Jewish Colonization Association

The Little Synagogue on the Canadian Prairie

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How the Lost Montefiore Institute Synagogue Was Found and

Came to Calgary’s Heritage Park Historical Village

By Irena Karshenbaum, Founder & President, The Little Synagogue on the Prairie Project Society

Jews Arrive in Alberta

Jacob and Rachel Diamond. Credit: Jewish Historical Society of Southern Alberta

The first Jews to settle permanently in the vast area that in 1905 would become the Province of Alberta tended to gravitate to the larger centres. In 1889, Calgary, already a bustling town in what was then the Northwest Territories, was in the midst of real estate speculation when the first of these settlers, Jacob Diamond, a Lithuanian immigrant, planted his roots there with his wife, Rachel (born Maria Stoodley).

Edmonton, 300 kilometres north of Calgary, is where Abraham and Rebecca Cristall settled in 1893, anchoring that town’s Jewish community.      

Location of some of the Jewish bloc settlements. Excerpted from Journey into Our Heritage by Harry Gutkin, p. 56.

Even though there were independent Jewish farmers working the land in various settlements across the young province, in places like Alliance, Acadia Valley, Cochrane, Rockyford, Okotoks, three Jewish bloc settlements emerged. All three were clustered in eastern Alberta. The independent Jewish farmers and the three bloc settlements — Trochu (1905), Rumsey (1907) and most importantly for our story, the Montefiore Colony (1910) — received assistance from the Jewish Colonization Association, with funds from Baron Hirsch’s bequest.

The clustering of the settlements occurred because Canada at the time espoused a bloc settlement policy. Sir Clifford Sifton championed this policy during his time as Minister of the Interior. The bloc policy allowed immigrants from the same ethnic group to settle near each other so they could create communities of support. Many ethnic groups formed bloc settlements — German, Mennonite, African American, Ukrainian and many others — Jewish included.

The Montefiore Colony

Jewish farmers harvesting on the Montefiore Colony. Credit: Jewish Heritage Centre of Western Canada.

In 1910, Bill Manolson and Louis Schacter filed for homesteads northwest of the village of Sibbald, located 5 kilometres east of the Saskatchewan border, establishing the Montefiore Colony. Twenty Jewish farmers soon followed.

        

Sir Moses Montefiore.

By 1914, the Colony had 53 residents. In 1916, the farmers decided that the colony was large enough that they needed a synagogue. To build the synagogue, they applied for and received a loan of $300 from the Jewish Colonization Association (JCA). They raised the remaining $1,200 from community members. Even though partial funding came from Baron Hirsch’s JCA, the colonists named their synagogue the Montefiore Institute, in memory of Sir Moses Montefiore. Sir Moses was an Italian-born, British Jewish philanthropist who had passed away thirty years earlier, in 1886, at the age of 100.

: The Little Synagogue on the Canadian Prairie

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Baron Hirsch, An Amazing New Biography

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Mathias Lehmann, professor of Jewish History at the University of California, Irvine has just published The Baron: Maurice de Hirsch and the Jewish Nineteenth Century. a biography of Baron Hirsch that fills a major gap, the lack of biographies of the Baron in English. 1

And Lehmann also provides us an eyewitness view of so much of Baron Hirsch’s life, based on Lehmann’s extensive archival research in Austria, Belgium, England, France, Israel, Turkey, and the United States.

The Embankment, Ostend, Belgium 1890s , the resort to which Baron Hirsch was summoned by King Leopold II, Library of Congress.

