Holocaust Survivors in Canada

The reorganization of postwar Jewish religious life among Holocaust survivors occurred throughout Canada, and in different ways. Montreal served as host to the development of Canada’s hub of Hassidic and ultra- Orthodox Jewish life. Elsewhere, groups of survivors joined and established landsmanshaftn and over time initiated the development of spiritual congregations. Membership bases derived primarily from existing mutual benefit societies and remained limited to individuals (survivors or Canadian Jews) originating in the same European regions. This pattern persisted across much of the country. But in Toronto, two Holocaust refugee’s survivor groups followed another path. With members originating from diverse parts of Europe, and stemming from different backgrounds and wartime experiences, two distinct “survivor” congregations emerged: Congregation Habonim was a liberal synagogue that operated along the lines of central European traditions, whereas Kehal Machzikei Hadas-Clanton Park Synagogue maintained the religious orientation, customs, and norms of a traditional Orthodox shul.¹

Organizations, free loan societies, and religious communities that emerged in postwar Canada consisted of groups of survivors searching for safe environs and comfort among like-minded persons with similar life experiences. The matter of locale and proximity to affordable living abodes also strongly influenced communal membership and “belonging.” Those involved in building Congregations Habonim and Clanton Park were affected by similar forces. But, like the Hassidim in Montreal, the congregations’ future founders encountered no place for themselves within Toronto’s existing Jewish communities. Numerous factors contributed to this sense of spiritual rootlessness. Inge Spitz, a German Jewish survivor, remembered that her father-in-law helped found Habonim and served as its first president out of a sense of desperation: “We were looking for people from the same backgrounds, and were not accepted by other shuls.”² Unfamiliar liturgies and melodies, and the sense that their foreign languages, cultures, and religious traditions alienated them from local congregations, prompted the survivors to unite and form their own prayer centres and, subsequently, spiritual, social, and economic communities.

Habonim was one of the first Holocaust refugee/ survivor congregations to emerge in Canada.³ A pair of Czech Jewish refugees, brothers Curt and Willy Fleischer, along with their colleague, Willy Lobel, first conceived of the congregation in 1942 Toronto for the purpose of providing High Holiday services for the small cluster of central and Western European refugees who adhered to a brand of liberal Judaism and attended the social group the New World Club. As was the case with most central European Jewish refugees to enter Canada in the latter part of the 1930s, neither the Fleischer brothers, with Curt’s wife, Lola, nor Lobel had any relatives in the country. The Fleischers had escaped from Czechoslovakia to Canada immediately before the onset of hostilities, and soon after came to rural Saskatchewan, posing as Roman Catholic farmers in order to meet Canadian immigration criteria. Curt and Lola moved to Winnipeg in 1941 and joined brother Willy Fleischer in Toronto the following year.⁴  There, with Lobel and other wartime refugees and released German and Austrian Jewish internees, the New World Club blossomed.

German (or, as Habonim congregants referred to it, “European”) liberal Judaism had been very popular in Western and central Europe and integrated musical accompaniments into traditional, Orthodox liturgy. Liturgical elements and musical accompaniments, and slightly more conservative-leaning services, differentiated such traditions from Reform Judaism.⁵

Standards (levels) of religious observance among the central and Western European refugees ranged. Some briefly attended services at the Reform Holy Blossom Temple, one of Toronto’s oldest synagogues. But, despite the congregation’s warm welcome, the Reform services lacked key experiential aspects to which the refugees were accustomed. The newcomers chose to conduct separate services in their own fashion.

The demand upon what was then known as the New World Club to provide not only social services but also to act as a religious and spiritual community, intensified as hundreds of liberal Czech, German, and Austrian (as well as a few Polish and Hungarian) Jewish survivors arrived in Toronto in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Gangolf Herman, a co-founder of Congregation Habonim, which literally translates in Hebrew to “the congregation of builders,” and one of its most active members for more than half a century, described the growing pressure to establish the congregation in the following manner:

When you come to a strange country as an immigrant, you feel a need for friendly human contact, for some part of your heritage to be transplanted with you in your new soil. It may be some of the old customs, some music, a language or a belief that was part of your former life and which you can still share in your new surroundings with people of a common background.

When a number of Jews from Central Europe, whom the Nazis had driven out and who had been familiar with Liberal Jewish practice there, came to Toronto, for various reasons, they found it difficult to integrate into existing local Jewish congregations.

