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Canada'sJewish community is both a leading diaspora population center and one of the fewsecond-rank diaspora communities that are actually growing demographically. Forthis reason alone, the Jews of Canada are well worth investigating. In addition,the community is simultaneously a mirror of trends found in Jewish communitieselsewhere, particularly the United States, with which it is tied in many ways, as wellas a distinct society, exercising a measurable influence on the culture and politicsof world Jewry. What major trends affect the contemporary Canadian Jewish community? LikeJews in most Western countries, Canadian Jews have recently experienced issuesregarding anti-Semitism. These, however, have been dealtwith adequately by Manuel Prutschi. They will not, therefore,be discussed in detail here; neither will the issue of theplace of Jews in Quebec society, nor the Jewish community'sattempts to influence the Canadian government's position onIsrael. A survey, however, of some significant internal trendsin Canadian Jewish life will provide a picture of an importantcommunity at an interesting moment of transition. Canadian Jewish Geography Canadians live in a country of immense geographicspace. However, the vast bulk of Canada's population of some32.4 million live in less than a dozen major urban centers, ofwhich Toronto and Montreal are the largest. Canadian Jewsmirror this pattern and are likewise largely urban. Most livein either Toronto or Montreal, with smaller concentrationsin Vancouver, Winnipeg, Ottawa, and elsewhere. Thus the story of Canadian Jewry today is largely,though not exclusively, a tale of two cities: Montreal andToronto. Toronto now contains nearly half of all CanadianJews and Montreal nearly a quarter of them. The firstnotable thing about Canadian Jews, then, is their strongdemographic concentration in two urban centers. Hence,the focus here will be mainly on events and trends inCanada's Jewish population hubs, with the other centersof Canadian Jewish population getting less attention thanthey perhaps deserve. The most important trend in Canadian Jewry in thepast decades is the rise of Toronto to preeminent status interms of Jewish population and the concomitant declineof Montreal. This trend was set in motion by a politicalprocess in the Province of Quebec often called the "quietrevolution," which marked the social, political, and economicempowerment of Quebec's French Canadian population,often at the expense of the previous anglophone elites. Thisprocess was exacerbated by the rise of Quebec separatistnationalism, which culminated in the rise to power of thepro-Quebec independence Parti Québécois in the provincialelection of 1976. These events caused a mass exodus of businesses andindividuals from Quebec, among whom were thousands ofJews. Thus whereas the Jewish population of Montreal inthe 1971 census peaked at approximately 112,000, the nextthree decades saw a diminution of more than 17 percentin the number of Jews in the city to approximately 93,000.This occurred despite a significant immigration into Montrealof francophone Jews of Sephardic (North African) originas well as a substantial increase in the city'sharedi (ultra-Orthodox) population. Moreover, the raw numbers do notentirely reflect the fact that most of the Jews who leftQuebec were young and middle-aged adults in their peakearning and reproductive years, who left behind a communitywith a high proportion of seniors. The fall of Montreal from its hitherto preeminentposition in the Canadian economy as a whole worked tothe decided advantage of Toronto and served to cementits economic prominence within Canada. This in turnmade Toronto an attractive place for Jewish immigrationfor those who had left Montreal. It further made Toronto amore popular choice than Montreal for Jewish immigrantsfrom the former Soviet Union, Israel, South Africa, andother places. Thus, Toronto's Jewish population rose fromapproximately 107,000 in 1971 to 179,000 in 2001. Governance of the Canadian Jewish Community The fundamental demographic change in CanadianJewry's two largest communities has led to a similarlyfundamental change in the governance of the CanadianJewish community. Whereas previously Montreal could beconsidered the "capital" of Canadian Jewry, the weight ofpolitical influence has decisively shifted to Toronto. This process is perhaps most clearly symbolized by thedecline of the Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC). CJC wasfounded in Montreal in 1919 so as to allow Canadian Jewsto speak with a united, democratic voice on both internalCanadian issues and international issues bearing on Jews.It was headquartered in Montreal and considered itself "theparliament of Canadian Jewry." Daniel Elazar describedCJC as a distinctively Canadian approach to communalgovernance. As such, it bucked the general North Americantrend toward governance of the Jewish community by JewishFederation bodies. Today, however, CJC has declined considerably inpower and is effectively controlled by the Toronto-basedUIA Federations Canada (UIAFC). UIAFC was founded inJune 1998 by the merger of United Israel Appeal Canadaand the Council of Jewish Federations of Canada, whichwere modeled after similar organizations in the UnitedStates. In the communal reorganization that resultedfrom the founding