Of course, prominent uptowners and capitalists such as Lyon Cohen and Clarence I. de Sola were also on the committee; no Congress of Canadian Jews could be complete without them. Their wealth, influence, and connections were vital to any chance of success.
The Congress finally assembled at the Monument National Theatre on March 16, 1919. And while it was an interesting exercise in community democracy, the Congress was a stillbirth.14 It quickly lost momentum and would not meet again for fifteen years. Congress’ main legacy was the organization of the Jewish Immigrant Aid Society (JIAS), with one of its major resolutions calling for the establishment of this new institution. Many of the philanthropic efforts of Canadian Jews had, through the years, been directed towards immigrant aid. Now, there would finally be a single comprehensive organization to attend to one of the major issues confronting the community. JIAS was, in the words of its historian and long-term director, Joseph Kage, “the realization of the need for self-effort to meet their communal needs.”15
JIAS was formally established in June of 1920. It opened an office in Quebec to service 5,587 Jewish immigrants who passed through the port from April 30 to November 30, 1921. Of this number, more than 1,200 were detained, predominantly for medical or legal reasons, and JIAS helped to secure the release of almost 1,100, though 171 were deported and two escaped. JIAS also established regional offices in Montreal, Toronto, and Winnipeg to provide for the considerable needs of the new immigrants.
Immigrant needs attended to by JIAS were reflected in its various departments, including landing, information, labour bureau (job placement), searching (for relatives and landsmen), and sheltering. In the first decade of its operation JIAS helped to welcome 41,873 Jews to Canada. Unfortunately, as historians Irving Abella and Harold Troper have shown, Jewish immigration slowed to a trickle in the 1930s and during World War II, when antisemitism and ignorance governed Canadian immigration policy. Still, JIAS did extend its hand to some 11,000 Jewish immigrants in the 1930s and to the sorrowful handful of 1,852 who reached Canada in the war years. Immediate post-war Jewish immigration was also pitifully small. Of the 98,057 Displaced Persons accepted by Canada from 1947 to 1952, only 11,064 were Jews, outnumbered by Poles and Ukrainians as Cold War security policies combined with antisemitism to exclude many of those seeking refuge in Canada.16
Antisemitism took various forms in pre-1930s Canada. There were restrictive covenants on the sale of real estate, discrimination by resorts and clubs, persistent defamation of Jewish life and practice issuing from both ancient canards and more recent stereotypes, quota systems practised by universities and professional schools, and a variety of other indignities. When these practices were challenged at all by a small and insecure Jewish community, it was usually through informal means. Thus, in a notorious Quebec City group libel case, the Plamondon affair, Montreal lawyers Samuel Jacobs and Louis Fitch argued the case for the plaintiffs, though apparently without any organizational support.
Since 1875, B’nai Brith had established lodges in Canada, primarily for fraternal and philanthropic purposes, but its role evolved over the years. The American-based organization established its Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in the World War I era, and there is some evidence of its activity in Canada during the 1920s.17 The two main B’nai Brith lodges in Toronto and Montreal established their own volunteer ADL committees in 1919, which co-ordinated B’nai Brith’s growing involvement in advocacy within Canada in conjunction with the ADL’s activities in the United States.
In 1934, again with Labour Zionists like Hananiah Caiserman taking the lead, the Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC) was revived. Caiserman would become Congress’s general secretary. His socialist ideology was still firm, but he explained to a comrade that “at present the plutocrats are the only ones who can provide the money without which a congress is unthinkable.”18 Congress’s revival took place against the background of serious threats at home and abroad. Hitler and his Nazis had come to power a year earlier. In Quebec the community was subject not only to the antisemitic invective of Adrien Arcand and his fascist newspapers, but also to the more influential Abb Lionel Groulx and his acolytes, whose racist and antisemitic nationalism flourished in the pages of Le Devoir. Small fascist groups were also organized in English Canada and hostility simmered under the surface, breaking out into open violence with a riot that followed a baseball game at Toronto’s Christie Pits in August of 1933.19
The new Canadian Jewish Congress proposed to deal with these problems in a coherent manner. Caiserman’s dream was of one organization that could unite Canadian Jews in their common cause. Fighting antisemitism was naturally to be the centrepiece of Congress activities. Thus, when Caiserman heard reports that B’nai Brith was about to establish a Canadian branch of the ADL in early 1935, he was outraged, stating that “a competitive organization is about to destroy all we have done and challenge the unity of Canadian Jewry.”20
The problem was that the longer established B’nai Brith felt that it had a prior claim to representing Canadian Jews in the battle against antisemitism. Undoubtedly, personality issues intruded along with turf claims in influencing the sometimes nasty negotiations, but by 1939 the two organizations had established a joint anti-defamation agency under the name of the Joint Public Relations Committee of Canadian Jewish Congress and B’nai Brith (JPRC). The last word on this minor contretemps belongs to historian and former CJC president Irving Abella: “Though they had every right to disdain the upstart Congress for encroaching on their territory, B’nai Brith leaders were totally forthcoming.”21 This agreement would hold for more than forty years, with the two groups having equal representation on the national and regional committees, but with all public statements issued through the Congress office. Unfortunately, this has given many historians the impression that the JPRC was solely a Congress effort.
