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Rabbis and Their Community: Studies in the Eastern European Orthodox Rabbinate in Montreal, 1896–1930 University of Calgary PRISM: University of Calgary's Digital Repository University of Calgary Press University of Calgary Press Open Access Books 2007 Rabbis and their community: studies in the Eastern European Orthodox rabbinate in Montreal, 1896–1930 Robinson, Ira University of Calgary Press Robinson, Ira, "Rabbis and their community: studies in the Eastern European Orthodox rabbinate in Montreal, 1896–1930". University of Calgary Press, Calgary, Alberta, 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/1880/49279 book http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives 3.0 Unported Downloaded from PRISM: https://prism.ucalgary.ca University of Calgary Press www.uofcpress.com RABBIS & THEIR COMMUNITY: STUDIES IN THE EASTERN EUROPEAN ORTHODOX RABBINATE IN MONTREAL, 1896–1930 by Ira Robinson ISBN 978-1-55238-681-1 THIS BOOK IS AN OPEN ACCESS E-BOOK. It is an electronic version of a book that can be purchased in physical form through any bookseller or on-line retailer, or from our distributors. Please support this open access publication by requesting that your university purchase a print copy of this book, or by purchasing a copy yourself. If you have any questions, please contact us at [email protected] Cover Art: The artwork on the cover of this book is not open access and falls under traditional copyright provisions; it cannot be reproduced in any way without written permission of the artists and their agents. The cover can be displayed as a complete cover image for the purposes of publicizing this work, but the artwork cannot be extracted from the context of the cover of this specific work without breaching the artist’s copyright. COPYRIGHT NOTICE: This open-access work is published under a Creative Commons licence. 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For more information, see details of the Creative Commons licence at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ UNDER THE CREATIVE UNDER THE CREATIVE COMMONS LICENCE YOU COMMONS LICENCE YOU MAY: MAY NOT: • read and store this document • gain financially from the work in any way; free of charge; • sell the work or seek monies in relation to the distribution • distribute it for personal use of the work; free of charge; • use the work in any commercial activity of any kind; • print sections of the work for • profit a third party indirectly via use or distribution of the work; personal use; • distribute in or through a commercial body (with the exception • read or perform parts of the of academic usage within educational institutions such as work in a context where no schools and universities); financial transactions take • reproduce, distribute, or store the cover image outside of its place. function as a cover of this work; • alter or build on the work outside of normal academic scholarship. Acknowledgement: We acknowledge the wording around open access used by Australian publisher, re.press, and thank them for giving us permission to adapt their wording to our policy http://www.re-press.org/content/view/17/33/ · · The Yiddish-Speaking Orthodox Rabbinate in North America and its Importance We want to extend our brotherhood and respect to the old-fashioned rabbi for whom American life is an unbroken series of disappointment and sorrow. – Rabbi Leo Jung (929)¹ This book will examine the Yiddish-speaking immigrant Orthodox rab- binate in Montreal, Canada, at the beginning of the twentieth century. In its pages, we will analyze and attempt to understand the deeds and motivations of rabbis who are, for the most part, forgotten men in the Jewish community they helped to shape. It is inevitable that personalities, factors, and trends from both the late nineteenth century and the middle of the twentieth century will be brought into our discussion for purposes of illustration. Nonetheless it is in the first three decades of the twenti- eth century in particular that the personalities who made up the Eastern European immigrant rabbinate in Montreal, the issues they faced, and the institutions they created, most particularly the Jewish Community Coun- cil of Montreal [Va’ad ha-’Ir],² were factors of fundamental importance for the development of the Jewish community of Montreal as a whole. Taking into account all the changes stemming from Quebec’s Quiet Revolution and the Sephardic immigration of the postwar years, the con- temporary Montreal Jewish community is still recognizably descended from the community set up by Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe in the period 880–930.