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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Stuart Schoenfeld
In a wonderfully mixed-up visual image, educators and parenting specialists advise us that, “There are only two lasting bequests that we can leave to our children. One is roots; the other, wings.” The visual image is bizarre (a flying tree?); so is the biology. Yet the sentiment is appealing in its frank acknowledgement of inconsistency. We want our children to know themselves by knowing where they came from. We also want them to be free, to make of themselves what they can with their own unique talents and dispositions. Nowhere is this ambivalence more evident than in the religious and ethnic communities in Canada that have their roots in the immigrant experience.
As we talk about our desires for our children, we also talk about our values. The mixed metaphor of roots and wings resonates beyond the specific settings of school and home. It speaks much to contemporary culture and religion. Tradition and freedom, roots and wings. There is a tension in the mixed metaphor, one we live with all the time while making choices, one we can see in the contours of Judaism in Canada.
Canada’s first congregation, Shearith Israel in Montreal, was founded in 1768 by a small group of families who looked to the Spanish and Portuguese congregations of London and New York for guidance and help. In the early 1840s, even though the Montreal community remained small, more recent Ashkenazi members separated and founded the German and Polish congregation (later the Shaar Hashomayim). In the newer settlement of Toronto, the purchase of a cemetery and efforts to hold regular Shabbat services were followed by the founding of the Holy Blossom congregation in 1856. On the Pacific coast, far from what was then Canada, the Jews of Victoria founded Congregation Emanu-El in 1862.1
These early congregations were very much on the frontier. They shared similar problems. How could newcomers, including many who might be transient, coalesce into a community? Some Jews moved on. Others married out and raised their children as Protestants or Catholics. Those who remained were a minority in a religiously conservative society. If they were to remain a distinct religious minority, they had to move from informal arrangements for prayer and teaching to something more enduring. Going through the process of establishing a congregation - making decisions on constitutions and by-laws, purchasing land for a synagogue and a cemetery, collecting dues, electing officers, and hiring employees - was a sign of settling in.
New congregations had similar initial needs to those experienced today. They needed real estate, Torah scrolls, shofars for the High Holidays and specialists with religious ritual skills. Rabbis were in short supply on the Canadian frontier, as they were throughout mid-nineteenth-century North America. The outstanding religious leader through the late nineteenth century was Abraham de Sola, who was brought from London, England to lead Shearith Israel in 1847. De Sola served with distinction for over three decades, and received an extraordinary honour in 1872 when he was invited to be the first Jew to lead the opening prayer of the United States House of Representatives. The other small congregations made do by employing individuals trained as mohels, cantors, and shochets, and with the involvement of a handful of energetic members.
The Jewish population of Canada was quite small until the 1880s. In 1881, 80 per cent of the world’s almost ten million Jews lived in the Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and German Empires. Slightly less than 2,500 lived in Canada. The Jews of central and eastern Europe, however, were on the move, fleeing towards places that promised tolerance and opportunity. From the outbreak of the Russian pogroms until the outbreak of World War I in 1914, millions fled to the United States, England, Argentina, South Africa, Canada, and elsewhere. When the outbreak of World War I curbed immigration, there were over 100,000 Jews in Canada.
As Jewish numbers grew from the 1880s on, congregations proliferated. The increase in the Canadian Jewish population, and in new congregations, was more pronounced after the failed Russian revolution in 1905. In Toronto, for example, there were four congregations at the end of the nineteenth century and twenty-five by 1914. Immigrant Jews looking for business opportunities found their ways to cities and towns in Ontario, Quebec, the Maritimes, the Prairies, and British Columbia, where they built numerous modest synagogues. As well, the Jews in the farming colonies on the Prairies set up schools, synagogues, and cemeteries. By 1936, after the period of mass migration, the demographer Louis Rosenberg counted 153 congregations in Canada. These congregations were served by thirty-three rabbis, almost half of them in Montreal, and by over 250 other “Jewish religious workers.”2
The period of mass migration was a time of intense disputes over the future of Judaism. Throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century, Jews debated the appropriate response to the novel innovations of mass citizenship, mass literacy, and science.
The promise of integration into the nation-state as equal citizens offered Jews a relief from centuries of religious prejudice, legal discrimination, and periodic violence. The 1783 Constitution of the United States incorporated the separation of church and state and promised freedom of religion. Within the British Empire, the colony of Lower Canada was a leader. The Quebec Legislative Assembly exempted elected Jews from swearing a Christian oath of office in 1832, years before a similar level of tolerance in the English parliament.
Equality of rights as citizens was a valued advance, but it contained an implied challenge to living by Jewish tradition. Citizenship, voting, and freedom of religion expressed the Enlightenment ideal of individual liberty. If Jews were going to participate in a society based on individual freedom, living as a Jew could no longer be a matter of fate, of being born in a community and living by its clear expectations of belief and practice. Jewish life became instead a matter of choice, a personal decision.
