Home
  • warning: Parameter 2 to wijering4_swftools_flashvars() expected to be a reference, value given in /home/burtonso/public_html/jhs/includes/module.inc on line 476.
  • warning: Parameter 2 to wijering4_swftools_flashvars() expected to be a reference, value given in /home/burtonso/public_html/jhs/includes/module.inc on line 476.
  • warning: Parameter 2 to wijering4_swftools_flashvars() expected to be a reference, value given in /home/burtonso/public_html/jhs/includes/module.inc on line 476.
  • warning: Parameter 2 to wijering4_swftools_flashvars() expected to be a reference, value given in /home/burtonso/public_html/jhs/includes/module.inc on line 476.
  • warning: Parameter 2 to wijering4_swftools_flashvars() expected to be a reference, value given in /home/burtonso/public_html/jhs/includes/module.inc on line 476.

Vancouver

Close up of the mantle on the Torah donated to Congregation Or Shalom by Morris and Dena Wosk and Family

Posted by aiu
Object id: 
L.12657

Colour photograph showing the mantle of a Torah.

Date: 
2007
Source: 
Tessler, Ronnie
Rights: 
Copyright JHSBC
Tags:

Or Shalom's Aron Kodesh with the Seigel Torah with B'nai Mitzvah class mantle, and the Wosk Torah

Posted by aiu
Object id: 
L.12656

Colour photograph showing Torahs.

Date: 
2007
Source: 
Tessler, Ronnie
Rights: 
Copyright JHSBC
Tags:

Bill Ornstein: Keeping Kosher

Posted by jhsadmin

 

 

 
 
JG:          So how did you maintain a Jewish lifestyle?
 
BO:        Would you believe my mother brought her kosher food in from Quebec City [the family was living in Cabano, a small town outside of Quebec City at the time]? Every week we got a parcel of meat and poultry. Our house was strictly kosher. We had 4 sets of dishes, two for Pesach and two for the rest of the year. And on Pesach my mother used to go up to the dairy with her own pot and milk the cow herself into the pot, so the children could have fresh milk. We had chickens in our own yard so we had fresh eggs and eventually we had our own cow and my father owned a horse.
 
JG:          Did you celebrate the holidays with other Jewish families in the area, with
   your uncle and aunt?
 
BO:        No. The only holiday we celebrated with anybody, and that was just my father and myself, my father combined a buying trip with Rosh Hashanah/Yom Kippur and we went into Montreal. On the way we picked up some of the Jewish men from Rivière-Du-Loup because you had to change trains and we all went together to Montreal and we stayed with one of my father’s brothers. I remember sleeping on a bed made out of a rectangle of chairs, piled with pillows. My father belonged to what was called then the Romana Shul it was actually the Beth David synagogue, one of the largest synagogues in Montreal. I also remember very clearly Kippurs before Yontif…
 
JG:          Describe that.
 
BO:        My father or my uncle would take a white chicken by the legs and wave it over my head and say the Kippuris prayer and I was always petrified that the chicken would have a little diarrhea maybe [laughter].
 
JG:          It was a tense moment!
 
BO:        It was very tense, not knowing how the chicken felt [laughter].
 
[Fade]
 
JG:          Now you were always within walking distance of the synagogue with all of these homes, did you remain kosher and Shomer Shabbat, as your family had been?
 
BO:        Okay, as far as kosher is concerned when we came here we were not kosher. We did actually observe Pesach because when we drove out here it was Chol Ha-Mo'ed Pesach. We had fruit and juices a couple of boxes of matzah in the car and that’s how we travelled.
 
JG:          Yep I’ve travelled like that.
 
BO:        Yeah I would not desecrate Pesach even though we were travelling. But we weren’t kosher as far as the food we had in the house or our dishes. And what happened is that Anita [] came to a, I guess it was a debate, that some of the teenagers were participating in, Les Horowitz was one of the participants and there were a few other kids and they actually sent out a message to Anita anyway, about the confusion that existed between what they were learning in Talmud Torah and what they saw in their own homes. And they felt very confused about really what was right to do as far as kashrut and Shabbat observances and so on. Anita came home that night and she said from now on our home is going to be a kosher home. When she told this to Shirley Goldenberg, Shirley and the Rabbi came down here, koshered all of our cutlery, our pots, our pans, and they went out and bought us our first set of dishes from Army & Navy and our house has been kosher ever since.
 
JG:          So the kids teach the parents now and then.
 
BO:        Absolutely.

You are missing some Flash content that should appear here! Perhaps your browser cannot display it, or maybe it did not initialize correctly. You can download a Flash plugin here

Tags:

Samuel Rothstein: Living and Working in Strathcona

Posted by jhsadmin

 

SR: By the time we got to Vancouver at the very end of 1922. Say the beginning of 1923. I remember when I was kid growing up in Vancouver and I don’t think things changed very much in say, the 15 years that intervened. I remember believing, being told somehow or other that Vancouver had a population of about 500 Jewish families. Maybe 2500 people in all in the 1920s and 1930s. So I should think that they had maybe 1500 or so before the war (WWI). But I’m just guessing. I really don’t know.
 