³ However, when historians came to chronicle the history of this community, or any other North American Jewish com- munity for that matter, the men of the Eastern European rabbinate and RTC.indd 1 7/21/07 11:08:17 AM 2 Rabbis and their Community the synagogues in which they preached and prayed were often marginal- ized, if not entirely neglected.⁴ There are important structural reasons for that neglect. Before concentrating on the story of the Montreal rabbis and their community, therefore, it will be important for us to understand the institution of the Eastern European immigrant Orthodox rabbinate from a much wider perspective. Why did these rabbis become forgotten men? Perhaps the best way to begin considering this issue is by recounting an incident that took place slightly outside the temporal and geographical frame of this book, but which nonetheless graphically illustrates both the problems and the potential of research in this subject. Early in 943, it was apparent to anyone in North America who had eyes to see, and who was carefully reading the newspapers, particularly the Yiddish press,⁵ that something tremendously horrible was happening to the Jews of Nazi-occupied Europe. The exact nature and proportions of what would come to be known as the Holocaust were still unknown, but disturbing reports from a number of sources had begun reaching people at the World Jewish Congress and the United States State Department, among others, that the Germans were systematically killing all the Jews within the territory under their control. There is presently a debate among historians of American Jewry regard- ing the appropriateness of the response of the American Jewish commu- nal leadership to this news.⁶ These historians have asked the following questions: . Could that leadership have done more to protest? 2. Would open and public protest by that leadership have made any difference in the end result? One American Jewish group that did engage in a vehement public protest was the Agudath ha-Rabbonim of the United States and Canada. The Agu- dath ha-Rabbonim was an organization of immigrant Orthodox rabbis in North America, founded in 902.⁷ The rabbis of Agudath ha-Rabbonim decided to go to Washington on October 6, 943, just prior to Yom Kippur, the most solemn day in the Jewish calendar, to attempt to meet with Pres- ident Roosevelt and to plead with him to do something to save the Jews of Europe.⁸ Approximately four hundred rabbis gathered in Washington to demonstrate. Nearly all of them were European-born. They were most RTC.indd 2 7/21/07 11:08:17 AM The Yiddish-Speaking Orthodox Rabbinate in North America and its Importance 3 comfortable expressing themselves in the Yiddish language, though most had lived in various North American cities for two decades and more, and many had become fluent in English as well. The group’s demonstration in Washington was covered by the major newspapers and newsreels of the day. Despite this publicity, however, the rabbis did not get what they really desired – the chance to see President Roosevelt. When the presi- dent found out about the rabbis’ request for an appointment, he turned to one of his most trusted advisors, Samuel Rosenman. Rosenman told FDR that he did not have to see the group, for, as he stated to the president in his memorandum, “they are a group of rabbis who have just recently left the darkest period of the medieval world. They really represent no one.”⁹ Rosenman’s political sense had told him that these rabbis, and the issues they represented, were marginal and could be ignored with impunity. Rosenman was not alone in his evaluation of these rabbis. In this, he most probably represented a large portion of American Jewish public opinion. The reasons for this negative evaluation of the rabbis of the Agudath ha-Rabbonim by Samuel Rosenman are not dissimilar to the reasons they have not received an adequate evaluation in the histories of North Ameri- can Jewry. The history of the Jewish community in this period has often been written by people who felt about these rabbis something similar to what Samuel Rosenman felt: that they represented the “darkest period of the medieval age”; that even though they were living in the twentieth cen- tury, they were not of that century; and that these were people who did not and should not have a say in either the Jewish present or future. Seeking the reasons behind this negative evaluation brings us to some of the major issues of the great Eastern European Jewish migration to North America, which, in turn, are intimately tied to the revolution inherent in Jewish modernity. This revolution engendered, among its other major effects, a historiography whose predominant characteristic has been an emphasis on transformation and change¹⁰ in Jewish life in the past two centuries, and a corresponding de-emphasis on continuity and tradi- tion during this period.
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