of UIAFC, CJC, which depends on UIAFCfor funding, became an essentially subordinate agencyalong with Jewish Immigrant Aid Services of Canada (JIAS)and National Jewish Campus Life (NJCL). All these agenciesare funded by UIAFC as a part of its "National CollectiveResponsibility...to support organizations that strengthen thenational fabric of Canadian Jewry." It is no coincidence that in 1999, the year after thefounding of UIAFC, CJC transferred its headquarters buildingin Montreal to Concordia University and moved its mainoffice from Montreal to Ottawa. The latter, while it is thecapital of Canada, has a relatively small Jewish community.Clearly Montreal's Federation/CJA, which represents Canada'ssecond largest community and also has significant historicalclaims to leadership, has an important voice in UIAFC. It isequally clear, though, that the leadership baton has passedto Toronto and that Montreal, which maintains an enviablenetwork of Jewish organizations and services, can no longerclaim to be the Jewish capital of Canada. Jewish Cultural and Religious Creativityin Canada When discussing the cultural life of Canadian Jews,it is important to understand some of the constitutionaldifferences between Canada and the United States andwhat these signify for the acculturation process of Jewsin Canada. The United States, from its inception, hasadumbrated a basically unitary culture and language,and immigrants were expected to learn and conform to it.Canada, by contrast, was founded as a compromise betweentwo "founding nations," Anglo-Protestant and French-Catholic, and its founding constitutional document, theBritish North America Act of 1867, gave specific guaranteesto each group. Therefore, Jews in Canada faced a cultural and linguisticduality as well as a reluctance by both "founding nations"to include Jews in their respective polities. This resulted ina pronounced tendency, in the early twentieth century, forJews in Canada to create their own religious and culturalspace. As a consequence, Canadian Jews developed with arelatively greater sense of autonomy vis-à-vis the establishedlinguistic and cultural groups. In the later part of the twentieth century, the Canadiangovernment supported an official policy of multiculturalismthat encouraged Canadians of all ethnic backgrounds toassert their cultural distinctiveness in a Canadian "mosaic."This policy also rendered Canadian Jews more culturallyidentified as Jews. Equally noteworthy, unlike the United StatesConstitution's separation of church and state, which theAmerican Jewish leadership embraces as a cornerstone ofAmerican Jews' equality of citizenship, there is no clearseparation of church and state in the Canadian constitution.Thus Canadian provincial governments can and do supportreligious schools, and, with the exception of the Province ofOntario, Jewish day schools receive significant governmentalfinancial support that they do not receive in the UnitedStates. Hence, day school education in Canada is relativelymore affordable. As a result, whereas in the United States12 percent of Jewish children attend Jewish day schools(considerably more than in past decades), in the Montrealcommunity fully 34.8 percent of Jewish school-age childrenattend day schools and 25.2 percent in Toronto. These are, respectively, the highest and second highestaverages for day school attendance reported in NorthAmerica. One concrete result is that, according to the2001Canadian census, 63,675 Canadians claimed to be ableto speak Hebrew. This is a significant segment of the totalCanadian Jewish population, going far beyond the numberof Israeli immigrants to Canada. The more intensive Jewish education in the two majorcenters of Canadian Jewry translates as well to the religiousrealm. Most surveys show Canadian Jews to be more affiliatedwith Orthodoxy and less with Conservatism or Reform relative to Jews in the United States. Observers of theCanadian Jewish scene remark, moreover, that Conservativecongregations in Canada tend to remain relatively moreresistant to the trend toward egalitarianism than theirAmerican counterparts. Non-Orthodox congregations inCanada are likewise relatively slower to accept womenrabbis. With respect to Judaic observance such as Yom Kippur,Passover Seders, or Hanukkah candles, Canadian Jews tend toregister higher percentages than American Jews. Another important difference in religious compositionis the growth of a large Sephardi community, mostly ofMoroccan origin, in Montreal. The religious characteristicsof this community, which embraces a traditionalism notcompletely congruent with any standard North AmericanJewish denominationalism, require those researching theJewish identification of the Montreal Jewish community toadd the category "Traditional Sephardic." An ongoing, considerable degree of identification withYiddish and Yiddish culture indicates a relatively high levelof Jewish cultural identification on a nonreligious basis. Thisis symbolized by the flourishing of KlezKanada, a Klezmermusic workshop and festival held annually near Montrealthat describes itself as "arising from the wellsprings of Jewishculture and expertise unique to Montreal and Canada,"28 andToronto's Ashkenaz festival. Montreal's Dora WassermanYiddish Theatre and Jewish film festivals in Vancouver,Toronto, and Montreal all testify to the continued popularityof secular Jewish