Culture as well as politics played a role in challenging a traditional Jewish outlook. National governments introduced public schools and mass literacy, teaching national identity through language and literature, and promoting the scientific view of the world. Throughout Western society, statements in holy scripture and views of religious authorities were compared to the findings of astronomy, biology, and physics and found wanting. The popularity of scientific discoveries and technological innovation whetted the appetite for new information. The stakes became even higher at the end of the nineteenth century with the development of the social sciences, which proposed secular theories of religion and non-religious theories of human nature.
One group of nineteenth-century western European Jews responded to the challenges of citizenship, science, and mass literacy with an explicit agenda for the reform of Judaism. Reformers promoted thinking of Jews as a religious group who were also loyal citizens of the nations in which they lived, whose ancient wisdom could be reinterpreted in a way consistent with a scientific, progressive outlook. Reformers examined and changed practices and beliefs that they considered contrary to the scientific and socially progressive spirit of the times. They adopted the national language as the language of the synagogue, introduced the weekly sermon on an ethical theme as the centrepiece of the Shabbat service, changed prayers, and introduced confirmation.
European rabbis who understood themselves to be the custodians of a ritualized, sacred way of life opposed the innovations of the reformers. The rabbis who opposed reform were scandalized by the deviation from centuries-old ritual practices and the open challenge to the Halachic framework of Jewish life. The emerging Orthodox position of opposition to change was particularly strong in eastern Europe. There, it was more than a response to reformers half a continent away; European Judaism was not only divided, it was under attack altogether.
Masses of displaced, impoverished shtetl Jews wandered to cities and found work in the appalling conditions of turn-of-the-century factories. Displaced and disoriented, Jewish workers knew themselves to be people in transition. Many found hope for the future in the socialist analysis of their lives. By 1897, when the Bund - the General Union of Jewish workers - held its founding congress, Jews had become one of the strongest elements of the European socialist movement. The most influential form of socialism, Marxism, denounced all religions as analgesics given by the powerful to the oppressed to dull their pain. Jewish workers were also likely to be aware that Marx himself was a renegade Jew and had written a particularly scathing condemnation of Judaism.
Socialist Jews were not the only ones to separate themselves from Judaism. The Zionist movement came into being as a coalition. Rabbis and religiously observant Jews could be found in the movement, yet its dominant tone was secular. Its official documents spoke the language of secular European nationalism. Its leaders looked to a national understanding of Jewish identity as the guide to the people’s future and had personally broken with Judaism. Leading European rabbis reciprocated, adding Zionism to socialism and Reform Judaism to their list of modern heresies.
The Jewish immigrants who came to Canada from Europe after 1881 brought this ferment over religion with them. The development of Judaism in Canada became a dialogue between the roots and wings of the metaphorical body - how much continuity, how much change?
Reform Judaism entered Canada through the turn Judaism was taking in the United States. The open liberalism of American society had attracted Jewish immigrants in significant numbers from the middle of the nineteenth century. Liberal Jews from Germany had called similarly inclined rabbis to serve their congregations. Supporters of reforms in Judaism met little opposition in America. They established the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, a federation of American congregations, and Hebrew Union College, a rabbinical seminary that opened in 1875. American reformers also continued the European pattern of holding meetings to discuss their interpretation of Judaism and to publish the results of their deliberations. In 1885, a well-attended meeting produced the “Pittsburgh Platform,” which approved of science, ethics, and other religions while deprecating the ceremonial and ritual practices of traditional Judaism, Jewish nationalism, and belief in bodily resurrection.
Canadian Jews familiar with Reform - in both its American and German settings - founded Temple Emanu-El in Montreal and introduced reforms into congregation Anshe Sholom in Hamilton in 1882. Holy Blossom Temple, the oldest congregation in Toronto, moved gradually toward the Reform movement. Reform congregations were organized in Winnipeg and Victoria, but did not last. The three congregations in Montreal, Hamilton, and Toronto remained the only outposts of the Reform movement until the 1950s.
Developments in Holy Blossom congregation give an example of how the tensions over Judaism were expressed.3 By the 1880s, members of the congregation were debating the decorum of the service. Whatever the merits of a decorous service, somewhat disorderly and noisy services were customary, as they had been in Europe. The drive for more decorum may have partly derived from within Judaism, but it clearly owed much to sensitivity over how Jewish worship was seen in the Protestant community, where refined spirituality was esteemed. Over the decade, the congregation abolished the sale of honours, required those wishing a prayer for the sick or a memorial prayer after an aliyah (a call to read from the Torah) to notify the cantor in advance, and required all to rise and sit in unison.
