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July 27, 2007
Vancouver historian hailed
Decades of work by Cyril Leonoff heralded with national award.
PAT JOHNSON
There is probably no individual alive who knows more about the
history of the Jewish people in Western Canada than Cyril Leonoff.
A very successful professional engineer by trade, Leonoff spent
much of his life as an avocational historian – taking it up
as a full-time occupation in his retirement.
Since his founding of the Jewish Historical Society of British Columbia
in 1971, Leonoff has researched, written and collected his way into
the role of official Jewish historian. His life's work came full
circle in June when Leonoff, with his wife, Faye, travelled to Saskatchewan
– where, for Leonoff, it all began – to receive a lifetime
achievement award for his efforts.
Dr. Randal F. Schnoor, president of the Association for Canadian
Jewish Studies, wrote to Leonoff in April to tell him he had been
selected as the 2007 recipient of the Canadian Jewish Studies Distinguished
Service Award for lifetime scholarly achievement.
"Among other areas of research, we would like to recognize
your contributions to the study of the history of the Jews of British
Columbia as well as your earlier work on the Jewish farm settlements
in Saskatchewan," Schnoor wrote.
In Leonoff's letter of response, he noted the site of the award
ceremony in Saskatoon was appropriate, not only because the Prairies
were the site of Leonoff's first major historical research project,
but also because he has deep roots in the province. Leonoff, who
was raised in Winnipeg and spent his professional engineering career
in British Columbia, wrote of his maternal family's connection to
the land in Saskatchewan.
"My maternal grandfather, Joseph Edel Brotman, and three uncles
homesteaded in 1889 at the Wapella Colony," Leonoff wrote.
"Having been ordained in a yeshivah in his native Galicia,
grandfather served as rabbi of the Wapella Hebrew Congregation for
16 years, I believe the first congregational rabbi to conduct religious
services and marriages in Saskatchewan. Because of his fluency in
seven languages, he also served as the immigration agent in the
district."
Despite Leonoff's extensive work, it remains a source of surprise
to many that there was a thriving Jewish farm society in Saskatchewan
for several generations. As Leonoff wrote in his definitive 1984
work The Jewish Farmers of Western Canada, the pogroms across
Russia after the 1881 assassination of Czar Alexander II displaced
100,000 Jews in the Russian Empire. Expelled Jews found their way
to modern Palestine, but also to the East End of London, among other
places, where Canadian High Commissioner Sir Alexander T. Galt obtained
immigration papers for 340 Russian Jews to travel to Winnipeg. In
Canada, they faced a two-year wait before land was assigned, resulting
in an attrition of immigrants to alternative employment, including
building the railway. But in 1884, 8,968 acres were taken up by
the Jewish pioneers southwest of Moosomin, in what is now Saskatchewan.
Despite tough winters, drought, early frost and inadequate housing,
Jewish farm communities developed around southern Saskatchewan.
Their decline in the first half of the 20th century was due mostly
to circumstances beyond Jewish particularity - the First World War
took many farm boys to war and farm girls to the cities, the Depression
winnowed out a vast number of farmers and the Second World War would
sow the seeds of national urbanization, which would alter the face
of farming for all Canadians.
There remains a single Jewish farm family still plowing the land
that the Kaplun family has tilled since 1889. Other than that, the
memory of Jewish farming in Saskatchewan is kept alive mostly in
Leonoff's pages.
In addition to Leonoff's work on Saskatchewan farmers, he is the
author of the 1978 volume Pioneers, Pedlars and Prayer Shawls,
still the primary source for the history of Jews in B.C. He also
authored two impressive volumes containing the collected works of
noted 20th-century Vancouver photographers Leonard Frank and Otto
Landauer.
In British Columbia, according to Leonoff, Victoria had the first
Jewish community, made up of Americanized, English-speaking Jews
who came north from California to sell provisions to prospectors.
The Vancouver community, by contrast, is younger and was built by
Jews from the European mainland who travelled to the West Coast
by rail.
Sitting in a garden swing on a recent rare sunny day, as his horses
idled in a paddock off his verdant Southlands home, Leonoff noted
that the daily media covered the exotic Jews with some regularity
in the early days, under such headlines as "God's peculiar
people." Scanning decades of haystacks to find the needles
of early Jewish history has been a life's work for Leonoff, who
retired last year from his position as historian for the JHS, but
who remains its historian emeritus.
"I suppose one welcomes recognition," Leonoff said of
his recent award, but he notes he did it "for the love of the
thing."
As recipient, Leonoff joins a distinguished small cast that has
been recognized by this award since 2001, including renowned Reform
Rabbi Gunther Plaut, historian Irving Abella and poet Miriam Dworkin
Waddington.
Earlier this year, at the time the Jewish Historical Society was
opening the B.C. Jewish Museum in the Jewish Community Centre of
Greater Vancouver, the society created the Cyril Leonoff Endowment
for the Jewish Historical Society of B.C. as recognition of his
work.
"To me, a lot of these people were heroes, so I found it very
interesting," he said. "I always have great respect and
pride for the Jewish community and thought their story should be
told."
Pat Johnson is, among other things, director of development
and communications for Vancouver Hillel.
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