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July 25, 2008
Discover community's past
Learn all about the city's Jewish history through your feet.
RON FRIEDMAN
In honor of B.C. Day and with this year marking the 150th anniversary of Jewish settlement in the province, the Jewish Independent took advantage of the balmy weather and went on a walking tour organized by the Jewish Museum and Archives of British Columbia.
The tour, called In the Footsteps of Jewish Vancouver 1886-2006, takes participants on an approximately five-kilometre journey through the neighborhoods of Gastown and Strathcona, visiting some of the city's earliest Jewish landmarks. The philosophy behind the tour is that, to learn about community, one needs to know about the people who lived and worked in the neighborhood. To that purpose, the staff of the museum pored over piles of archival material, including hundreds of photographs, letters and documents, as well as hours of oral histories, in order to give participants a real sense of early Jewish life in Vancouver.
The walking tour starts off in historic Gastown, at the intersection of Abbott and Water streets. Our guide was Naomi Goldman and the first stop along the way was 42 Water St., the site of what was formerly Zebulon Franks hardware store. It was in this two-storey building that the first Jews in Vancouver got together to pray. Franks' was one of many Jewish businesses located on Water Street in Vancouver's early days, when the city was little more than a few dirt roads along the banks of Burrard Inlet. The Jews of the time were mostly merchants and peddlers, people who came over from eastern Europe and set up businesses outfitting prospectors.
The original store burnt down in the Great Fire of 1886. When the site was renovated in recent years, the owner wanted to have the façade look exactly as it did in its original form but, not having the plans, the designer only managed to get it nearly right, inserting one too many windows on the second level. In the back of Franks' store was Blood Alley. Goldman gave us two possible explanations for the name, either because it was a place where public executions were carried out or because there were several butcher shops on the street and the blood from their work would flow down the alley.
Our second stop was opposite a building that takes up a full city block. When 22-year-old Sam Cohen opened the Army and Navy store in 1922, after making a fortune selling liquidation stock from closing, bankrupt or destroyed stores, the Gastown area was the commercial centre of Vancouver. Etchings from the time show horse-drawn carriages, dapper men and well-dressed women strolling down the street. You get the feeling that this was once the trendy part of town but, today, the smell of urine is thick in the air in one of the most neglected parts of the city.
Before it was bought by Cohen, the building was home to Vancouver's first community Yom Kippur services. In 1892, the Agudace Achim Society rented a hall in the building from the fraternal order, the Knights of Pythias. The building is now owned by Vancouver socialite Jacqui Cohen, Sam Cohen's granddaughter.
A short distance from the Army and Navy store is the site of the Oppenheimer Grocery Warehouse, named after its owners and Vancouver's second mayor, David Oppenheimer and his family. Learning a lesson from the fire that consumed nearly all the city,
Oppenheimer and his brothers constructed their warehouse out of brick - it was the first brick building in Vancouver. On the invitation of the Oppenheimers, city hall, which at the time was housed in a tent while a new building was being built, temporarily operated out of their warehouse. The building, which is now listed as a world heritage site, was purchased by singer Brian Adams in 1991. It currently functions as a world-class recording studio, where Canada's top musicians, like Avril Lavigne and Sarah Mclachlan, come to record.
A 10-minute walk east brings participants to 496 Hastings St. and the site of the Orwell Hotel. Though it functions as a low-income housing development today, during the 1920s and '30s, it was the centre of Vancouver's Zionist activities. Housing organizations like Young Judea and the Zionist and Social Society, the Zionist Hall played a central part of the community in the days that forming a Jewish homeland in Palestine was one of its main focuses.
Another story of entertainment trivia is told at the next stop along the way. On the corner of Hastings and Dunlevy streets sits an old seven-storey building called Ferrera Court. Once the home of a Jewish family headed by local tailor, David Marks, a small apartment in this building was the meeting place of a couple that would go on to become one of the world's most renowned comedy teams – Jack Benny and Mary Livingston. (You can find out more on the tour.)
The walk then takes participants past Strathcona public school. Goldman told us that, in the early 20th century, most of the area's Jewish children would have gone to this school, where they would have encountered the children of immigrants from all over the world. Although she described the Jewish community of the time as very tight knit, she also said that the neighborhood was very multicultural and that Jewish immigrants from Russia, Poland and the Ukraine would regularly intermingle with non-Jewish Italians, Portuguese, Greeks, Irish and others. While the wealthier, more established Jews, who tended to live in the West End, spoke mainly English, Yiddish was the common language in Strathcona.