In its first years Congress organized boycott efforts against Germany, an anti-discrimination bill in Manitoba, and work in Quebec with more liberal elements of the Catholic Church. Congress also intervened with the Nationalist Party leader, Henri Bourassa, who promised to speak out against antisemitism in the Canadian parliament and followed through on that pledge. CJC carried on a wide range of anti-fascist activities, including the tracking of fascist groups, attempts to unmask German agents, and protests against fascist hate literature, which it collected for its records. The early Congress also undertook what it termed “preventive work” or education in the larger Canadian community. This included “good will fraternization” - that is, meeting with gentile groups - and “oral educational work” - largely public presentations by rabbis, including Maurice Eisendrath in Toronto and Harry J. Stern in Montreal. In one year alone, CJC claimed that four rabbis gave 189 addresses. It was this type of work, in addition to legal interventions, that the broader-based Joint Public Relations Committee assumed.22
Caiserman summarized JPRC activities for a six-month period of 1941, highlighting a number of items that included the distribution of books and pamphlets to 262 libraries, the success of the JPRC in getting the government to suppress the antisemitic La Voix du Peuple, as well as a similar publication, Chez Nous, the continuing investigation of fascist activities, supplying material to editors, and meeting with more receptive priests.23
Unfortunately, even in the midst of the terrible war - during which Hitler’s onslaught against the Jews was public knowledge, although the news of the “final solution” was not as well known - the JPRC still had to deal with traditional antisemitism. The University of Toronto’s dean of medicine asked a Jewish doctor to enlist the aid of his community in reducing Jewish numbers in the medical faculty. His problem was that more than one-quarter of his 197 students were Jewish, and, evidently, the dean thought it would be more diplomatic and less painful if the Jewish community itself took action to reduce their representation in the medical school. Of course, the JPRC refused to have anything to do with the dean’s suggestion and continued to fight the battle against quota systems in Canadian universities.24
In the legal area, the JPRC took a notable role in the Drummond Wren case, which arose in 1944. Wren represented the left-wing Workers’ Education Association, which had bought a Toronto property and then found that a restrictive covenant, including racial and ethnic discrimination, was attached to the property. Wren went to the JPRC, which agreed to take the case. JPRC lawyers J.M. Bennett, Professor Jacob Finkelman, Bora Laskin, and Charles L. Dubin, joined a larger legal team that argued the case before Justice Keiller Mackay. Justice Mackay’s courageous and creative decision struck down the restrictive covenant and even cited the Atlantic Charter and the United Nations Charter to show that the world and Canada had entered a new human rights era. Of course, he also distinguished the case from previous decisions that had upheld such covenants, but the novelty of his ruling was in the argument that the law now existed within a changed social context. Although the immediate legal impact of Drummond Wren may have been limited, Mackay’s decision did play a role when the United States Supreme Court struck down restrictive covenants in Shelley v. Kramer.25
The JPRC was also active against other restrictive covenants and represented Bernard Wolf of London, who purchased a summer cottage in 1948 at the Beach O’Pines complex on Lake Huron, only to find that it was burdened with a restrictive covenant that a property owners’ organization fought to enforce. The initial court finding by Justice Schroeder upheld the covenant, ignoring Mackay’s ruling, which never went to appeal and thus had little force as precedent. The JPRC stepped in at the appeals stage, with counsel including Bora Laskin and Sidney Harris, and eventually the case went to the Supreme Court of Canada after unfavourable rulings in the lower courts. The court disappointed some by basing its decision of November 1950 on narrow legal grounds and in not rendering a broad-based decision that might have been a landmark in the fight against discrimination in Canada. Nevertheless, the JPRC scored a significant triumph with a public that was less interested in the legal grounds of the ruling than it was in the end result - that discrimination had suffered a major setback.