In the same decade, reformers unsuccessfully proposed seating men and women together. Replacing the customary informal chatting of the men’s benches, the women’s gallery, and wandering children with the family pew of husband, wife, and children could be seen as movement towards decorum, but it is also a clear violation of centuries-old practice. The traditionalists successfully defeated this initiative, but not the introduction of a women’s choir. By 1889, the congregation’s school was under the direction of an energetic advocate of reform (who had successfully introduced changes at Anshe Sholom in Hamilton), and a rump group had organized an alternative reform service on the High Holidays. When a small organ was installed in 1890, the cantor resigned and protesting traditionalists carried it into the yard. When the trustees ordered it replaced, some of the traditionalists resigned from the congregation. The new synagogue to which the congregation moved in 1887 had a larger organ built in. After the move, the congregation also instituted a late Friday evening service, traditional in form, but using the organ and including an English language sermon. Through the first two decades of the twentieth century, reformers continued to press for changes - a late Friday night service with family pews and non-traditional prayers, more English in the service, even removing men’s obligation to cover their heads in the sanctuary. More traditional members of the congregation resigned or died. While some new members who came from more traditional congregations preferred to continue customary practices, a clear majority of the newcomers supported reforms. In 1920, the congregation affiliated with the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, the congregational federation of the Reform movement.
The role of the religious professionals in the congregation shows another dimension of the tension between continuity and change. In its early years, Holy Blossom employed “reverends,” who had a wide range of ritual skills, but not the learning or authority of a rabbi. When the congregation decided it needed an English-speaking preacher to give sermons and to be its representative to the larger community, it turned to the chief rabbi of England for recommendations; he sent, in succession, two Orthodox-trained “minister-preachers.” Both left for more liberal congregations in the United States. They were followed by one of the first graduates of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. Jewish traditionalists had organized the Jewish Theological Seminary in 1886 as a rival to the Hebrew Union College, committed to Jewish tradition but open to moderate change. This orientation was to become the basis of the Conservative movement, but that was not clear at the beginning. Just as the Reform movement began with individual reforms, “conservative” was initially a “lower-case” adjective. After two years, the contract of the Jewish Theological Seminary graduate was not renewed and Holy Blossom brought Rabbi Solomon Jacobs from England, who served until his death in 1920. Rabbi Jacobs, supporting a traditional orientation in keeping with the general Jewish outlook in Toronto, was able to restrain the pace of ritual innovation.
Each of the growing number of Canadian congregations searched for equilibrium between continuity and innovation. As today, religious ties were at least as much about community as they were about belief and ritual. Many of the new congregations founded by immigrants were based on landsmanschaften (compatriot organizations), and named for places of origin in the old country. Landsmanschaft synagogues were often quite small, tiny compared to almost any synagogue today. Many met in converted houses. Synagogues were places to be with familiar faces, to speak in Yiddish, to share in the news, and to recreate familiar rituals. They were places to mark the life-cycle - for acknowledging the circumcision of sons and announcing the names of newborn daughters, for sons to be called to the Torah after their thirteenth birthday, for celebrating weddings, and for saying Kaddish for the dead, who were sometimes buried in the synagogue’s cemetery and sometimes buried half a world away. Memorial plaques prominently displaying the names of the deceased gave silent voice to the ties of continuity between generations.
Despite the traditional form of immigrant synagogues, the ritual observance of the membership was highly variable. Even as the number of congregations increased in the twentieth century, standards of observance declined. The new century brought more immigrants influenced by secular Jewish movements in Europe. They looked to labour unions, the socialist movement, or to Zionist societies as their communities. The more affluent used Saturdays for shopping and entertainment. Jewish women quietly abandoned as old fashioned the mikveh (ritual bath) and the laws restricting sexual intimacy. Those who were traditionally inclined placed their livelihoods in jeopardy by observing Shabbat and holidays, but immigrant Jews were often forced to give up Sabbath observance in order to earn a living. A Montreal newspaper estimated that Jewish workers in sweatshops laboured seventy-five to eighty hours a week.4 In a competitive economy and facing legislation that forbade Sunday store openings, Jewish shopkeepers opened on Saturdays.
Most, however, continued some reduced degree of religious practice and affiliation. The same Jews who worked, shopped, and frequented places of entertainment on Shabbat and holidays contributed what they could to build synagogues, continued to light Shabbat candles, recited the Haggadah at Passover seders, kept kosher homes, marked the life cycle with Jewish ritual, and more. However, as lax observance among the nominally Orthodox became frequent, many came to view violations of ritual practice as normal and acceptable. Consider the example of a shopkeeper who advertised in 1915 in the Toronto Jewish newspaper that a congregation had chosen him to be cantor for the High Holy Days. The advertisement stated his hours of business, which included Shabbat and holy days.5 In Montreal, Rabbi Yudel Rosenberg, writing under the pen name the Sabbath Queen, published an open letter imploring the Jewish community to return to the Sabbath’s sacred outlook and rituals.6 In the area of Kashrut, as well, standards were confusing. Any butcher who wished could advertise his meat as kosher. Supervision by different rabbis was part of the confusion.
