From HBT Archives: High Holidays Past

High Holidays Past

By the Archives Committee

Holy Blossom’s Archives Committee has spent August exploring High Holiday highlights from the past for publishing on Instagram and Facebook. In the lead up to the High Holidays this year, we’d like to share them with our whole Holy Blossom congregation.

Holy Blossom’s first Rosh Hashanah service, held on the third floor over this drugstore. Jewish year 5616

Did you know that it was only towards the middle of the 19th century when Jews began to find their way to Toronto? In his authoritative history of Toronto Jewry, Stephen Speisman tells us that an 1846 census recorded just 12 Jews here. They came primarily from England, but also Germany and the United States, and many returned to those places too. By 1849 those early settlers established the first Jewish communal organization, a burial ground which came to be called “Jews Cemetery”. The land was legally purchased but the initial organization behind it faded from the record.

Just a few years later, an 1851 census noted 57 Jews in Toronto and 77 more in the vicinity of the city. In 1856 local merchant Lewis Samuel and 16 other founding members decided to create a formal synagogue to support that growing Jewish life. In the space of three weeks they canvassed other Jews, rented a third-floor room above a drug store at the southeast corner of Richmond and Yonge Streets, borrowed a Torah scroll, and on September 29th held Rosh Hashanah services. It was the Jewish year 5616.

Rosh Hashanah 5784
168 years strong, still blowing the shofar and still growing along with a growing Toronto Jewish community

That congregation was Holy Blossom, the first lasting Jewish communal organization in the city of Toronto. According to census figures for Toronto, Jews in the city now number almost 190,000 and are almost half of the entire Jewish population of Canada. Toronto is one of the largest Jewish communities outside of Israel and larger even than many Israeli cities.