Jews in Greater Vancouver

After the Great Fire of June 1886 destroyed their Vancouver store, the family built the 100-room Gold House, a “strictly first-class” hostelry on Water Street. In 1877 Gold preempted 65 hectares along the North Arm Waggon Road in South Vancouver, leaving him, along with most such landowners in the suburbs, where population was scant, land rich but cash poor. In 1914 Louis’ son Edward was elected councillor in South Vancouver, and became reeve the following year. An outspoken, controversial figure, Edward instituted cost-cutting measures by suspending the clerk and other civic employees, and hectic council meetings became an attraction, where “chairs were used as weapons of offense and defense.”

Jewish merchants have been associated with the Lower Mainland since gold-rush days. In November 1858 Simon Reinhardt bought one of the first lots at Old Fort Langley (Derby), then projected to be the capital of the new colony of British Columbia. When New Westminster was chosen instead, Meyer, Reinhardt & Co. established there, as did the firm of Levi and Boas, “suppliers to the Cariboo gold fields.”

Born in the Saar, Germany, the Oppenheimer brothers, David and Isaac, after business experience in the California gold country, developed a mercantile enterprise to service the Fraser River and Cariboo gold rushes, and later the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway through the Fraser canyon. Realizing the great potential of the future Vancouver, from 1878 to 1886 David and Isaac and several business associates bought prime land at Coal Harbour, English Bay and a large block east of Carrall Street. In so doing their Vancouver Improvement Company became the largest landowner in town, after the CPR and the Hastings Saw Mill.

David Oppenheimer was undoubtedly the outstanding citizen in Vancouver’s formative period. He promoted incorporation of the city, which took place on April 6, 1886. In June Oppenheimer Bros.—today Vancouver’s oldest business—built the first wholesale grocery in the city’s first brick building, still extant in present-day Gastown. The Great Fire passed over its foundation, then under construction. Upon completion, the building was used as Vancouver’s first “city hall.” Both David and Isaac were members of the 1887 city council, David being chairman of the finance committee. From 1888 to 1891 David served four terms as mayor, among the most constructive in Vancouver’s history.

Mayor Oppenheimer set up the basic civic services: water supply, sewers, fire department, streets, schools, and parks. His civic duties were often intertwined with entrepreneurial investments: the Vancouver Water Works Company, the Vancouver Electric Railway and Light Company, and the Westminster and Vancouver Tramway. He promoted trade far and wide and succeeded in establishing steamship connection between Vancouver and Australia. Oppenheimer also had an active hand in the founding of the B.C. Sugar Refinery. He was a prime mover in forming the city’s YMCA, the Alexandra Orphanage, the Vancouver Board of Trade, the British Columbia Exhibition Association, and the Vancouver Club, of which Isaac was president in 1895-96.

As mayor, David Oppenheimer presided over the dedication of Stanley Park on October 29, 1889. He also reserved Burnaby’s Central Park along the tramway, calling it after its namesake in his wife’s home town, New York City. When in 1911 a bronze-bust memorial sculpted by Charles Marega was unveiled at the English Bay entrance to Stanley Park by Premier Richard McBride, David Oppenheimer was publicly acknowledged as the “father” of Vancouver.

The earliest Jews in Vancouver, originating from Central Europe, had arrived via the United States, the British Empire and the earlier community of Victoria. They soon integrated into the language, way of life and relative affluence of Anglo society. But at the time of Vancouver’s formation, events changed the origin and class of the typical Jewish immigrants. Russian persecution, completion of the transcontinental railway, and Canadian policy intended to populate the west all resulted in a flood of immigrants from Eastern Europe. While most of these newcomers settled on the prairies, a trickle found their way to Vancouver. Largely from old- country villages, these Jews brought with them their folklore, their ages-old practices of Orthodox Judaism, and the Yiddish language. They settled in the town’s working-class Strathcona district. Many were destitute and started out in business as peddlers. Others became storekeepers, or operated as artisans—tailors and shoemakers mostly—along the main business streets of Vancouver’s early days—Water, Cordova, and Westminster (Main). Through hard work and mutual assistance almost all eventually gained a better livelihood and higher social standing.