During the wave of migration, rabbis were brought over from eastern Europe, sometimes by congregations acting together. Rabbi Jacob Gordon visited Toronto in 1904 to raise funds for the Volozhin yeshiva. He was persuaded by two congregations to remain as their rabbi and was subsequently accepted as religious leader by numerous other congregations. Rabbi Isaac Kahanovitch was brought to Winnipeg in 1907 as rabbi of Beth Jacob congregation, but within a few years was considered by many congregations to be the “chief rabbi of Western Canada.“ In Montreal, the central communal rabbi was Hirsch Cohen, a founder of the Vaad Ha’Ir (Jewish Community Council) and the Montreal Talmud Torah (community Hebrew school), who served for many years as president of the Montreal Council of Orthodox Rabbis.
The role played by these rabbis and others was influenced by the European kehillah tradition. In Canada, as in the United States, each Jewish congregation is an autonomous legal entity. In Europe, in contrast, there was a long history of Jewish communities that were recognized as legal entities. The kehillah owned and administered synagogues, schools, and ritual baths, provided charity to the Jewish poor, and regulated disputes among Jews. The rabbi was spiritual, ritual, and legal leader of the community, not just of a congregation. Traditionally oriented congregations brought over European rabbis to build up the community, not just their own congregations. Rabbi Cohen, Rabbi Gordon, Rabbi Kahanovich, and others did not disappoint. They worked to bring order into Kashrut supervision, to establish and strengthen Talmud Torahs, and to encourage poor relief and charitable giving to religious institutions. Community-wide rabbinical leadership, however, depended on voluntary assent. In Toronto, the Talmud Torah organized under Rabbi Gordon’s patronage was challenged as too modern by the Eitz Chaim school organized by Rabbi Yudel Rosenberg.7 During the Montreal “kosher meat war” of 1922-25, rival rabbis certified different butchers. The dispute was resolved when the rabbis returned Kashrut supervision to the authority of the fledgling Vaad Ha’Ir.8
The development of Canadian Judaism mirrored the gradual separation of American Judaism into three movements. The attempt to build one movement in opposition to Reform was not successful. The Jewish Theological Seminary, the first self-consciously traditional seminary, looked forward to many congregations of acculturated Jews that would retain traditional beliefs and practices, but would also be comfortable in the new world of science, scholarship, and democratic citizenship. Supporters of the Jewish Theological Seminary worked with traditionally oriented immigrants to create the Union of Orthodox Congregations in 1898. However, at the turn of the century, the large wave of Yiddish-speaking immigrants did not place acculturated rabbis high on their list of priorities. By 1902, the Union of Orthodox Congregations had decided to replace financial support for the Jewish Theological Seminary with support for a struggling New York yeshiva, which developed into the Rabbi Isaac Elhanan Theological Seminary (RIETS), an affiliate of Yeshiva University. With its openness to both religious and secular learning, Yeshiva University became the centre of what was called the “modern Orthodox” movement. After 1919, when RIETS graduated its first rabbi, Canadian congregations could then turn to Reform, Conservative, or Orthodox rabbis trained in North America.9
Congregation Shearith Israel in Montreal was one of the founders of the Union of Orthodox Congregations. Although its membership was acculturated, it was among those who had reservations about the association with the Jewish Theological Seminary. On the other hand, Shaar Hashomayim congregation in Montreal hired Jewish Theological Seminary graduate Herman Abromowitz, who served from 1902 until 1947. Under his leadership Shaar Hashomayim became an important supporter of the United Synagogue of America, the congregational federation of the Conservative movement. In Toronto, European-trained, Orthodox Rabbi Gordon remained the senior rabbi of Goel Tzedec, the city’s second-oldest congregation. Acculturated and less traditional members of the congregation wanted a rabbi who would speak in English every week, and, in 1926, under the leadership of a new rabbi from the Jewish Theological Seminary, Goel Tzedec became part of the United Synagogue of America.
While rabbinical seminaries and congregational federations had important long-term consequences for Judaism in the US and Canada, they were of little consequence to the average Jew in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Poor immigrants came with ambition and determination to do well. They worked long hours in sweatshops under dangerous, unhealthy conditions or gave their lives over to their businesses. The parts of Judaism that mattered to most immigrants were not seminaries and congregational federations, but the folk traditions of home and synagogue.