Readers will enjoy this very readable and delightfully detailed text that describes human beings, not just historical figures. We are able to see the building of transcontinental railroads and the formation of huge refugee projects from the details of the daily activities that led to these achievements, as exemplified by the book’s first paragraph ” At seven o’clock one summer morning in August 1895, Maurice de Hirsch, accompanied by his twenty-nine-year-old son Lucien, set out from Boitsfort, on the outskirts of Brussels, to catch the express train to the Belgian seaside resort of Ostend. The reason for that morning’s journey was a summons by King Leopold II, who was eager to convince the prominent Jewish banker and businessman to invest in the construction of a new railroad in the Belgian Congo.” 2

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  1. Other biographies include Grunwald, Kurt, Turkenhirsch: Study of Baron Maurice De Hirsch, 1966; Frischer, Dominique, El Moises de las Americas: Vida Y Obra Del Baron De Hirsch (trans from French), 2004; Lee, Samuel,  Moses of the New World: The Work of Baron Hirsch (1970); Rozenblum, Serge-Allian Le Baron De Hirsch: Un Financier Au Service De L’humanite, 2006 [↩]
  2. Lehmann, Mathias (2022). The Baron: Maurice de Hirsch and the Jewish Nineteenth Century, Stanford: Stanford University Press, p. 19. [↩]

Baron Hirsch’s Jewish Farmers Dream

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Where did it come from?

Thomas Jefferson by Rembrandt Peale, White House Historical Association

Dreams of turning Jewish tradesmen into farmers date back to the mid-eighteenth century and feature some strange bedfellows. Besides Baron Hirsch, these utopian efforts involved Polish patriots, Russian Czars, German Mennonites, and of course, the Zionists. Like Thomas Jefferson, these Europeans and many other eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century thinkers believed that “cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens . . , the most vigorous. . . [and] the most virtuous.”1

17th and 18th Century Jewish dress in Poland

The idea of turning Jews into farmers to make them vigorous and virtuous was first proposed In Eastern Europe in the mid-eighteenth century when Austria, Germany, and Russia were trying to gobble up Poland. To ward off this national decapitation the Polish government sought to strengthen Polish society.  One concern was the large number of non-assimilated Jews who had settled in Poland since the 12th Century because of the relatively liberal environment that allowed them to prosper and practice their religion. Many of the Jews worked for the nobles, managing estates and selling crops.   

By the late 18th century, half of the world’s Jews, about 1.5 million, lived in Poland. The Polish bourgeoisie considered this large community of Jews to be unwelcome competitors and the general populous put the Jews in the same basket as the nobles, resenting both.  Polish leaders saw these conflicts as one more cause for the weakness of the country. They thought that if Jews would become farmers they would be like everyone else and the conflicts would cease. Plans were drawn up but were never implemented.  And Austria, Germany, and Russia did gobble up Poland. 

The areas of Poland annexed by Russia are shown in mauve, lilac, and gray.

The majority of the Polish Jews, approximately 1 million, lived in the areas of Eastern Poland that were annexed by Russia between 1772 and 1795. (Listen to a discussion on how this annexation affected these Polish Jews.)

By Dim Grits – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0

 So when Czar Alexander I rose to the throne in 1801 he faced a dual dilemma. First, how could he populate New Russia and Crimea in southern Russia, lands recently conquered from the Ottomans following the Russo-Turkish Wars? In addition, how could the Czar integrate the one million Jews who had recently come under Russian rule through these partitions of Poland? 

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  1. JEFFERSON, Thomas. Letter to John Jay, Aug. 23, 1785, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (DLC) Jefferson Quotes and Family Letters, Thomas Jefferson, Monticello. [↩]

Baron Hirsch Genealogical and Historical Archives

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For searching family members in the United States and Canada note:

Online searching is available for Baron Hirsch related genealogical records available through the Center for Jewish History in New York. See this video for instructions. Some complete records are online, and when only a reference to a record is on online you can request the full document from the Center via email at inquiries@cjh.org

Baron Maurice de Hirsch

More Archives

In addition, the genealogical and historical archives described below (alphabetized by city) contain reports and correspondence relating to Baron Hirsch-funded Jewish farming projects and individual immigrants who received aid from the Baron Hirsch charitable organizations. These archives are scattered around the world. Some of the holdings have been uploaded digitally – see the links below – but most are only available on-site.

For texts in French, Spanish and Portuguese I suggest copy-pasting into google translate. It really works.

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