Zebulon Franks was a typical example. A youthful scholar in his home town in the Ukraine, where his father was the rabbi, he witnessed the massacre of his family in a pogrom but escaped across the Austro-Hungarian border. Arriving at Vancouver in 1887, he established a store on Water Street which stocked “hardware, stoves, guns, and every imaginable article—from bucksaws to boots—needed by logger, fisherman, miner and trapper.” Named after his wife Yetta, the business operates today as Y. Franks Appliances. Zebulon Franks was the first Jewish religious leader in Vancouver, and the earliest Orthodox services were held in his store.

In 1887, when a tract of land in the forest, now known as Mountain View Cemetery, was procured by the city for burial purposes, a separately fenced section was allotted to the Jewish community. In October 1891 Vancouver’s first Jewish congregation Agudas Achim (Congregation of Brothers) celebrated the High Holy Days at the Knights of Pythias Hall on Cordova Street—now part of the Army & Navy store. The press reported on the Orthodox services as if describing an alien civilization: the headline read, “God’s Peculiar People.” In 1894 with the arrival of Solomon Philo, a German Reform rabbi who had previously ministered to the Victoria congregation, Temple Emanuel of Vancouver was formed. Thus, from the outset, a split developed between the more “Anglicized” jews and their Yiddish-speaking strictly Orthodox co—religionists.

Samuel Gintzburger, long-term president of Congregation Emanuel, was the leader of Reform Judaism in Vancouver. Arriving from his native Switzerland at the age of 20, in 1887 he purchased 65 hectares on the site of present-day North Vancouver. Gintzburger traded with natives on the west coast of Vancouver Island, hunted seal in the North Pacific and Bering Sea, mined silver in the Kootenay, and joined the gold rush to Atlin. He later served on the first municipal council of West Vancouver, and eventually settled in Vancouver, where he became a real estate, insurance and financial agent, consul of Switzerland, and a citizen of substantial influence.

Another noteworthy person in early Vancouver was Justice Samuel Davies Schultz, a grandson of pioneer Victoria families, who in 1914 was appointed to the Vancouver County Court, the first Jew in Canada named to the bench.

Twenty-five years elapsed before Vancouver’s Jewish community managed to build its first synagogue, the Orthodox Sons of Israel, a small wooden building in Strathcona, where the majority of the 250 Jewish families lived. A Hebrew school was also started in a nearby house, which grew into the Vancouver Talmud Torah. A pocket of upper middle-class Jews lived in the affluent West End, but this Reform group remained largely static, and by World War I the more numerous East-European community was predominant. In 1921 a new synagogue named Schara Tzedeck (Gates of Righteousness), seating 600 persons, was consecrated on the site of the first synagogue. A handsome building in traditional Mediterranean style, it is today a heritage landmark, restored for other uses. Nathan Mayer Pastinsky was the spiritual leader, a man of extraordinary sagacity and humanity who worked tirelessly among the immigrant population for 30 years. The Reform congregation suspended its plan to build a synagogue in the West End in order to unite the Jewish community under one roof. Not until 1965 was the Vancouver Reform Congregation reconstituted as Temple Shalom.

By the mid-1930s the Jewish community had grown to 600 families, and the structure of the community was firmly established in the founding of its many core organizations. In 1926 the Council of Jewish Women opened a Neighborhood House in Strathcona, superseded in 1928 by a Jewish Community Centre in Fairview. In 1930 the Jewish Western Bulletin, a weekly newspaper, was established. Today the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver is the central fund raising and planning agency for the community.

Faced with providing facilities to meet the particular needs of their immigrant group, Vancouver’s Jews were often in the forefront of social services. The Hebrew Aid Society was one of the earliest of its kind in Vancouver, assisting needy immigrants with money, food, clothes and shelter, and giving aid to orphanages, hospitals and asylums. In 1924 the Vancouver Jewish Community Chest was organized, and in 1931 became the model for the city-wide organization. The Council of Jewish Women started in 1927 the free Well Baby Clinic, which was later incorporated into the Metropolitan Health Service. Three women who headed much of the cultural and philanthropic work of the community during this period were Rachel Goldbloom, Louise E. Mahrer and Anne Sugarman, who was also a driving force in the Vancouver Folk Festival and a leading Red Cross worker in World War II.

In the mid-1920s and 1930s, most Jewish income earners were small business people, and a number of the retail merchandise establishments on Hastings and Granville, which had become the principal business streets, were owned by Vancouver Jews. Enterprises such as Wosk’s Furniture and Appliance Stores, Toban’s Quality Shoe Stores, and Sam Cohen’s Army & Navy Department Store became familiar shopping places. Many of Vancouver’s Jews resided south of False Creek in the newer districts of Mount Pleasant, Fairview, Shaughnessy and later Kerrisdale and Oakridge, By the end of World War II the Jewish community had completely deserted Strathcona.