The increasing difficulty that Jews faced in entering Canada in the 1920s was followed by their complete exclusion in the 1930s. Without a fresh wave of immigrants, it might have appeared that the religious dimension of Canadian Jewish life had stabilized. The large previous wave of immigrants had set up their congregations and schools. Rabbis had immigrated, established followings in the community, and begun to work together. Different interpretations of contemporary Judaism had coalesced into movements, each with its own federation of affiliated congregations, rabbinical seminary, and association of rabbis. The overwhelming majority of congregations considered themselves Orthodox, but some congregations had affiliated with the Conservative movement and three were Reform. The large majority of Canadian Jews had adopted an inconsistent, but practical, Judaism that combined Orthodox affiliation and a reduced level of ritual observance with hard work and, financial circumstances permitting, participation in the entertainments and luxuries of the emerging consumer society.
Beneath this apparent stability, as always, was change. The community of immigrants was becoming more sophisticated, more integrated into Canadian economic and political life. The younger generation was growing up English-speaking, acquiring the secular knowledge and skills needed to be successful in their later careers. The prestige associated in the European past with religious study and entry into a yeshiva was now being conferred upon the history, literature, and, especially, the sciences of Western civilization.
While immigrants could rely on the knowledge of Jewish thought and ritual they had acquired in their families and communities in the old country, their children lived in a less self-contained Jewish world. For most, Jewish education was rudimentary. What they learned was ambivalence. The ambivalence can be seen in the celebration of bar mitzvah, which was sometimes a simple aliyah on a Monday or Thursday, and sometimes a more formal event on Saturday morning. The family would take great pride that the thirteen-year-old had reached his “age of maturity.” The early adolescent would demonstrate basic synagogue skills, perhaps make a speech, and be the centre of attention at a modest social event. Afterward, there was the full expectation that the early adolescent would hardly ever be seen in synagogue, even less than his father. Despite the discrepancy between the rhetoric of becoming part of the minyan and the reality of subsequent absence, these were not insincere rituals, but profoundly ambivalent ones. Parents really did want their children to acknowledge their roots, and to somehow stay rooted, even as they took pride in (or worried about) their children’s wings.
Jewish schools supplemented what children learned in the family. The most common form of Jewish education was the cheder. In crowded rooms, after school and on Sundays, immigrant melameds taught basic skills needed for bar mitzvah, more or less successfully. The Talmud Torahs and secular Jewish schools were more ambitious, but faced the challenges of teacher shortages, lack of textbooks, unsystematic curricula, and students who had already spent many hours in public school classrooms and were often irregular in their attendance. Parents were very likely to enroll their sons in Jewish schools for at least a year or two. They were less likely to enroll their daughters.
Through the 1930s and 1940s, Canadian Jews poured their energy into the fight against antisemitism and fascism, the Jewish workers movements, and the drive of family upon family for successful integration. They revived the Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC) and founded the Joint Public Relations Committee of CJC and B’nai Brith (JPRC). They took leading roles in the union movement and in socialist politics. They pushed their children to see success in school as the door to a better future. In the following decades, Canadian Jews gave more attention to religious life.
Religious life in Canada in the 1950s and 1960s is often thought of as part of the process of suburbanization. Just as the Catholic Church and Protestant congregations built new churches in the suburbs, Canadian Jews did not leave their religion behind when they moved from the inner cities of Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg, Ottawa, Vancouver, Hamilton, Calgary, and Edmonton to new neighbourhoods. Jews in new suburbs would gather in rented premises for the High Holidays and then decide to continue as a congregation. Central city congregations relocated.
Surveys of movement identification across Canada in the 1960s and 1970s showed a substantial shift.10 The Jews of Montreal remained the most traditional in their religious identities. While a Reconstructionist congregation was founded in Montreal, a second Reform congregation did not last. New Sephardic synagogues and the growing Hasidic community supplemented well-established Orthodox institutions. Montreal’s Vaad Ha’Ir continued to play an important role in the city’s Jewish life, with its extensive program of Kashrut supervision and as a network for the Orthodox community. Across the country, however, identification with the Conservative movement became as common as identification with the Orthodox. Existing Conservative congregations were joined by those whose suburban relocation coincided with the decision to identify as Conservative, and by newly organized congregations. New Reform congregations were founded, not only in the suburbs of Toronto, Vancouver and Winnipeg, but, by the1990s, in Calgary, Edmonton, Kingston, London, Regina, Victoria, and Waterloo, as well.
Suburbanization was associated with a new type of congregation - the synagogue centre. The synagogue centre is more than a place of worship. Rather it is a place that is open all week, with many different types of activities supplementing worship - recreational facilities, a library, adult education classes, a brotherhood and a sisterhood, and a school (colloquially, “a shul with a school and a pool”). Synagogue centres were built with attractive social halls for wedding, bar mitzvah, and bat mitzvah receptions. Bar mitzvah celebrations were becoming more elaborate, and bat mitzvah was slowly becoming more fashionable.