JG:          Well, they certainly had enough to build a synagogue on Heatley Street…
 
SR:         I think the Heatley Street one was built after the way but I remember it very well of course. And next to it was the hader that I attended. The Hebrew school where we would go to for instruction several times a week.
 
JG:          So your parents came here because your father’s family had already settled?
 
SR:         Yeah, that’s right.
 
JG:          What did they do for a living?
 
SR:         Well my uncles did various things but soon at least after they got here they got into the sack business. I think they may have had to do peddling at the beginning but they got into the sack business. And each of them had a pretty good business dealing in bags, burlap and twine, that being the name on the window. Mostly it was used burlap bags, they also did some new bags and some other things, but it was used burlap bags which they would buy from the peddlers and then fix up, that is, repair, because many of them had holes, and then in turn sell them to people who wanted the burlap bags, people like farmers or many other people. So that was the business my uncles were in. When my father came here, he in turn became a peddler which must have been a tremendous hardship for him to have to start from scratch after have been a man of some substance and means. And I remember going with him as he would go from customer to customer. And these would be sometimes farmers out in Lulu Island or people with various stores who would have bags and he would sell them to my uncles, mostly my uncle Abe, who had a bigger business. And that was the way in which my father made a living. Not all unusual. It was practically the standard operating procedure for immigrants coming to at least Vancouver, probably all over North America, I should think. But at least in Vancouver, this is what you saw people doing. Later, they would try to—if they were young enough and vigorous enough—they would try to get on to other things. But that was a very common fate for the immigrants. Tough life.
 
JG:          Yes, I’m sure it was. The business was downtown in East Vancouver?
 
SR:         We lived at 641 East Georgia Street. The house is still there, which would be about two blocks from the shul. The shul was at Heatley and Pender, we were on Georgia, half a block from Heatley. So, my uncles’ business premises were on Powell Street and Pender Street, respectively. My father didn’t have a place of business, in so far as he did operate one, it would have been from our house, the garage.
 
JG:          The neighbourhood was largely Jewish? Describe the neighbourhood a little bit.
 
SR:         The neighbourhood was, it’s now called Strathcona. And it was a couple blocks south of Strathcona School. The neighbourhood was Jewish but not by any means mainly or exclusively so. It seemed to be the locale for all immigrant groups. So I remember when I went to Strathcona School, where I went until I was 8 years old, there was a statement going around then that Strathcona was the home of 95 different nationalities. And it may very well have been true. So I went to school with Chinese and Japanese, there were substantial colonies there. There were Italians, Russians, Poles, Ukrainians, lots of immigrants of various kinds. But it was the centre of Jewish life. Though already by the end of the 20s quite a number of the East End Jews had moved west to places like Fairview, and if they were well-to-do, to Shaughnessy. Some to the West End. Scattered in places like Kitsilano and so on. Mostly to Fairview in the vicinity of the first Jewish Community Centre on 11th and Oak. The centre was built in 1928, we moved to Fairview in 1929. So we were very much a part of the sort of standard ebb and flow of Jewish community life in Vancouver and probably in that sense shared characteristics and so on with many other Jews in the world.

You are missing some Flash content that should appear here! Perhaps your browser cannot display it, or maybe it did not initialize correctly. You can download a Flash plugin here

Tags:

Bill Ornstein: Chevra Kadisha

Posted by jhsadmin
 
 
JG: Right. I don’t want to pass over that. What is a Chevra Kadisha and who is involved in the procedures?
 
BO: Okay, Chevra Kadisha is, if you will, a burial society. They’d made up of, it’s made up of people, presumably, who are observant Jews. These people prepare the body for burial, and these people on a rotating basis, sit with the body until such time as the funeral takes place. These are very dedicated people, it’s something that not everybody would like to do. We have a women’s Chevra Kadisha and a men’s Chevra Kadisha. Of course it’s obvious that one looks after women and the other looks after men. It’s been pretty much the same people for several years. Every once in a while we get a new member joining. It’s a type of position that you can’t just go out and hire somebody to do. It’s something that somebody does because they have a special feeling for the person who is being buried.
 
JG:          Now, can anyone - does it serve anyone in the community or is it just for members of Schara Tzedeck?
 
BO:        Serves everybody in the community. It’s the only Chevra Kadisha in Vancouver, anyway. I was going to say all of British Columbia because I don’t think there’s an official Chevra Kadisha anywhere else including Victoria, to the best of my knowledge. But anyway it serves all of British - all of Vancouver and the outlying areas and it serves all of the synagogues, certainly not just for Schara Tzedeck.
 