With the growth of the second generation, Canadian-born and schooled, a demand arose for a modern congregation without segregation of the sexes and with greater English-speaking content. This led in 1932 to the inauguration of a Conservative congregation, Beth Israel (House of Israel), which reconciles traditional values of Judaism with modern forms, and today is the largest synagogue in the region serving 900 families.

Numerous Jewish stars of vaudeville and radio performed in Vancouver. Benny Kubelsky was playing the Orpheum circuit in 1922, along with the Marx Brothers, and accompanied Zeppo Marx to a passover service in the home of David Marks, a Vancouver tailor. There he met Marks’ daughter Sadie. The couple married in 1927 and in the heyday of radio, under the stage names of Jack Benny and Mary Livingstone, became a world-renowned comedy team. In 1946 the first Jewish home for the aged was opened by comedian and humanitarian Eddie Canter, who gave a benefit performance in its support. Today this geriatric care facility operates as the Louis Brier Home and Hospital, funded by the legacy of a Yukon pioneer and philanthropist who made his fortune in the Klondike Gold Rush.

The post-war period has seen a many-fold increase in the Jewish population of Vancouver; 25,000 Jews live in Greater Vancouver today. The largest growth has come from a westward migration of second- and third-generation Canadians, particularly from the prairies. These people were graduating in large numbers from the universities as professionals, and arrived looking for new opportunities.

Jews have more recently come to Vancouver from almost every region of the world—the United States, South America, South Africa, the Middle East and the Soviet republics—resulting in a modern, highly cosmopolitan community. Occupations have become diversified to the point where one can nowadays expect to find Jews working in virtually all fields of endeavor.

From 1972 to 1975 a social worker, David Barrett, raised in the East End of Vancouver where his father ran a produce market, led the New Democratic Party in the first social-democratic government in British Columbia. He thus became the first member of the Jewish faith to be elected premier of a Canadian province. In July 1974 Simma Holt, a newspaper reporter, was elected member for Vancouver-Kingsway, becoming the first Jewish woman to serve in the parliament of Canada. Muni Evers, a pharmacist, served seven terms, from 1969 to 1982, as mayor of New Westminster. And Harry Rankin was a perennial alderman of Vancouver. From 1979 to 1988 Nathan T. Nemetz was Chief Justice of British Columbia. Jews have also served as chancellors of the provincial universities.

In contrast to other Canadian cities, there have been few cases of overt anti-Semitism reported in Vancouver. Rather discrimination has been more subtle; there was antipathy toward Jews in the social, fraternal, athletic, and business organizations of the general community, on the faculties of colleges and the university, and in employment. In current times, with equal employment and human rights legislation in place, and attainment by people of all ethnic backgrounds to the highest public offices in the province, discrimination has become infrequent. Reciprocally, Jewish institutions have opened their doors to other races and creeds.

With increasing affluence and the opening of new residential districts in the 1960s and 1970s, the Jewish population has continued to shift southward and westward. Oak Street between 16th and 17th avenues has become the Jewish “main street,” where three synagogues, the Talmud Torah day school, the Jewish Community Centre, the Lubavitch Centre, a senior citizens homes and hospital complex, delicatessens and a book store are located.

The 1980s and 1990s have seen a significant shift of population to the suburbs. Recognizable Jewish communities have evolved in Richmond/Delta, the North Shore, Burquest (Burnaby/New Westminster/Coquitlam) and White Rock/South Surrey. Richmond in particular has had a long-time Jewish presence since the 1890s, when pioneer storekeepers Simon Petersky, Louis Rubinowitz and Henry Sisson operated in the fishing village of Steveston. Today Richmond is a bedroom community of professionals and retirees which has three synagogues, a Jewish Community Association, schools, and the Richmond Country Club.

As Jewish people have entered the economic and social mainstream the rate of intermarriage has risen to 50 per cent and concern has been expressed that Jewish distinctiveness and values are eroding. Nevertheless visitors have described Vancouver as having a vibrant Jewish community. Today there are fifteen Jewish congregations in Greater Vancouver, ranging from ultra-Orthodox to Reform.