Though these difficulties were not substantial, we hoped that a group of like- minded people, embracing some of our traditions and common experiences, would form the cohesive nucleus of a new congregation in which newly arrived refugees would feel at home. Thus, a few of us started to organize Jewish religious and social meetings, and in 1954 Congregation Habonim was founded.⁶

Congregation Habonim was formally consecrated in the fall of 1953. The Fleischers, Willy Lobel, and a handful of other newcomers rented the Borochov Hall from the Council of Jewish Women in preparation for the congregants’ first-ever High Holiday services. Advertisements for the three- dollar tickets were placed in Aufbau, the German-Jewish communal newspaper. In an impassioned but pragmatic announcement (in German), one of the congregation’s founders, Mr. Herbert Faber, reached out to potential members with the following words: “For the first time in Canada, our new home, [our idea is] to establish a new congregation, true to our fathers, worthy and equal to our brothers and sisters in other countries. We want to try to preserve the European [liberal] Judaism, forced by the Nazis into foreign lands, here in Toronto, guided by our inherited tradition, and to do our best to furnish our children with this tradition in their lives.”⁷ And so, with a borrowed Sefer Torah from Holy Blossom Temple, and in a rented space, approximately 150 survivor refugees and their families gathered for Yom Kippur in 1953. Max Adler, a founding member and former opera singer in Europe, performed a memorable Kol Nidre service.⁸

The announcement in Aufbau reportedly attracted dozens of newcomers who took a central part in the congregation’s development. Among those drawn to Habonim was German Jew Georg Spitz, who had spent the war years as a refugee, first in Cuba and then, with his family, in England. With his wife, Vera, and adult children, Ursula and Erich—all three survivors of the 1939 St. Louis affair⁹—along with their respective spouses, in-laws, and young children, the family joined the congregation before its opening service. The elder Spitz, who went on to serve as Habonim’s first president, was representative of the congregation’s founding members. An older gentleman in his sixties, Spitz came from an upper-middle class European Jewish background and had benefited from post secondary education and a prosperous pre-war career.¹⁰

Among the early waves of membership were European-born refugees and Holocaust survivors, with the exception of two Canadian women married to refugees.¹¹  Congregants were, on average, fifty years old; the youngest, by a generation, was thirty-year-old Gangolf Herman. The entire cohort consisted of educated central and Western Europeans with a wide range of professional backgrounds and wartime experiences. For instance, University of Toronto historian and professor Fritz Heichelheim was a German Jew raised in the liberal tradition who fled to Great Britain in the 1930s, arriving in Toronto in 1951. He joined Congregation Habonim soon after its inception.¹²  Opera tenor and Czech Jew Max Adler—who, with his wife, Fritzi, was among the final interwar Jewish refugees to enter Canada as farmers¹³—was a staunch member until his premature death in 1960. Polish survivor and famed visual artist Henry Weingluck served as a Torah reader and secondary singer to Cantor Albert Feldman.¹⁴ A slew of other lawyers, businessmen, engineers, and academics filled the congregation’s early membership ranks.

Only one woman’s name is listed on the synagogue’s charter. Ruth Baumann Linz was born in 1920, in Danzig, to committed liberal Jewish parents who were active members of the Great Synagogue of Danzig and the Jewish community at large. In May 1939, with her parents’ support, Linz fled to London, England. Her younger brother Simon followed that August, with the elder Baumanns securing visas for Shanghai. The family was reunited in London in 1947, and thereafter began the exodus to Toronto—Simon immigrated in 1949, his parents in 1950, and Ruth in 1952. Ruth Linz’s involvement with Habonim morphed from her initial activity with the New World Club. One year later, Linz’s commitment to preserving the liberal Judaism of her childhood was made official when she became the synagogue’s only female founding member, and encouraged her brother and parents to join, too. Ruth Linz remained a member in 2011.¹⁵

The congregation operated out of two temporary facilities in downtown Toronto before following its members to its permanent home at 5 Glen Park Avenue in (what was then) north Toronto, in 1958. Determined to purchase the land on which the rented synagogue sat, the founding families spent the following decade raising funds and entrenching the congregation. While Ruth Linz was denied attendance at the all-male board meetings, the Sisterhood played a crucial role in the congregation’s evolution and growth by planning and leading fundraising events, and arranging and catering holiday parties and mitzvoth. Women contributed, too, to the promotion of the arts and Jewish culture—specifically, music and the fine arts—within the synagogue.¹⁶

