shop, working 10 hours a day. He also received that forbidden book known in English as the New Testament. At first he may have tried to hide his copy from the Jewish family with whom he was boarding. When they found him reading it and talking like the missionary, they sent him packing.
***
Why did the Presbyterians have a mission to Jews in the centre of Edwardian Toronto? This proudly multicultural city has long since lost touch with the less tolerant society of the early 1900s. It was rife with anti-Semitism, and its growing number of Jewish immigrants was generally welcomed with disdain and mistrust. The newcomers often lived as peddlers, dealers in cast-off goods and second-hand clothes. Some found work in the needle trades or turned their homes into little storefronts in the city’s poorest district.
In Toronto, that location was “the Ward” (properly called St. John’s Ward), in the very heart of the city, bordered by College Street on the north, Yonge Street to the east and University Avenue to the west and extending south to Queen Street. Currently, it’s a district that boasts major office towers and some of the city’s leading hospitals. Back then it was a maze of narrow alleyways lined with dilapidated housing, some dating back to the 1840s. The drafty stucco frame homes were rented out by absentee landlords; many lacked indoor plumbing and had dirt floors. New immigrants kept the cheap housing in demand, and city officials ignored complaints from public health officials. Here, as in New York’s Lower East Side and cities across North America, one of the poorest districts in Toronto became the hub of a thriving Jewish community.
According to the 1901 census, Toronto had 15,000 Jewish residents out of a total population of 208,000, but they quickly became one of the largest, most visible, immigrant groups. The vast majority of recent arrivals had fled Russia and its satellites: Poland, the Ukraine, Slavic and Baltic states. Their numbers grew even more dramatically from 1903 to 1906 when the Czarist government allowed indiscriminate attacks on the Jewish populace. Their homes and businesses were looted; families ran for their lives, while the Russian authorities did nothing. The Americans, also inundated by refugees, compelled the Czarist government to bring the worst excesses to a halt, though the immigrants kept coming.
A growing Jewish presence in the heart of Toronto was of special interest to local Presbyterian church leaders. All through the 19th century, Protestant Jewish missions were expanding. In England and North America, they would provide Jewish immigrants with English lessons, life skills education and family-friendly programs while their founders, a rising number of Jewish followers of Jesus, spread the gospel.
The rise of Jewish missionary efforts helped to spark a growing fascination in the fulfillment of Bible prophecies during the 19th century. Popular interpretations of prophetic Scriptures pointed to specific prophecies, both in the Jewish Bible and the New Testament, that “in the last days” Jewish people would experience a spiritual revival, be drawn to their Messiah and resettle in the Holy Land. With the impending close of the second millennium, visionary Christian leaders were preaching the Lord’s soon return. Others recognized that centuries of Christian persecution had hardened Jewish people against the gospel. The emerging leadership among the Jewish believers in Jesus—Hebrew Christians of various denominations—began to form sizable missionary organizations and strongly influenced the Christian approach to Jewish people.
As early as 1838, the Church of Scotland was excited by this vision of Israel receiving the message of Jesus as Messiah and being restored to the Holy Land. During the 1840s, a fervent young Scot, Rev. Robert Murray McCheyne, travelled with a church commission to Palestine, seeking new avenues to bring the gospel to Jewish people. Returning to his parish in poor health, he passed away during a typhoid epidemic. McCheyne was only 29, but his diaries and sermons, published posthumously, became Christian bestsellers. His zeal for Jewish missions, combined with the rising interest in fulfillments of prophetic Scriptures, helped to sustain the popular wave of support to Presbyterians across the British Empire.
By the 1860s, Canadian Presbyterians were sponsoring their own Jewish missionary in the Middle East, the Rev. Dr. Ephraim Menachem Epstein.5 When several Presbyterian denominations became a single national church in 1875—the Presbyterian Church in Canada—they looked for new Jewish ministries to support. While considering ministry opportunities in Canada, the Ward caught their attention. During the 1907 general assembly in Montreal, a motion was carried “to commence a mission to the Hebrew people in Toronto, with the privilege of extending the work elsewhere in Canada as the circumstances may warrant.”6 A special committee was formed under Rev. John McPherson Scott of St. John’s Church, Riverdale, in Toronto’s east end. He was charged with setting up an outreach to the growing Jewish community in Toronto.
Scott was a tall, beloved great-hearted leader with a reputation for getting things done. (A local Jewish mission had already started with his help.) With typical efficiency, he took leadership of the committee in September 1907, and by the end of December he was able to recommend a promising missionary candidate: Mr. Sabati Benjamin (Ben) Rohold, then employed by a similar ministry in Glasgow.
Numerous photos of the period show Ben Rohold as a studious-looking figure with round wire-rimmed glasses.7 His contemporaries respected his diligent, unpretentious and genuinely spiritual character and admired his intellectual gifts. (He grew up speaking Hebrew to his father, Spanish to his mother, Arabic to the children on his street, German to his tutor in secular studies, fluent English as a Christian minister and Yiddish for preaching and personal ministry.)8 In April 1915, the first international conference to form an international alliance of Hebrew Christians in North America was held in Toronto, and out of all the dignitaries he was elected president.9 He became the first editor of that organization’s quarterly journal, was a writer and editor of books and wrote for numerous other leading missionary publications. Whenever Morris and Annie spoke of him to their children it was with sincere reverence.10
Born and raised in Jerusalem, the son and grandson of distinguished rabbis, Rohold had a thoroughly traditional Jewish education, including rabbinical training and extensive Talmudic studies. An encounter with a Christian missionary on the Mount of Olives (according to his personal account they began their discussion in the Garden of Gethsemane) led Rohold to the firm belief that Jesus of Nazareth is the Jewish Messiah. After weighing the costs of his decision over a period of years, he made an irreversible break from his parents and left for Great Britain; Rohold was only 21. A few years later, after graduating from Glasgow Bible College, he began to work in the local Jewish mission. Rohold had been there seven years when the Canadians offered him the position of mission superintendent, ordination, an annual salary of $1,200 and full provision for moving expenses (which largely meant shipping his books). By March 1908 he had arrived in Toronto.11
Rohold’s storefront mission opened on Monday, April 6, 1908, in the centre of the Ward at 156 Teraulay Street (now Bay Street) at Elm. A number of the city’s leading Presbyterians were there for encouragement, but there were other visitors more openly doubtful of the enterprise. In his book Missions to the Jews (1918), Rohold describes listening to their comments. “Some gave us a lease of life of three months, six months and the most generous ‘one year.’ But the good Lord was pleased to put the seal of Divine approval on the work.”12
Scott and his committee were willing to be patient. Jewish ministries were expected to make slow progress. The Eastern European immigrants were isolated by the Yiddish language, a hybrid form of Hebrew and low German. They saw no difference between the Presbyterians and churches that had been persecuting them for the past millennia. A few of the young Jewish leaders had prepared their own welcome for the Mission; they set up a lookout to write down the names of anyone going in or out of the storefront. So when success came relatively quickly, it far exceeded the expectations of Rohold’s superiors. Within five years there was not only a regular flow of traffic through the Mission doors but even a small, vibrant Hebrew Christian Presbyterian congregation.
Rohold envisioned a mission caring for a wide array of needs, reaching