The alliance of Congress and B’nai Brith became unsettled in 1964 when an all-Canadian district of the latter was established. Shortly thereafter, in 1966 an ADL office was established in Toronto, though with no overt challenge to the existence of the Joint Public Relations Committee, which had been renamed the Joint Community Relations Committee (JCRC). In 1968 ADL’s Toronto director, Sol Littman, assured Saul Hayes of CJC that he would “make every effort to guarantee the integrity of the agreement.”26 Yet the ADL program that Littman outlined in l968 was certainly within the mandate of the JCRC. The program included television spots on human rights, sponsorship of an inter-faith institute on Judaism with Christian colleges, a conference on political extremism and the role of the mass media, action against three discriminatory country clubs in the London area, using radio tapes from the ADL in New York on Canadian stations, and confronting lodge-identified issues of discrimination.27 Activity on such a broad range, along with the new aggressive style of Littman and the B’nai Brith leadership, almost guaranteed a rupture. For B’nai Brith, an aggressive ADL operation was a principle means of asserting its identity within Canada and this goal conflicted with a thirty-year-old structure in which all public declarations came from Congress. Still, the JCRC would persist for more than another decade until, in September 1981, CJC gave notice that it would terminate the relationship.28
By that time, the ADL in Canada had already given way to the League for Human Rights, established in 1970. B’nai Brith Canada had decided to give a more Canadian direction to its human-rights operation, while maintaining close ties to the American ADL. It had consolidated its advocacy programs to such an extent that it incorporated the League for Human Rights as an integral program component, in effect taking over the work of the ADL in Canada. The totality of that consolidation was to be demonstrated towards the end of the decade when Frank Dimant, executive vice-president of B’nai Brith Canada, was named as chief executive officer of the League.
After the departure from the organization of the aggressive and very visible Litman, the League was directed through the 1970s by a Protestant clergyman, Reverend Roland de Corneille.29 Many of the League efforts at that time paralleled the activities of CJC, such as the presentation of briefs to provincial and federal governments, the pursuit of Nazi war criminals in Canada, tracking and exposing neo-Nazi activities, gaining intervenor status before the courts in cases involving antisemitism. The League, however, developed its own particular expertise in the field of human rights and anti-racism training and, as multiculturalism came to the fore in Canadian life, this proved to be an important sphere of activity. Although some in the larger Jewish community would complain about the duplication of efforts, this may have been offset by the determination of each organization to be more aggressive, with competition providing incentive.
One of the major issues that had confronted the young League for Human Rights was the antisemitism emanating from the United Church Observer, which was sympathetic to the Palestinian cause and often openly hostile to Israel. In January 1972 Alf Green, president of the Toronto lodge, attacked these writings as antisemitic in the lodge Digest, and Reverend A. C. Forrest, editor of the Observer, responded with a law suit. In March 1972 the Observer crossed the line, publishing an outrageous article entitled “How the Zionists Manipulate Your News,” in which contributor John Nicholls Booth directly attacked B’nai Brith and the ADL. Booth, a Unitarian minister from Florida, was a known contributor to the American Mercury, a magazine noted for its antisemitism and racism. The League leadership saw itself as more militant and outspoken than the CJC and they relished the opportunity to confront the large and influential United Church. They served a notice of libel against the Observer, and the Church responded by inviting the League leadership to meet with the leaders of the United Church in Canada to discuss the issue. On May 4, 1973, Church moderator Reverend Bruce McLeod and Reverend George Morrison, secretary of the General Council, convened with B’nai Brith president Sydney Maislin and executive vice-president Herb Levy to sign a joint statement of reconciliation, with Lou Ronson, chair of the central region of the League, and counsel Morley Wolfe in attendance. Following their agreement, both suits were withdrawn, and not only did the Observer print a retraction, but the Church leadership thereafter became much more restrained in its pronouncements on the Middle East and, in the case of Reverend Morrison, even became pro-Israel.30 Undoubtedly, this success of the League through tough, public action in confronting a major opponent left an indelible impression, and in the following decades the League would follow the path blazed by its early, and in the case of Ronson and Wolfe, still active leaders.
