Our Formidable Firsts: Ontario Jewish Heritage Month

Our Formidable Firsts: Ontario Jewish Heritage Month

By Sharoni Sibony

Holy Blossom Temple has a proud legacy of pioneering, since its establishment in 1856 as the first Jewish congregation in Upper Canada. For Ontario Jewish Heritage Month this year, we want to celebrate our formidable firsts and share them with our wider community on social media. Each Friday throughout the month of May, our Archives Committee will be using Facebook and Instagram to share a new image and story about our history of innovation and community partnerships. We hope that you’ll help promote these stories by sharing the posts with your networks.

Ontario is home to more than 200,000 Jews, representing about half of the current Canadian Jewish population. Since 2012, the provincial government has recognized the month of May as Jewish Heritage Month – and the federal government followed suit in 2018 at the national level.

For a Jewish congregation, every day is obviously about Jewish heritage. But we also believe in the importance of remembering and sharing our history in place, our deep roots and wide branches in Ontario, and the ways in which our congregation has supported the growth and development of the wider Toronto Jewish community.

When Victorian Toronto was still a quiet colonial outpost, known alternately as the “City of Churches” or “Hogtown,” the establishment of a 400-seat Jewish synagogue on Richmond Street in 1876 was front-page news in all the city newspapers. Over the next decades, the Richmond Street synagogue would evolve from an orthodox congregation with a women’s gallery to the champion of a liberal Jewish tradition, a nascent Reform Judaism, with changing and sometimes controversial practises, but always speaking for the growing Jewish community in the city.

When Eastern European Jewish immigrants started to settle in Toronto, nearly tripling the city’s Jewish population in just a few short years, Holy Blossom responded to the growing demands of their poor brethren by building a bigger synagogue on Bond Street in 1897. Though this didn’t attract the newcomers the way they’d hoped, the Holy Blossom members contributed large sums of money to sustain the growing community which now spread out across St. John’s Ward and shortly thereafter into Kensington Market.

Between 1900 and 1920, Holy Blossom was now just one of about 100 Jewish congregations in the city, but our leadership remained the main representatives of the Toronto Jewish community, advocating against Presbyterian missions to proselytize newcomer Jews and advocating at all levels of Canadian government for the needs of the Jews.

For a fuller history of the congregation, we invite you to revisit Irving Abella’s wonderful “Brief History of Holy Blossom Temple’s First 150 Years” and to watch for more #formidablefirsts in your social media feed every coming Friday!

Shabbat Shalom and Chag Sameach.