The authors of Crestwood Heights, a study in the early 1950s of an affluent suburb of Toronto, described the religion of its residents, Jews and Christians alike, as “more a matter of habit than of deep convictions, [more] a socially useful practice than a source of spiritual solace.“ The inconsistent, ambivalent religiosity of the immigrant generation continued into the lives of their children, albeit altered by new conditions of economic success. Parents and teachers in Crestwood Heights encouraged children to be individuals-to think for themselves, to discover their own talents and to cultivate the skill of making their own way in life. They also encouraged children to be comfortable with religion, to think of it as a means to the ends of happiness, peace of mind, or mental health.11
This pastel portrait of the times overlooks its darker tones. Six million European Jews, one third of world Jewry, had been recently murdered. The Nuremberg trials had given way to the Cold War and to what Elie Wiesel has described as “the silence” about the Holocaust. Yet the Holocaust was a presence in the lives of the Jews in Canada - in their memories of failure to persuade Canada to open its gates in the 1930s, in the loss of relatives, and among the tens of thousands of survivors who arrived after the war. Responding to the Shoah was not an abstract discussion among scholars, but a lived experience that required of Jews that they take some stance toward Judaism. As ambivalent as many Jews had become about Judaism, few were willing to become public atheists. The University of Toronto philosopher Emil Fackenheim struck a responsive chord when he argued that the abandonment of Judaism would be giving a posthumous victory to Hitler. All Judaisms after the war became post-Holocaust Judaism. There was no way that any serious discussion of faith and practice could avoid it.
Hasidic and other Orthodox immigrants are part of the story of post-Holocaust Judaism in Canada.12 Lubavitch yeshiva students arrived in Montreal from Europe via Shanghai in 1941, forerunners of other Hasidic groups, among which the other large ones are Satmar, Belz, and Tash. Through residential concentration, distinctive dress, common use of Yiddish as their everyday language, and frequent participation in communal rituals, Hasidim maintain intense social ties among themselves and preserve boundaries that separate them from others. Their schools play an especially important role in maintaining their separation. Hasidic schools prepare young men to become yeshiva students and young women to be mothers. Education that might endanger these goals - learning about evolution or reading library books for example - is excluded.13 Over 4,000 Hasidim now live in the Montreal area,14 and a noticeable group live in Toronto. Lubavitch Hasidim conduct outreach work among less-observant Jews, sending rabbis to create new Lubavitch centres. Chabad has eighteen locations in the Montreal area, eight in the Toronto area, and is found in Halifax, Ottawa, Nepean, Hamilton, London, Winnipeg, Calgary, Edmonton, Vancouver, Richmond, and Surrey.
Post-war immigration brought other observant Orthodox survivors of the Holocaust to Canada. While Canadian Orthodoxy had made accommodations to the inconsistent observance of most of its adherents and to the appeal of Conservative and Reform movements, European Orthodoxy had defined itself in vigorous opposition to deviationist movements - Reform, socialist, and Zionist. This adversarial orientation and the expectation of conformity with at least the public ritual obligations of Kashrut and Shabbat observance had an impact on Canadian Orthodoxy. Orthodox congregations became more insistent on ritual observance. Relations with the Conservative and Reform movements became more strained. The observant Orthodox also enlarged the number of advocates of more intensive Jewish schooling.
The second half of the twentieth century saw significant developments in Jewish education. Canadian Judaism has had to adjust to the important role played in modern times by public education. From the primary grades through university, public education identifies the academically talented and channels them into the specialized areas of knowledge required by complex technological societies. As in other countries, Jews in Canada have been exceptional in recognizing the usefulness of education, a heritage, perhaps, of the long Jewish history of rewarding and respecting education. In the period of mass migration, Jewish education was limited for financial reasons and by the importance of success in public school as a tool for integration and advancement. In the post-war period, Jewish education became an increasingly important aspect of community life.