A third entry into the ranks of Jewish advocacy organizations was the Jewish Labour Committee (JLC). Historian Ross Lambertson believes that “this relatively little-known organization had an impact on Canadian history out of all proportion to its size.”31 This group grew out of the social-democratic (Bundist) Workmen’s Circle and the Jewish-dominated trade unions such as the International Ladies’ Garment Workers (ILGWU), Amalgamated Clothing Workers, and the United Cap, Hat and Millinery Workers’ Union. During the war, the Jewish Labour Committee concentrated on the rescue of Jewish comrades from occupied Europe, some of whom, after reaching safety in Canada, became active in the JLC or in the Workmen’s Circle.32 After the war, the American parent organization of the JLC established the Division to Combat Racial Activities, and the Canadian branch followed suit. In April 1946 the JLC of Canada appointed as its first director, Polish-born Kalman Kaplansky, social democrat, army veteran, and former linotype operator, giving him the mission of securing the support of organized labour in the fight against racism and the fight for human rights in Canada.
The Jewish Labour Committee established a base within both major Canadian labour federations of the post-war era, the Trades and Labour Congress (TLC) and the Canadian Congress of Labour (CCL). The more conservative TLC had established a National Standing Committee on Racial Discrimination in 1944. Its chairman was Claude Jodoin of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers, who later became president of the TLC and, in 1956, the founding president of the unified Canadian Labour Congress. Jodoin was Kaplansky’s constant and dedicated partner in human-rights work. The new TLC committee issued Canadian Labour Reports and, though it was under the editorial control of Kaplansky and the JLC and served as their vehicle for publicizing human rights within the labour movement, the organization did not advertise this fact. Later, some of the major CCL unions such as the United Steelworkers of America and the United Automobile Workers funded hundreds of copies of each issue to be distributed to their activists.
The work of the Jewish Labour Committee was furthered across Canada by joint labour human-rights committees, which had full-time direction in Montreal and Toronto and part-time workers in cities such as Halifax, Winnipeg, and Vancouver. The committee leaders included a remarkable cast of contributors including, for various periods of time, David Orlikow (later a New Democratic Party member of parliament), Allan Borovoy (a leader to this day in Canadian civil liberties), Donna Hill (a sociologist), Les Wismer (a former Co-operative Commonwealth Federation member of the Ontario legislature), and even, briefly, one Bernard Landry (later a well-known Quebec political figure). These social democrats and human-rights workers helped to spread the human-rights message across the nation.
The Jewish Labour Committee carried out educational work within the labour movement through pamphlets, lectures, films, institutes, exhibits and the like. The constant message was that discrimination did not pay and that it was often the tool of employers who sought to divide the workers. It should be stressed again that the JLC itself was not the public face offered to the workers. These presentations came from the joint labour committees with no hint of the Jewish sponsorship of these various efforts. Of course, this cost the JLC something in its fundraising efforts because it did not have the public profile of the League or the JPRC. On the other hand, some of the major unions of the country preferred the low profile of the JLC and made important annual contributions to its budget.
Human-rights education within the labour movement - much of it organized by the Jewish Labour Committee - enabled the Trades and Labour Congress and the Canadian Congress of Labour to mount vigorous campaigns in the early 1950s for fair employment practices legislation and, later, for fair accommodation practices in various jurisdictions across the country. Of course, the JPRC and other human-rights groups were also active in this legislative field.
