Published: 30 July 2019
Last updated: 5 March 2024
WHEN I WAS A CHILD, I attended one of North America’s first and most enduring Jewish day schools, the Jewish People’s School of Montreal, affectionately and colloquially known as the Folks Shule (the people’s school). The Jewish People’s School was the product of Jewish reaction to the unique cultural and historical circumstances of the city in which it was founded.
Montreal at the beginning of the 20th century was the largest city in Canada and one that was divided between two religious and linguistic groups, who were not particularly friendly to each other: French Canadians who were primarily Catholic, and English Canadians who were primarily Protestant.
In the early 20th century, Jews made up the largest non-Christian minority in the province of Quebec. As the century progressed, their numbers kept rising in response to economic hardship and persecutions in Europe, especially the Holocaust.
This meant that until 1976, when the separatist Parti Québécois came to power, fuelling a mass exodus of Montreal Jews to Toronto, Montreal had the largest Jewish community in Canada, and Yiddish was the third most commonly spoken language in the city after French and English.
FULL STORY The Jewish people’s school of Montreal (Tablet)
Photo: Jewish school of Montreal yearbook
