Goldberg - Holocaust survivors in Canada: exclusion, inclusion, transformation, 1947-1955

Studies in Immigration and Culture

Royden Loewen, series editor

14 Holocaust Survivors in Canada: Exclusion, Inclusion, Transformation, 19471955

Adara Goldberg

13 Transnational Radicals: Italian Anarchists in Canada and the U.S., 19151940

Travis Tomchuk

12 Invisible Immigrants: The English in Canada since 1945

Marilyn Barber and Murray Watson

11 The Showman and the Ukrainian Cause: Folk Dance, Film, and the Life of Vasile Avramenko

Orest T. Martynowych

10 Young, Well-Educated, and Adaptable: Chilean Exiles in Ontario and Quebec, 19732010

Francis Peddie

9 The Search for a Socialist El Dorado: Finnish Immigration to Soviet Karelia from the United States and Canada in the 1930s

Alexey Golubev and Irina Takala

8 Rewriting the Break Event: Mennonites and Migration in Canadian Literature

Robert Zacharias

7 Ethnic Elites and Canadian Identity: Japanese, Ukrainians, and Scots, 19191971

Aya Fujiwara

6 Community and Frontier: A Ukrainian Settlement in the Canadian Parkland

John C. Lehr

5 Storied Landscapes: Ethno-Religious Identity and the Canadian Prairies

Frances Swyripa

4 Families, Lovers, and Their Letters: Italian Postwar Migration to Canada

Sonia Cancian

3 Sounds of Ethnicity: Listening to German North America, 18501914

Barbara Lorenzkowski

2 Mennonite Women in Canada: A History

Marlene Epp

1 Imagined Homes: Soviet German Immigrants in Two Cities

Hans Werner

HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS IN CANADA

Exclusion, Inclusion, Transformation, 19471955

ADARA GOLDBERG

University of Manitoba Press

Winnipeg, Manitoba

Canada R3T 2M5

uofmpress.ca

Adara Goldberg 2015

Printed in Canada

Text printed on chlorine-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper

19 18 17 16 15 1 2 3 4 5

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database and retrieval system in Canada, without the prior written permission of the University of Manitoba Press, or, in the case of photocopying or any other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright (Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca, or call 1-800-893-5777.

Cover image: Eating a meal outside at the Mothers and Babes Summer Rest Home, 1948. Ontario Jewish Archives, fonds 52, series 1-7, file 5, item 2.

Cover design: David Drummond

Interior design: Jess Koroscil

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Goldberg, Adara, 1983, author

Holocaust survivors in Canada : exclusion, inclusion, transformation, 1947-1955 / Adara Goldberg.

(Studies in immigration and culture ; 14)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-0-88755-776-7 (pbk.)

ISBN 978-0-88755-496-4 (pdf )

ISBN 978-0-88755-494-0 (epub)

1. JewsCanadaHistory20th century. 2. JewsCultural assimilationCanadaHistory20th century. 3. Jews, Canadian History20th century. 4 . Holocaust survivorsCanadaBiography. 5. ImmigrantsCanadaBiography. 6. CanadaEmigration and immigrationHistory20th century. I. Title. II. Series: Studies in immigration and culture ; 14

FC106.J5G63585 2015 971.004924 C2015-903498-1 C2015-903499-X

The University of Manitoba Press gratefully acknowledges the financial support for its publication program provided by the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Manitoba Department of Culture, Heritage, Tourism, the Manitoba Arts Council, and the Manitoba Book Publishing Tax Credit.

To my father, David Goldberg, whose high standards and strong moral code I strive to live up to. I hope that Ive made you proud.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

INTRODUCTION

In October 1949, at the request of the Canadian Jewish Congress (CJC), Miss Mary Palevsky, a former caseworker with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) and deputy director of the New York Association of New Americans, produced a survey report on Jewish refugee settlement work in Montreal and Toronto, two metropolises representing 85 percent of Canadian Jews. The investigation shed a disheartening, unflattering light on communal efforts to effectively serve the first wave of postwar Holocaust survivors to reach Canada: The settlement of thousands of immigrants is essentially a large-scale welfare operation. The resources for an operation of such scope were lacking in Canada. Canadian communities are not well organized to serve the normal demands of even the native population. Confronted by the need to extend its limited resources to meet the urgent and almost unlimited needs of the immigrants, the program collapsed at pressure points and emergency measures had to be improvised from day to day. In her eyes, the CJC and its affiliated organizations had failed the survivors.

And, yet, Holocaust survivors entered and integrated into Canadas Jewish communities, and in the process, they affected and transformed various aspects of Canadian Jewish life. Possessing limited political agency or power, in addition to the lingering physical and psychological effects of wartime abuses, survivors collectively navigated the resettlement process with varying degrees of savvy. And, in spite of legal, social, political, and economical obstacles, most survivors became engaged new Canadians by the latter part of the 1950s. They spearheaded the development of Hassidic and ultra-Orthodox communities, contributed to and rejuvenated Yiddish culture and the arts, and helped enact legislative change relating to refugee laws and human rights. Although financially poor, the newcomers brought with them energy, expertise, and a commitment to re-establishing their lives.

Canadian Jewry was dramatically reshaped by the arrival of approximately 35,000 survivors of Nazi persecution, plus their dependents, from 1947 to 1955. A small but well-established community of 170,000 persons in the 1930s, Canadian Jews had maintained close ties with Eastern Europe prior to and during the first years of the Second World War, and pioneered campaigns to deliver money, food, and resources to suffering relatives and friends. As the war progressed and the Final Solution unrolled, however, these ties withered. Knowledge about the destruction of their European co-religionists arrived through various sources, including press coverage, public demonstrations, and military reports. Unpreced-ented accounts of mass, state-sponsored, anti-Jewish violence challenged comprehension. Few Canadians could begin to fathom, or believe, the extent to which Nazi Germany decimated Jewish life in Europe.

When surviving remnants of European Jewry, the Sheerith Hapleitah, began to trickle into Canada two years after liberation, Canadian Jews were ill-prepared to attend to all but their most basic needs. Joseph Kage, director of social services of the Jewish Immigrant Aid Society (JIAS), understood that the incoming refugees required special treatment because of the conditions under which they lived prior to immigration. But despite the inadequacies of the system, as well as the unprecedented nature of this immigrant population and the bureaucratic service limitations, Jewish agencies responded to the newcomers to the greatest of their professional capability.