Professor Emeritus, University of Windsor
Introduction
While several works have been published that provide a broad canvas of the Canadian Jewish scene, there are only a few communal Jewish histories. Windsor is not one of Canada’s premier cities such as Toronto, Montreal, or Vancouver, nor is its Jewish community comparable in size, but the important role that Windsor Jews played in the development of the Ontario Southland is a story deserving to be told.
The story begins in the eighteenth century when Jewish merchants and military provisioners accompanying the victorious British forces into Montreal in 1760 surveyed the economic opportunities opened up by their victory over the French. With the existing French economic system leaderless, a functioning fur trade composed of a series of forts and routes, native alliances and technical expertise, and a continent to exploit — the lure to Anglo entrepreneurs was irresistible. Jews made up a major part of the Montreal merchant community during this transition and many of them participated in the far-flung fur trade itself. A Jewish consortium of five, including Ezekiel Solomon and Chapman Abraham at Michilimackinac and Detroit, respectively, were among the first Anglos to the Great Lakes, the stepping stones to the Northwest and the Rockies. These Jewish fur traders worked throughout the Great Lakes region, peddling their wares to the Indians and coming into contact with the leading military, economic, and social figures in the region. Although many of these Jews had permanent associations with the Montreal community, they made this Great Lakes area their centre of operations for a westward-expanding fur trade and gradually made this part of the continent their home.
Windsor’s place in the story begins with the activities of another one of these Montreal families — the Davids — a remarkable family closely associated with the city’s developing Jewish community. This family of practising Jews was intimately connected with the founding of the first synagogue in 1768. Moses David, the third son, was posted to Detroit, extending the family’s business to the Great Lakes just as large scale Loyalist migrations and settlement resulting from the American Revolution forced the creation of Upper Canada. When the community of Sandwich was established across the Detroit River in 1797 to accommodate residents who wished to remain under British rule, he became the first Jewish settler in what is now Windsor, and married Charlotte Hart, daughter of the first Jewish settler in Canada. Moses David’s experiences in establishing a home, business, family, and community life begins a two-hundred-year chronicle of the Jewish experience in Windsor, Ontario.
It would be over half a century following Moses David’s death before the other founding pioneer families of Windsor arrived to re-establish their Eastern European shtetl in a North American environment. United by common origins, many from the same villages or regions, and family connections leading to chain migrations, the Jews of Windsor were not immune to disagreements, bickering, and petty quarrels among themselves. Yet in spite of divergent religious, political, and economic interests, they established synagogues, schools, and an organized communal structure. This book is a memoir of that community and those who led, inspired, and laboured on behalf of its success.
The Windsor Jewish community tended to be far more traditional in all respects than its Detroit counterpart. The earliest settlers in Detroit, coming after the 1848 revolutions, were of German Jewish origin and by the end of the century had merged themselves with the wider community. Economically successful, they established Conservative and Reform synagogues and a number of secular institutions. Indeed, this established group of Jewish pioneers in Detroit found little in common with the masses of the Great Migrations (from the 1880s to the 1920s) who were arriving from Eastern Europe with their Old World ways intact and determined to recreate their experience in the New World. Windsor’s pioneer families were among these Eastern European immigrants, mainly Poland and Russia, and did not arrive in Canada to establish a permanent settlement until after the pogroms of 1881.
Many of the basic patterns of Windsor’s settlement are sufficiently reminiscent of Detroit to warrant comment, but the Windsor Jewish community compares most closely to its smaller counterparts in Canada and the United States. While there are some clear similarities in that the early settlers were peddlers and small shopkeepers, from the outset Jews in Windsor burst the bonds of the ghetto and were represented on City Council, actively involved in communal organizations, and appointed to judicial posts. By 1930 Windsor had a Jewish mayor. A tradition of public service beginning with Moses David allowed Windsor’s Jewish community to produce a number of outstanding individuals whose careers and contributions could not be contained in the local context. Windsor can boast of Canada’s first Jewish cabinet members, provincially and federally, in David Croll and Herb Gray.
While Shaarey Zedek, the first congregation in Windsor, was founded in 1893 near the firehouse within the emerging Jewish ghetto, over time the Jews moved out of the downtown core. Early on, it was thought that Ford City, which was emerging around its namesake’s Canadian automotive complex, attracting workers with its moving assembly lines and $5-a-day wages, would be the ultimate centre of the community. For those residents who lived in East Windsor, religious services were held at Congregation Tifereth Israel, the second area synagogue. As the Jews settled and became merchants and active citizens of the community, the leadership turned to building a prominent house of worship to show their non-Jewish compatriots the glory and pride of their ancient tradition. In some comparative communities, Jews remained fearful of demonstrating their success too openly, thereby inviting Old World pogroms and anti-Semitism. This was not so in Windsor. An expanded Shaarey Zedek served the more traditional members, but community leaders demanded a new edifice, the Shaar Hashomayim Synagogue, that would highlight their new affluence and status.
Although Orthodox congregational leadership was the norm, by the 1920s, Windsor’s Jewish community had grown large enough to foster alternative visions and institutions. The Talmud Torah, with its Hebrew language and Zionist ideology, and the I. L. Peretz Schule, where Yiddish and Jewish culture were the main focus, challenged the synagogues for support and student enrolment. In the mid-1930s, a volunteer community structure emerged that led to a fully operating and professionally directed community centre in the early 1940s. While these two traditions — religious and secular — clashed or co-operated, Windsor remained immune to challenges to Orthodox Judaism. Disputes over Old World traditions, synagogue seating, and the role of women and youth were contained within the Orthodox family. It would be the 1960s before the Reform challenge emerged.
Windsor’s Jewish community supported World War I without active military participation, but contributed to community efforts to aid the troops and the war effort. They were particularly animated by the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which pledged British support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Zionism had always been popular among many in Windsor’s Jewish community and they cheered three of their sons who volunteered to fight for the establishment of the British Mandate over the area. In the 1930s, when Canada’s leaders refused to take in desperate European refugees fleeing from racist regimes, Windsor’s community rallied on behalf of saving Jews in other lands. In World War II, Windsor’s Jews actively supported the soldiers and the war effort. Jewish families sent their sons to war and several of them paid the ultimate price. When Israel became a state, Jews again were most generous in their total commitment to the new nation. When the Windsor Jewish community needed to rally, all differences ended in the name of k’lal Yisrael — the community of Israel.
In the post-war period, modernity and the growing influences of Zionism and Conservative/Reform Judaism challenged the Orthodox, traditional, and leftist leanings of the community’s founders. With the establishment of Congregation Beth El and the introduction of Reform Judaism in 1959, many young families with children joined, gradually forcing consolidation within the other institutions as Reform became a dominant influence in the communal landscape. By the end of the 1970s, the Peretz Schule and Congregation Tifereth Israel had both closed, several attempts at forming Hebrew day schools had fallen short, and Beth El’s student enrolment had surpassed that of Shaar Hashomayim.
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