Women and men worked together to educate their children in the traditions of liberal Judaism. Mrs. C. Schatzky, speaking for the mothers at a congregational meeting in January 1960, stressed the importance of maintaining young people’s interest through increased social activities—in addition to religious school—to ensure “the future growth and development of the congregation.”¹⁷ One Mr. Herman, a representative of the synagogue’s male members, agreed with the mothers: “Since Congregation Habonim is unique in Canada in perpetuating the European Liberal tradition in Judaism,” he said, “it was our duty to offer our young people activities giving them this background, which could not be found in any other organization.”¹⁸ The group elders sought to develop a cohesive infrastructure that fostered younger congregants’ spiritual growth while preserving an inclusive family- friendly environment brimming with culture and social engagement orchestrated largely by the Sisterhood.

Congregation Habonim grew into something far greater than what was initially envisioned by its founders. As the sole Canadian congregation to adhere to the German-Jewish liberal tradition, Habonim’s emphasis on egalitarianism and focus on arts and scholarship penetrated deep into the non-survivor Canadian Jewish community.¹⁹ As a veteran member recalled, the congregation took pride in its attitudes toward other newcomer Jews seeking membership in a spiritual community. Hungarian Jewish refugees fleeing the 1956 Revolution received a warm welcome from the congregation, as did Canadian-born members attracted to the congregation’s liberal approach toward issues of gender equality and its inclusion of individuals born to non-Jewish mothers or converts to Judaism.²⁰ As of 2015, Habonim continued to operate as a liberal congregation, although the German liberal traditions have been largely replaced with more universal principles. Founding survivors and their descendants make up a small minority of the current membership.

Clanton Park

Nearby, the establishment of another survivor congregation, but one following a very different path than that adopted by Habonim, was well underway. Whereas Habonim emerged to address the particular needs of the liberal Jewish refugees who settled in Toronto, the Clanton Park congregation emerged out of a combination of necessity and convenience. Opportunities for religious Jewish life in the northern part of Toronto, well beyond the traditional Spadina corridor of Jewish immigrant and refugee habitation, were scant for even nominally observant survivors. Established Orthodox synagogues Shareei Shomayim and Shaarei Tefillah presented two options for religiously traditional survivors. However, both shuls were located more than six kilometers away from the dirt roads leading to the newly established community later known as Bathurst Manor and were therefore not within walking distance for the Sabbath and Jewish holidays.

19. Purim Announcement in the Congregation Habonim News Bulletin, No. 4 (March 1956), 1. Courtesy of Lisa-Catherine Cohen, The Builders: The Fifty-year History of Congregation Habonim (The Writers Guild of America, 2013). 

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The campaigns to establish the liberal Congregation Habonim and modern Orthodox Clanton Park Synagogue arose in response to different stimuli and involved the participation of different cohorts of Holocaust survivors. And yet the two congregations shared key features that resonate even today. Many among the founding members originated in Europe and entered Canada either immediately before, or after, the Holocaust, although Clanton Park’s leaders were substantially younger than Habonim’s. The permanent homes of both synagogues were in the northern suburbs of Toronto, away from the traditional areas of Jewish refugee and immigrant settlement and life in the downtown core. Sisterhoods were held in high regard, and women occupied positions of influence on various committees. With few members, the congregations could not afford to take the value of any member’s contributions for granted.

Both congregations found their strength in faith, as each defined it, and utilized their collective resources to build their physical and spiritual homes. Through their integration of new congregational individual members and member families from whom they garnered support and comfort, which also encouraged a sense of permanence in their new surroundings. New friendships, business ventures, and social (and sometimes even romantic) relationships took root. Even as they have each evolved over the decades, Congregation Habonim and Kehal Machzikei Hadas–Clanton Park Synagogue continue to thrive. The founders’ children, and children’s children, especially in the case of Clanton Park, remain committed to ensuring that the legacy of their survivor descendants remains strong and active into the twenty-first century. But where these survivors clung to their faith, other new Canadians rejected Judaism and facets of Jewish life. We consider these stories next.