One of the more notable triumphs of the Jewish Labour Committee was in the small town of Dresden, Ontario, a town with a population of 1,700 at the end of World War II, of whom approximately three hundred were black. It was a town that became infamously identified with racism in the late 1940s. However, it must be noted that Dresden was not Montgomery, Alabama or Albany, Georgia. There were no bombs, no Southern red-necked sheriffs or the like, but there were venues catering to the public at large that refused to serve Black citizens. One group of local Blacks were determined to change things and formed the National Unity Association, which turned to groups such as the JPRC and the JLC for support. Sid Blum, director of the Joint Labour Committee, as well as two of his predecessors, Donna Hill and Vivian Mahood, kept the Dresden issue in the public eye. JPRC lawyers such as Bora Laskin and David Lewis supplied useful legal advice, while a broad coalition of labour, Jewish human-rights organizations, the National Unity Association, and its black sympathizers brought pressure on the government of Premier Leslie Frost to prosecute the Dresden offenders and to pass stronger legislation.
JLC would go on in the 1960s to take up other causes. Allan Borovoy travelled to Halifax to aid the Black community and labour supporters in Halifax. The organization was also one of the first human-rights organizations in Canada to take up the native cause. Kaplansky left the JLC after a decade to work for the CLC in Ottawa, but his work was carried on by able successors, including David Orlikow. The organization wound up its affairs at the end of the 1960s, but it had left a proud record as one of the most important Jewish advocacy organizations.33
Both the Canadian Jewish Congress and B’nai Brith Canada, through their committee structure, maintained advocacy programs on behalf of Jewish communities facing persecution around the world, in particular in the Soviet Union. In the 1970s a parallel committee to the JCRC was established, which featured at its core Congress, B’nai Brith, and the Canadian Zionist Federation. Leaders in this committee included J.B. Salsberg and David Satok representing Congress, and Boris Moroz and Max Schechter representing B’nai Brith. Both Alan Rose, national director of the CJC, and Herb Levy, executive vice-president of B’nai Brith, were actively involved in the political efforts on behalf of Soviet Jewry. Once again, as was the case with the JCRC, B’nai Brith deferred the right to be the official voice of the joint committee and, as a result, history often remembers these initiatives as solely Congress-driven. This committee was dissolved by Congress at the time of the demise of the JCRC.
In 1985, the need to develop a more formal framework for international advocacy led to the establishment of B’nai Brith Canada’s Institute for International Affairs under the leadership of Marilyn (Wainberg) Frankel, who was later to become the first woman to be president of the organization. The Institute’s mandate encompassed community education and mobilization, as well as public advocacy and government relations initiatives in the field of international human rights. The Institute became increasingly involved in monitoring the situation of Jewish communities in distress worldwide, as well as forging coalitions with other human-rights entities on global issues.
Jewish communal organization in its early stages was not so different from that of other Canadian ethnic communities, but over time the scale and diversity of organizational efforts was indeed impressive. The scale was such that, by World War I, diversity began to be viewed as a handicap rather than as an asset, and reformers within the Jewish community sought to bring order to what they viewed as chaotic inefficiency. The drive to establish cohesive charitable federations took place in almost every Jewish centre in Canada, as an effort to centralize fundraising and budgeting for the community. Many of these federations became multi-million-dollar enterprises co-ordinating Jewish welfare from cradle to grave, as they still do to this day.
This essay has examined the first efforts to organize a Canadian Jewish Congress that would not take root until 1934, and the partnership established thereafter between Congress and B’nai Brith to pursue advocacy work through the Joint Public Relations Committee. The Jewish Labour Committee entered the fray as the community’s second advocacy group, and when B’nai Brith opened an ADL office in Canada in 1966, there were, in fact, three autonomous Jewish entities working in the burgeoning field of human-rights activism, sometimes co-operatively and sometimes independently.
Many other minority ethnic and racial communities have established their own defence organizations, but few have moved beyond the narrow interests of their own groups to embrace pluralism and human rights in general. Most other minority communities knew that they could turn to the Jewish advocacy organizations when they needed help and the Jewish groups were in the forefront, educating on human rights, lobbying for legislation, and, when necessary, taking the battle to the courts.
In the years following World War II, Canada’s Jewish community felt more secure, but they identified their own security with the welfare of all minority communities. It was not just altruism that led the Jewish advocacy organizations to fight for the rights of Black Canadians, aboriginals, or other minority groups; Jewish self-interest was defined in the protection of the rights of all peoples. A genuinely pluralistic Canada offered the most secure home for Jewish Canadians, who were unequivocal in placing human-rights concerns high on the community’s agenda.