Jews Thrive in La Belle Province Despite Separatist Movement

By LISA KEYS

The Forward, JUNE 14, 2002

MONTREAL — On a sunny Sabbath afternoon, hordes of chasidic children play in their yards in the leafy suburb of Outremont.

On Sunday, in the Jewish-flavored neighborhood of Snowdon, the Jewish Public Library hums with activity as a trio of high school girls work on a Theodor Herzl project, job-seekers type away at computer terminals and box after box of donated books lands on librarians' desks.

If, as rumors would have it, Jewish life is on the decline in Montreal, someone forgot to tell the 100,000-plus Jews who make their homes in this cosmopolitan city.

True, following the election of a separatist Quebecois government 25 years ago, the Jewish community worried that it faced economic setbacks and cultural extinction. Some 20,000 Jewish baby-boomers fled town for points west and south, knocking Montreal off its perch as Canada's Jewish capital and transforming Toronto into an economic powerhouse. But despite worries of a "brain drain" of the Jewish community's brightest and best, the Jews of Montreal have stayed committed to their tight-knit and diverse community. From the community's growing day schools to its low intermarriage rate, to the newly-built $35-million Jewish community campus, Jewish life is thriving in the cultural center of la belle province.

"There is certainly a sense of confidence in our Jewish community," said Danyael Cantor, executive vice president at Federation CJA, the community's combined Jewish charity. "I think we're committed to not just holding the line but finding ways to grow this community. It suffered a significant loss, specifically in a generation of young people. But we battled the quantitative loss with a qualitative enhancement."

As Ronald Finegold, reference librarian at the Jewish Public Library, notes, "the community isn't as large as it should have been at this stage. But 100,000 is nothing to sneeze at."

Jews have had a long history in Montreal, dating back to 1759. Like New York, Montreal became a hub for Eastern European Jews fleeing oppression throughout the late 19th and early-20th centuries. Montreal quickly became the economic as well as the Jewish capital of Canada, its ferment providing material for novelist Mordecai Richler, poet A.M. Klein, singer Leonard Cohen and even actor William Shatner. The Bronfman family shares the largesse of its Seagram's liquor fortune internationally, and the community's day school system — the Labor Zionist Jewish Peoples Schools and Peretz Schools, the Orthodox United Talmud Torahs and the ultra-Orthodox Adath Israel — became crown jewels. The community could simultaneously boast about two culinary staples — smoked meat and bagels — and two Yiddish scholars of world reknown, brother and sister Ruth Wisse and David Roskies.

In the 1960s, however, inklings of the Quebec separatist movement began and in 1968, two leading separatist groups united to form the Parti Quebecois. In 1976, the PQ gained control of the government, holding the province's first referendum on independence, which fell 10% short of passing.

"That was the flashpoint," Finegold recalled. "The crème de la crème took the 401 [highway] to Toronto and all points west. More and more people gradually left."

"Having a government voted in that is proclaiming succession of your province from the country was a radical concept," recalled Lois Liverman, director of Contact Promontreal, an organization that places college graduates in Montreal-based jobs. "It was a horrifying thought — where we grew up and lived our lives, where our ancestors lived their lives, it would take us out of the confederation. It was a hefty pill to swallow."

Within five years of the PQ's victory, nearly 20,000 Jews had left Quebec. By 1991, Montreal had a Jewish population of 100,000, while Toronto had grown to 162,000. According to Charles Shahar, research coordinator for Federation CJA, Toronto's Jewish population is likely to be double that of Montreal's within the next 15 years.

Those who were horrified by the political climate fled. Those who remained, however, approached the Jewish community with renewed vigor. "People rallied, just like they do in Israel," Liverman said. "This is probably one of the strongest Jewish communities in North America."

"Montreal has the highest quality of Jewish life in North America," according to Shahar, citing statistics from a 1996 survey such as the low intermarriage rate (15%) and high levels of synagogue membership (64%, compared to 48% in Toronto).

Despite stringent pro-French language rules governing everything from street signs to worker-customer interactions, "the PQ has not been hostile to the Jews," Finegold said. "We were the first jurisdiction in Canada to get the secular component of Jewish day schools supported by the state."

As Quebec's precarious economic situation fluctuated over the past quarter-century, the PQ's calls for succession gained momentum during the rough patches. In the throes of a deep recession in 1995, Quebec voters narrowly defeated a vote of sovereignty — by 1%.

Today, however, the good times are rolling in Montreal. Some major companies have come back to Montreal, restaurants and bars are packed and downtown shops are open for business. As McGill University history professor (and columnist for this newspaper) Gil Troy notes, the American economic boom of the early 1990s didn't hit Quebec until the mid-1990s, and downtown Montreal has only been undergoing revitalization for the past few years. "It's been a weird thing," Troy said. "People keep expecting it, but on the whole, the great recession hasn't happened. The boom took so long in coming that the bust hasn't happened."

As such, "The whole separation thing has much less support in overall Quebec society," said Simon Bensimon, executive director of Hillel of Montreal. "Even though we have a separatist government, they have this thing about staying in power. According to the polls, at least, pushing separatism is not something that the Quebec electorate are into these days."

Still, some worry that the current political calm is about as bankable as Celine Dion's retirement — in other words, not at all. "Every time there's a threat of succession, there's an impact on the economy and the economy has an impact on the Jewish community," Liverman said. "It has its peaks and valleys. You learn to look on the bright side, fight when you have to."

With calls for separation subsiding, "you feel more optimistic about your future," Cantor said. "You're not living on a fault line."

The Jewish community's newfound confidence is evidenced, in part, by the multi-million dollar Jewish community campus. At the groundbreaking ceremony for the center in April 1999, then-Federation CJA president Stanley Plotnick told the Canadian Jewish News that the campus was "an expression of our unrelenting commitment to and confidence in the future of the Jewish community in Quebec. It is a message to ourselves, to our city and to all Quebecers and Canadians that our future is here."

But the Jewish commitment to Montreal is a psychological posture as well. "Now the loss is much less obvious," Shahar said. "People who stayed behind are basically people who have faith in the city and have strong attachments to it. Montreal's an easy city to be attached to; it's beautiful and it doesn't have that same big-city frenetic atmosphere that, say, Toronto has."

"Families have been here three, four generations," Finegold said. "You get the feeling there's a lot of roots here."

"You know how they say, once a New Yorker, always a New Yorker?" Liverman said. "I think that's true for Montreal as well: once a Montrealer, always a Montrealer."