page_title: History of the Jews in Canada
section_title: Growth of the Canadian Jewish community (1850–1939)
hierarchical_section_title: History of the Jews in Canada / Growth of the Canadian Jewish community (1850–1939)
caption_attribution_description: English: Congregation Emanu-El, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
context_page_description: The history of the Jews in Canada is the history of Canadian citizens who follow Judaism as their religion and/or are ethnically Jewish. Jewish Canadians are a part of the greater Jewish diaspora and form the fourth largest Jewish community in the world, exceeded only by those in Israel, the United States, and France. As of 2011, Statistics Canada listed 329,500 adherents to the Jewish religion in Canada and 309,650 who claimed Jewish as an ethnicity. One does not necessarily include the other and studies which have attempted to combine the two streams have arrived at figures in excess of 375,000 Jews in Canada. This total would account for approximately 1.1% of the Canadian population.
  The Jewish community in Canada is composed predominantly of Ashkenazi Jews and their descendants. Other Jewish ethnic divisions are also represented and include Sephardi Jews, Mizrahi Jews, and Bene Israel. A number of converts to Judaism make up the Jewish-Canadian community, which manifests a wide range of Jewish cultural traditions and encompasses the full spectrum of Jewish religious observance.
context_section_description: With the beginning of the pogroms of Russia in the 1880s, and continuing through the growing anti-Semitism of the early 20th century, millions of Jews began to flee the Pale of Settlement and other areas of Eastern Europe for the West.  Although the United States received the overwhelming majority of these immigrants, Canada was also a destination of choice due to Government of Canada and Canadian Pacific Railway efforts to develop Canada after Confederation.  Between 1880 and 1930, the Jewish population of Canada grew to over 155,000.  At the time, according to the 1901 census of Montreal, only 6861 Jews were residents.
  Jewish immigrants brought a tradition of establishing a communal body, called a kehilla to look after the social and welfare needs of their less fortunate.  Virtually all of these Jewish refugees were very poor. Wealthy Jewish philanthropists, who had come to Canada much earlier, felt it was their social responsibility to help their fellow Jews get established in this new country.  One such man was Abraham de Sola, who founded the Hebrew Philanthropic Society. In Montreal and Toronto, there developed a wide range of communal organizations and groups.  Recently arrived immigrant Jews also founded landsmenschaften, guilds of people who came originally from the same village.
  Most of these immigrants established communities in the larger cities.  Canada's first ever census, recorded that in 1871 there were 1,115 Jews in Canada; 409 in Montreal, 157 in Toronto, 131 in Hamilton and the rest were dispersed in small communities along the St. Lawrence River. When elected mayor of Alexandria in 1914, George Simon had the double honour of being both the first Jewish mayor in Canada, as well as the youngest mayor in the country at the time. He died suddenly in 1969 while serving his tenth term in office.
  A community of about 100 settled in Victoria, British Columbia to open shops to supply prospectors during the Cariboo Gold Rush (and later the Klondike Gold Rush in the Yukon).  This led to the opening of a synagogue in Victoria, British Columbia in 1862. In 1875, B'nai B'rith Canada was formed as a Jewish fraternal organization. When British Columbia sent their delegation to Ottawa to agree on the colony's entry into Confederation, a Jew, Henry Nathan, Jr., was among them.  Nathan eventually became the first Canadian Jewish Member of Parliament. In 1899, the Federation of Canadian Zionist Societies was founded to champion Zionism, and became the first nation-wide Jewish group. The overwhelming majority of Canadian Jews were Ashkenazim who came from either the Austrian empire or the Russian empire. Jewish women tended to be particularly active in Canadian Zionism, perhaps because many of the Zionist groups were secular. 
  By 1911, there were Jewish communities in all of Canada's major cities. By 1914, there were about 100, 000 Jews in Canada with three quarters living in either Montreal or Toronto. The overwhelming majority of Canadian Jews were Ashkenazim who came from either the Austrian empire or the Russian empire. There were two competing strands of Jewish nationalism in Eastern Europe in the early 20th century, namely Zionism and another tendency that favored forming separate Jewish cultural institutions with a focus on promoting Yiddish. Institutions such as the Montreal Jewish Library with its collection of Yiddish books were examples of the latter tendency. 
  The Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC) was founded in 1919 and would be the major representative body of the Canadian Jewish community for 90 years. Much of its work was focused on lobbying government around issues of immigration, human rights and anti-Semitism. One of the terms of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles were the so-called "minorities treaties" that committed Eastern European states with substantial Jewish populations such as Poland, Romania, and Czechoslovakia to protect the rights of minorities with the League of Nations to monitor their compliance. The CJC was founded in part to lobby the government of Canada to use its influence at the League of N
caption: Congregation Emmanu-El Synagogue (1863) in Victoria, British Columbia, the oldest Synagogue in Canada still in use, and the oldest on the West Coast of North America
exif: {"Image Make": "SONY", "Image Model": "ILCE-6000", "Image XResolution": "240", "Image YResolution": "240", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 5.6 (Windows)", "Image DateTime": "2018:05:05 21:24:14", "Image Artist": "Michal Klajban", "Image Copyright": "\u00a9 Michal Klajban", "Image ExifOffset": "260", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "966", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "21796", "EXIF ExposureTime": "1/160", "EXIF FNumber": "9", "EXIF ExposureProgram": "Program Normal", "EXIF ISOSpeedRatings": "100", "EXIF SensitivityType": "Recommended Exposure Index", "EXIF RecommendedExposureIndex": "100", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0230", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2018:05:01 21:37:45", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2018:05:01 21:37:45", "EXIF ShutterSpeedValue": "915241/125000", "EXIF ApertureValue": "126797/20000", "EXIF BrightnessValue": "12137/1280", "EXIF ExposureBiasValue": "0", "EXIF MaxApertureValue": "555/128", "EXIF MeteringMode": "Pattern", "EXIF LightSource": "Unknown", "EXIF Flash": "Flash did not fire, compulsory flash mode", "EXIF FocalLength": "24", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF FocalPlaneXResolution": "83662979/32768", "EXIF FocalPlaneYResolution": "83662979/32768", "EXIF FocalPlaneResolutionUnit": "3", "EXIF FileSource": "Digital Camera", "EXIF SceneType": "Directly Photographed", "EXIF CustomRendered": "Normal", "EXIF ExposureMode": "Auto Exposure", "EXIF WhiteBalance": "Auto", "EXIF DigitalZoomRatio": "1", "EXIF FocalLengthIn35mmFilm": "36", "EXIF SceneCaptureType": "Standard", "EXIF Contrast": "Normal", "EXIF Saturation": "Normal", "EXIF Sharpness": "Normal", "EXIF LensSpecification": "[16, 50, 7/2, 28/5]", "EXIF LensModel": "E PZ 16-50mm F3.5-5.6 OSS"}