In the 1950s, two contrasting trends coexisted. Reform and Conservative congregational school enrolment expanded in new synagogue centres. Congregational schools brought more families into places offering worship and education together, retaining the after-school and Sunday schedule. At the same time, while Talmud Torahs had begun opening up day-school divisions before the post-war suburban migration, day-school enrolment grew rapidly after the movement to the suburbs.15, 16
By the early 1960s a third of children receiving Jewish education in Canada were enrolled in day schools. Most day schools were under Orthodox sponsorship, but a few were secular schools teaching Jewish culture, such as Bialik in Toronto or the Jewish People’s School in Montreal. In the 1960s and 1970s, Quebec, Manitoba, Alberta, and British Columbia made private schools, including Jewish day schools, eligible for financial subsidies towards the secular part of the curriculum. In the 1980s, the Edmonton Talmud Torah was incorporated into the public school system as an alternative school. However, an earlier initiative in Ontario in the 1970s to bring the largest Jewish day school into “associate” status with its local public school board failed. Ontario Jewish federations responded to the argument that day-school education was a communal priority by devoting a very large percentage of the annual budget to day-school tuition subsidies.17
Day-school enrolment across Canada continued to rise through the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, as did enrolment in private schools in general. The Conservative movement, and later the Reform movement, opened day schools. Attendance at Jewish day school is most common in Montreal, where the large majority of Jewish children are enrolled at the elementary level.18 Almost all day schools are identified with a branch of Judaism, or are community schools with a strong religious dimension in the curriculum.
Supplementary Hebrew schools, which are mostly sponsored by congregations, continue to educate large numbers of Jewish youth. Supplementary schools face the challenge of dealing with the ambivalence built into their structure; the challenge of helping students and their parents to connect the studies in Hebrew school with the secular education learned in public school, and to give the resources for building Jewish identity in a part-time setting.
Canadian Judaism has also been profoundly affected by the establishment of Israel. Secular Zionists founded the Jewish state, but they did not foresee the role Judaism would play. Orthodox Jews have been part of the Zionist movement since its beginning and were organized as a distinct Religious Zionist wing in 1902. The Religious Zionist party has been a regular coalition partner, first in the twenty-eight-year reign of socialist Zionism, and in successive governments, whether of the right or of the left, that have followed. Moreover, the massive post-war immigration of European refugees included surviving Orthodox rabbis, their students, and followers. These non-Zionist Orthodox were for many years outside the government coalition, but their votes also mattered, giving their parties political influence. After the creation of Israel, Sephardim immigrated in large numbers to Israel and France, with some also going to Canada, and laying the foundation for their distinct community centred in Montreal. Sephardim were not successfully organized into an Israeli Orthodox party until the 1990s, but when this did occur under the Shas party, it changed Israel’s political landscape.
Orthodox influence in Israel has clearly strengthened Orthodoxy in Canada. Religious Zionists, Hasidim, the modern Orthodox, and Sephardim each have their own networks connecting them to Israel. Orthodox Canadian Jews often send their children for studies at yeshivas and universities there. The Conservative and Reform movements have also worked to build up their institutions in Israel. Partnership with the Diaspora is important to the Israeli branches of all three movements, and their sister organizations in Canada work to promote a strong relationship with Israel, cultivating links with the congregations, schools, camps, youth groups, and charities of their Israeli counterparts.
The division of modern Judaism into institutionally separate Reform, Orthodox and Conservative movements took place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The small Reconstructionist movement, which has two congregations in Canada, separated from the Conservative movement in the 1960s. The most common identification of Canadian Jews is Conservative, while Orthodox congregations and schools have grown, as have Reform congregations. Of the three large communities, Montreal is the most Orthodox, Toronto is mixed, and Vancouver has many who are unaffiliated. This information is important, but some aspects are missed by such a broad overview.
Firstly, the institutional structure of the branches of Judaism has become blurred and more complex. In Montreal, the most recent Jewish community survey added a new choice to the conventional list of movements. When the choice “traditional Sephardic” was added, 13 per cent of respondents chose that category. In previous surveys, some of them had identified as Orthodox and some as Conservative. There are also active unaffiliated congregations whose practices and outlook do not fit neatly into the Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist division. The increasing openness of Reform Judaism to traditional ritual has made for much less clear boundaries with the Conservative and Reconstructionist movements. Another small network has recently joined the list of movements. The Union for Traditional Judaism joins rabbis and laymen who have both Conservative and Modern Orthodox backgrounds. The Union lists rabbis of leading Conservative congregations in Toronto as prominent members. If the movement at the beginning of the twentieth century was towards the separation of distinctive branches of Judaism, at the beginning of the twenty-first century these developments are all signs of movement towards blurring the boundaries.
Secondly, most Canadian Jews see movement labels as points along a continuum rather than separate forms of Judaism. Surveys from Toronto19 and Montreal20 give information about the continuum of ritual observance in the two largest communities, which account together for about two-thirds of Canadian Jews. Fasting on Tanis Esther (Fast of Esther) is uncommon (5 per cent in Toronto) as are not handling money on Shabbat (10 per cent in Toronto) and attending synagogue more than once a week (10 per cent in Toronto, 15 per cent in Montreal). Lighting Friday-night candles and keeping separate dishes for meat and dairy according to the requirements of Kashrut are more common (35 to 40 per cent in Toronto, about 50 per cent in Montreal). About half of the households in Toronto and almost two-thirds in Montreal are synagogue members. A substantial majority in both cities attend synagogue at least on High Holidays and a few times a year (about 60 per cent in Toronto, 80 per cent in Montreal). Fasting on Yom Kippur, lighting Hanukkah candles, and attending a seder are the most common ritual observances (80 to 90 per cent).
