“There were cries of joy, some of sorrow”: Canadian Jewish Soldiers and Early Encounters with Survivors

A close study of the early contacts between Canadian Jewish soldiers and survivors reveals many of the features largely associated only with the “liberation” of the camps in 1945. Already in 1944, in France, Belgium and the Netherlands, Canadian soldiers had encountered evidence of the Holocaust, especially the stories of deportations, deprivation and loss told by Jews emerging from hiding. Many soldiers heard the stories, were deeply affected by them, and reached out to the survivors and wrote about their experiences to family members. Some accounts of these encounters appeared in the Canadian Jewish press. These accounts fed into a homefront discourse and strategy, encouraged by the Canadian Jewish Congress, which sought to demonstrate to both Jews and non-Jews the role of Canadian Jews in the war effort and the need to help European Jewry.

‘‘The Other Side of the Coin’’: The Anatomy of a Public Controversy in the Montreal Jewish Community, 1931

This article examines in detail the repercussions of a 1931 sermon by Sheea Herschorn, an immigrant Orthodox rabbi in Montreal, on the public discourse of the Montreal Jewish community. It begins with a brief consideration of the position of the immigrant Orthodox rabbinate in Montreal and then explores the nature of the public discourse on this sermon, in which Rabbi Herschorn was accused of agreeing with an anti-Semitic position, through a close examination of the reportage of the controversy in Montreal’s Jewish press, which then included two newspapers in Yiddish, the Keneder Adler and Der Shtern, as well as the English-language Canadian Jewish Chronicle. Finally, the article explores some of the major issues raised in Rabbi Herschorn’s sermon regarding the contemporary situation of Polish Jews in relation to their society, tying it to his perception of the relationship of Canadian Jews and Canadian society as a whole. These latter issues included especially the relationship between Montreal Jews and Montreal’s public Anglophone institutions, such as the Royal Victoria Hospital, and McGill University, whose ambivalent acceptance of Jews as physicians and students was then an issue of great concern to the Jewish community.