The next stop was a place that could be described as Vancouver's first Jewish community centre. In a residential house, built in the Queen Anne-style of architecture, at 800 Jackson Ave., the Vancouver branch of the Council of Jewish Women was first established in 1924. Two years later, the house turned into a so-called neighborhood house, serving as a second home to many of the city's newcomers, offering English classes, library facilities and a children's summer camp. In 1927, a well-baby clinic was opened there. The house closed shortly after the first Jewish community centre opened, on Oak Street, in 1928.
A short distance away, we came to a house that once was the site of a Jewish-owned grocery store and butchery. Owned by the Merin family, Zion Grocery was a hub of the neighborhood, a place for Jews to socialize with friends and relatives and gossip while making their weekly purchases. Goldman told the group that people would often buy chickens for Shabbat in nearby Chinatown and then give them to the grocer/shochet (ritualistic slaughterer), who would then prepare them according to the laws of kashrut. Families who couldn't afford to pay for their groceries in cash would occasionally trade clothes and family trinkets as barter.
On the other side of the street is where Rabbi Nathan Mayer Pastinsky lived. Stories tell that when Pastinsky first arrived in Vancouver from Winnipeg in 1918 and saw flowers on the ground, where in Winnipeg there had still been feet of snow, he immediately knew that this was the place for him. While initially engaged to perform the ritualistic duties of shochet, mohel (circumciser) and cantor, Pastinsky, or, as he was affectionately known, Father Pat, soon assumed full rabbinical duties. From Goldman's stories, it's clear that Pastinsky was a character, indeed.
Near the rabbi's home lies the site of the original Schara Tzedeck Synagogue (which has since relocated to 19th and Oak). Located at the intersection of Pender and Heatley, the synagogue was initially named Bnei Yehudah (Sons of Israel) and was renamed Schara Tzedeck. In a show of community solidarity, the construction of the Orthodox synagogue was made possible, in a large part, by the aid of the city's more well-heeled Jews, many of whom affiliated with the Reform movement. Recognizing the importance of the synagogue, the wealthier community members, many hailing from German or British origin and longtime residents of Canada, banded together with the poorer and more recent immigrant Jews of the area to build the city's first substantial Jewish building, with room for 600 people. Today, the building still has the exterior characteristics of a synagogue and even has an engraving of the Ten Commandment tablets on its front, but functions as a condominium.
The last part of the walking tour is optional, as it takes participants through some of the roughest parts of the Downtown Eastside. East Hastings Street, sometimes referred to as Skid Row, is a gathering point for many of the city's homeless, drug addicts and people with mental or other disabilities. This area was once lined with Jewish-owned businesses. Now all that remains to remind of those days are the old B.C. Collateral Loan, Gastown's oldest business, once owned by Harry Evans, and Knowlton's drug store, which at one time was owned and operated by Mike Ratner and Al Ragosin.
Longtime Jewish Western Bulletin advertisers, the Hub, a fancy men's clothing store at 45 Hastings St., is currently occupied by United We Can, a recycling depot that services the city's bottle collectors. The San Francisco tailors/cleaners/pawnbroker shop was one of Vancouver's longest-running businesses, owned by three generations of the Snider family – the store, originally established in 1908, closed earlier this year and is now a vacant lot.
The walking tour of historic Jewish Vancouver is a great way to learn both about the Jewish community and its early days and about the Gastown/Strathcona neighborhoods and its waves of success and failure. The richness of the experience depends mostly on your degree of inquisitiveness. While not too strenuous, the tour does consist of two hours of walking at a relatively brisk pace and, due to construction work in several places along the route, it is not wheelchair friendly. While it is possible to take the tour independently, it is not recommended to go alone because, as mentioned, the walk takes you through some unsavory places.
Remaining guided tours take place Wednesdays, July 30, Aug. 13 and 27, at 1:30 p.m.; and Sundays, Aug. 10, 17 and 31, at 10 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. The tours leave punctually, so be sure to get there on time or even a few minutes early. For more information and to book a space, contact the Jewish museum at 604-257-5199. Tickets are $10 and participants receive a booklet that includes historical summaries and an easy-to-follow map.
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