culture in Canada. Memorialization andritualization of the Holocaust similarly has loomed large asa factor of Jewish identity in Canada. According to FranklinBialystok, however, the emergence of the Holocaust as anissue for Canadian Jews had a somewhat different trajectorythan in the United States. Canadian Jewish Studies One of the most significant recent intellectualdevelopments affecting Canadian Jewry is the rise ofCanadian Jewish studies as an academic field, which haslargely paralleled the development of Jewish studies inthe United States. What has emerged from the Canadianacademy, however, in the past decade or so is a distinctivefocus on the Canadian Jewish experience from a historical,sociological, and literary perspective. This trend has naturallyinvolved mostly Jewish academics but has also interestedsome French Canadian intellectuals. The field has been institutionalized through thetransformation of the Canadian Jewish Historical Society,founded in 1976 as a largely lay-based group supportingthe research of local rabbis, CJC officials, and amateurhistorians, into a largely academic group called theAssociation for Canadian Jewish Studies. The associationsupports a growing number of professors and studentsdevoted to this developing field, as well as a journaldedicated to academic scholarship in the area,CanadianJewish Studies. In this period there have also emerged chairs inCanadian Jewish Studies at York and Concordia universities,an Institute for Canadian Jewish Studies at Concordia, anda program in Jewish Canadian Studies at the University ofOttawa. Evidently, one of the major aims of the nascentfield of Canadian Jewish studies is to establish a separateCanadian Jewish dynamic. One of its most distinguishedpractitioners, Gerald Tulchinsky, notes that: Canadian Jewish history is a subject in its ownright, not a branch or pale reflection of the Jewishexperience in the United States. Its contourswere shaped by Canadian conditions, and did notnecessarily reflect occurrences and trends that tookplace first among mainstream Americans and, yearslater, were experienced by their northern cousins. TheAmericanization of the Jews - their gradual or rapidadaptation to and acceptance in the mainstreamof American culture, and the development of whatmight be called the American Jewish symbiosis - wasnot necessarily mirrored in Canada. The CanadianJew who becomes chief justice of the Supreme Courtof Canada (Bora Laskin), or governor of the Bank ofCanada (Louis Rasminsky), or a member of a federalCabinet (Herb Gray), or a highly decorated officer inthe Royal Canadian Air Force (Sydney Shulemson), or aleading literary figure (Mordecai Richler), is not simplythe northern equivalent of an American Jew like JusticeBrandeis, Henry Morgenthau, Bernard Baruch, AdmiralRickover, or Philip Roth. Some Conclusions Tulchinsky's statement clearly indicates that CanadianJewry, like Canada itself, sees a need to define itself bydifferentiating itself politically and culturally from theAmerican experience. This is not entirely easy to do becauseAmerican influence, which was an important factor inCanadian life from the beginning, took on even greaterproportions with Britain's twentieth-century retreat fromempire and the corresponding rise in American power andinfluence worldwide. It is clear that the Jews of the UnitedStates have exerted considerable influence on CanadianJewry, not least because the Canadian Jewish communityis so much smaller and the border between the two countrieshas historically been relatively open to the movement ofpeople and their ideas. To take but one example, Canada possesses no majorinstitution for the training of rabbis and professional Jewishcommunity workers. This means Canadian synagogues andother Jewish institutions are led by those trained elsewhere,especially in the United States and Israel. Although someare indeed Canadians who left Canada for their professionaltraining and returned, mostly the positions are taken bynon-Canadians who have to learn the differences andsimilarities of the Canadian Jewish community with Jewishcommunities elsewhere. For most casual observers, the major differencebetween the Canadian and American Jewish communitiesis a sort of "time lag" in which the situation of the formercommunity seems to lag a generation behind the realitiesof the latter. As Harold Waller put it, "trends in communitylife probably appear in Canada about twenty to twenty-fiveyears later than they do in the US." As demonstrated here,this phenomenon is no accident. Instead it stems from factorsin the Canadian polity that have given the Canadian Jewishcommunity a different valence and a different approach tothe issues of contemporary Jewish life. *     *     * Notes Manfred Gerstenfeld, Publisher • Chaya Herskovic, Editor • Howard Weisband, Associate Editor • Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (Registered Amuta), 13 Tel-Hai St., Jerusalem 92107, Israel; Tel. 972-2-5619281, Fax. 972-2-5619112, Email: jcpa@netvision.net.il • In U.S.A.: Center for Jewish Community Studies, 5800 Park Heights Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21215 USA; Tel. (410) 664-5222, Fax. (410) 664-1228 • Website: www.jcpa.org • Copyright. ISSN: 0792-7304 The opinions expressed herein do not necessarily reflectthose of the Board of Fellows of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.