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Jewish History - Origins
Origins
The first Jews to arrive in Canada were sutlers—that is, pedlars who sold food and other supplies to soldiers—for the British forces in Quebec during the Seven Years War (1756-1763). Most eventually settled in Montreal and a Jewish congregation was established there in 1768.
It was not until Kingston became the capital of the United Province of Canada East and Canada West, from 1841 to 1844, that the city attracted its first Jewish resident, Abraham Nordheimer, from Bavaria. He was hired to be Governor-General Sir Charles Bagot’s music teacher. Within a few years, he left to join his brother in Toronto to manufacture pianos and help the Jewish congregation there procure its own graveyard.
The chevra kadisha, or burial society, is the first institution to be founded in nascent Jewish communities; ensuring proper burial usually precedes the building of synagogues. The date of the formal establishment of Kingston’s Jewish community, then, is 1897, the year Simon Oberndorffer, among others, succeeded in marshalling local efforts to purchase land for a cemetery on Sydenham Road, on the western outskirts of town.
Oberndorffer was also from Germany, arriving here in 1857 by way of New York. If German Jews such as the Nordheimers and the Oberndorffers constituted the first small wave of Jewish immigration to Kingston, the Eastern Europeans, or Ostjuden, comprised the second, and much larger, wave. To this day, their descendants comprise the majority of the Kingston’s Jewish population. Between 1891 and 1921, at a time when Jews were fleeing, virtually en masse, from the Russian Empire’s Pale of Settlement in the face of political chaos, pogroms, and economic liability, the number of Jews here grew from 39 to 303; that is, by a factor of eight. Meanwhile, Kingston’s overall population grew much more slowly in the same time period, from 19,263 persons to 21,753.
Czarina Catherine II promulgated the “Pale of Settlement” in the late eighteenth century as a means by which to delimit Jewish movement within the Russian Empire. It covered an enormous geographic area, including today’s Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, Moldava, Ukraine (including the Crimea), and parts of Poland. The Ostjuden cannot, therefore, be lumped together as a single group; their local customs varied, as did their rites of worship. The nearer to Lithuania, the more likely they were to be strictly Orthodox; the further from it, the greater the likelihood of Hassidic influence. Though Eastern European Jews shared the same mother tongue, Yiddish, it was spoken differently in different places. There were at least three distinct forms: the central dialect (popularly referred to as “poylish/galitsyaner”); the northern dialect (popularly referred to as “litvish”); and the southern dialect (popularly referred to as volinyer/podolyer/besaraber”).
Most of the Ostjuden arriving in Kingston originated in the Russian Imperial gubernia or provinces of Grodno, Vilna, Kovno, and Vitebsk (i.e., modern-day eastern Poland, Belarus, Lithuania, and Latvia, in that order). A lesser number departed from Kiev and Podolia (northern and southern Ukraine), and still fewer from western and central Poland.
A Jewish settlement takes root when it acquires a cemetery. With the construction of a synagogue it begins to mature. In 1910, Kingston’s first synagogue (since demolished) was built on Queen Street, across from St. Paul’s Anglican Church. The project was made possible through the diplomacy and munificence of a recently arrived Eastern European immigrant, Isaac Cohen, originally of Lithuania. Thus Oberndorffer and Cohen, two businessmen—the former a cigar-maker, the second a scrap-dealer turned battery manufacturer—are often considered the founders of Kingston’s Jewish community.