JG:          Okay and if someone is not affiliated with a synagogue and you know that he or she has died and they’re Jewish…
 
BO:        They still get looked after. We even look after bodies that have to be shipped elsewhere. The body is prepared and put in a casket and sent where ever they have to be sent. We’ve sent some to Israel, to the prairies, to Montreal, still looked after by the Chevra Kadisha.

You are missing some Flash content that should appear here! Perhaps your browser cannot display it, or maybe it did not initialize correctly. You can download a Flash plugin here

Tags:

Joanne Emerman and Clare Prasow: Donner’s Furniture Store

Posted by jhsadmin

 

LR: Is anything more you can tell us about the actual furniture store itself [Donner’s Furniture Store in Vancouver, 1127 Granville Street].

JE: I think in my interview with you previously, we did a bit of our own manufacturing at one point. We did… we had a hardware store; it was like three different components.

LR: That’s right, I remember that.

JE: Hardwood, Furniture and the unpainted furniture. And then it was actually… we sort of catered to the middle and lower class. So we weren’t really that competitive necessarily. You didn’t have to… we weren’t in competition with the Wosk’s or Hope or Belmont. They had sort of the upper class type furniture.

CP: But we also had appliances

JE: We had everything, we had toys. We were just the whole works. And it was great. It was really, buy everything for your house from one store. And at one time it did, as I say, we also had the manufacturing. I don’t know much really about that end of it. I don’t know …It was not a long period of time. They had… underneath… it’s quite a large store. They actually stored a lot of furniture because they had a basement and so they could actually store a lot of material. They didn’t just have to order it in as it was sold. They actually had a huge warehouse in both stores. And as I say, I don’t know much about the manufacturing but they touched on that. And they enjoyed it so maybe that’s important to tell you. They loved working together, loved it! And they loved working with Nana. And they enjoyed going to work, they enjoyed being together and they all took their days off together and I told you, whenever they socialized… right to the very end…the last one went… they always huddled in a corner, not to talk business but just to be together. Because they just liked to be together. And we celebrated all the holidays together, it was a very… we were all one big family. I mean I consider… I’ve always considered Uncle Sam and Uncle Fred and Auntie Claire just like my parents and their spouses… Uncle Saul and Aunt Hazel and Auntie Min. We were all just one big family.

You are missing some Flash content that should appear here! Perhaps your browser cannot display it, or maybe it did not initialize correctly. You can download a Flash plugin here


You can also play the clip by downloading the file directly here.

Tags:

David Malchy: Beth Tikvah Synagogue

Posted by jhsadmin
 
 
 
NO: What kinds of volunteer work have you done in the past?
 
DM:       Volunteer work? Well, I worked for approximately eight years with Beth Tikvah in the capacity of President, past-President, involvement in education committees and various other committees over a period of eight to ten years.
 
NO:        When was Beth Tikvah founded, what year?
 
DM:       Well Beth Tikvah was started originally as a Jewish community in Richmond and that was in 1970/71 and after four or five years as a Jewish community association it became a synagogue, and was originally started in 1970. In the summer of 1970 on of the rabbis in Vancouver by the name of Harold Rubin, he was the rabbi of the Temple Sholom, he was living in Richmond and he found that his children were discriminated against when they missed school to go to the synagogue for Jewish holidays, so he was quite concerned that the community was not aware of Jewish holidays in the area. So he proceeded to send out notification tall the Jewish families that he knew of in Richmond for a meeting, and this took place in June of 1970. And from that meeting a loosely arranged group of families got together over the summer and met to try and form a community association. In the fall of 1970 we had a meeting here at the Jewish Community Centre in Vancouver at which there were about sixty or seventy families and we got together and formed Richmond/Delta Jewish community association. I was chosen first President because I had kept notes over the summer and nobody else wanted to take on the job. So from the fall of 1970 we met regularly in different members’ homes to develop a constitution, to set up various committees; we had a President, vice-President, secretary, treasurer, social committee, education committee, ways and means committee, we had a welcoming committee who would welcome new families into the community and this is how we started. The first fund-raisers occurred in the fall of ’71 and our goal as the time was to set up a pre-school and an after-school Hebrew school, so in the fall of ’71 we had a bazaar and we had a raffle, we built a playhouse for children and we raffled this off and we also had a bazaar at the same time and we raised money towards setting the school up. Finally in the fall of ’71 we were able to set up this pre-school.

 

 

You are missing some Flash content that should appear here! Perhaps your browser cannot display it, or maybe it did not initialize correctly. You can download a Flash plugin here

Tags:


Affidavit of Erwin Dann (formerly Erwin Danziger), Vancouver, B.C., 1939
Rights - Copyright JMABC


Invitation to the laying of the cornerstone for the first Jewish Community Centre, Vancouver, B.C., 1928
Rights - Public Domain


Ground-breaking of new Jewish Community Centre, Vancouver, B.C., [1960]
Rights - Copyright JMABC