Most of the very observant are members of Orthodox synagogues and social networks where ritual observance is conventional. Another small group who are not Orthodox contribute to the numbers who regularly attend synagogue and follow Shabbat restrictions. A much larger group with varying patterns of affiliation marks Shabbat and Kashrut in the home, belongs to congregations, and attends occasionally. Of the remaining group, most mark the annual calendar in some way with Jewish ritual. This continuum reflects the view of most Jews that ritual observance is a choice. The view that ritual observance is an obligation is common only among the Orthodox minority.21
For the majority with moderate and low levels of observance, the most commonly retained rituals involve home and children. Judaism, like other religions, helps give meaning to family events and life-cycle transitions. These events and transitions are often decision points for individuals, when they have to make up their minds about how they want Judaism to be expressed in their lives. There are some family rituals that we know are common and important for Canadian Judaism, even though we do not have statistics about them. The life-cycle events of bris, bar and bat mitzvah, marriage, and Jewish burial are very common, even among those who practice few other rituals. Bar mitzvah and bat mitzvah have become important social events, retaining the same function they had for the immigrant generation. Such celebrations act as rituals of identification, which blend ceremony and celebration, and bring together synagogue, school, family, and friends.22
The exploration of choices and the focus on Judaism rather than on its branches can be seen in two successful examples of Jewish outreach in Toronto. Aish Hatorah grew from a yeshiva in the Old City of Jerusalem. In Toronto, it is staffed by Orthodox rabbis, who teach and hold services at several locations. Aish Hatorah describes itself as “an international network of Jewish educational centres, where Jews from all backgrounds can explore their heritage in an open, non-judgmental atmosphere.” It does not expect that the Jews who come to it will already be committed to Orthodox beliefs and practices. Its classes focus on how (Orthodox) Judaism can help them understand and deal with the issues in their lives. A similar approach is taken by Kolel, which has three permanent faculty - a Reform rabbi (director), a Conservative rabbi, and an educator who has worked in both the Reform and Conservative movements. Kolel describes itself as “the adult centre for liberal Jewish learning” and as a “pluralistic, egalitarian institution where men and women can engage in Jewish learning which values both traditional and liberal interpretations.”
Similarly, the importance of choice can also be seen in new opportunities for Jewish women. Women are choosing to participate in Jewish adult education and to engage in higher level studies that have previously been male domains. While there are still few female rabbis in Canada, they are no longer a novelty. Women are also participating in “traditional-egalitarian” congregations,23 adult bat mitzvah,24 and innovative rituals,25 aware that what they do with Judaism in their own lives is a matter of choice, not fate.
Roughly a hundred years past the wave of migration that established the Jewish community, Canadian Judaism appears to be facing substantially different issues. A hundred years ago, Jews were immigrating into a country with a deeply felt Catholic and Protestant division, where religious observance was conventional, and religious beliefs part of public discourse. Today, while committed Catholics and Protestants remain important segments of Canadian society, the religious dimension of Canadian society has gone through profound changes.
Many Canadians are former or lapsed Catholics, and many nominal Protestants rarely attend church. A series of scandals, which have left no religious group untouched, has brought organized religion into disrepute. Christian teachings have been taken out of public-school curricula, leaving educational values that are individualistic and tolerant on the one hand, and technocratic and utilitarian on the other. Sunday has become another shopping day. Popular culture - movies, radio, television - usually has only superficial religious content. Indeed, social critics argue that our public culture is more about advertising than anything else, an indication that the strongest contemporary religion is the cult of consumption.
There are signs, though, of the persistence of religion, a phenomenon that is not unique to Canada. A hundred years ago, intellectuals were confidently forecasting a trend towards secularization, as more and more people learned to live without religion. This forecast has turned out to be a poor guide to current realities. Something is keeping religion alive in many different parts of the world. In the prosperous, democratic, well-educated parts of the world, the most common face of religion is as a resource for spiritual seekers. The other face of contemporary religion is seen most commonly in the parts of the world where life is dangerous and unpredictable, and in these settings many turn to religion for solace and guidance.
Like the roots and wings we value in our metaphorical bodies, the two faces of contemporary religion may appear to be alternatives, but are, in fact, complementary. The autonomy of spiritual seeking and the secure stability of a religious community are both desirable. As we enter the twenty-first century, both faces of religion can be found in Canadian Judaism. In any living tradition, new times raise new issues and evoke new interpretations. The struggle over Judaism that was raging in the formative years of the Canadian Jewish community still continues.