Migration defines us

Editorial

When the idea for a Jewish homeland was being discussed in the late 19th century, among the places mentioned as having space available were rural northern Canada and Argentina. As it turned out, there was really only one place where the Jewish people could fulfil the ideal of self-determination: in the ancestral and never-abandoned city of Jerusalem and the land of Zion. Nevertheless, a funny sort of intra-Diaspora migration in recent years reminds us that the Jewish world is not binary, but multiplicitous.

A story in the Canadian Jewish News recently reviewed the history of Argentine Jews who were encouraged to resettle in Manitoba over the past decade. Driven by an economic crisis that peaked in 2001, many Argentineans, including many Jews, emigrated to more stable places. Sensing opportunity for growing their declining population, the Jewish community of Winnipeg took the unprecedented step of organizing missions to Argentina to encourage and help Jews from the South American state make aliyah – to Manitoba.

The story may be little known to those outside Winnipeg, but it demonstrates an innovative and welcome approach both to the modern challenges facing Diaspora communities and the ancient mitzvah kol Yisrael arevim zeh le zeh. A community facing a declining population takes proactive measures that serve the purposes of both communal survival and aiding other Jews in need.

"We had 44 families come between 1996 and 2002, 70 come in 2003 and 40 more in 2004," Evelyn Hecht, who was Winnipeg Federation's immigration officer at the height of the Argentine immigration, told CJN. "We have had a few more since."

This is not the most massive relocation of Jews in the last few years, nor does it have the urgency or resonance of the airlifting of, say, Yemenite Jews or Falash Mora, just two communities whose rescue from oppression and isolation are legendary in the Zionist epic, but it will certainly have an impact on Manitoba Jewish life for generations to come.

It is also notable that, in other Canadian news, the Toronto Jewish community has just created a single umbrella organization to unify the disparate groups serving Israeli-Canadian Ontarians. The group, Israeli Forum, was launched three years ago by the local federation and now has 4,000 members. The Israeli-Canadian population in Greater Toronto is estimated at 50,000 – fully one in four Toronto Jews are Israeli immigrants – and this number presents some very unique communal challenges.

There was a time when Israeli emigration was a cause for discomfort in Diaspora communities. The trajectory of Jewish history in the past 60 years has been assumed to flow from Diaspora to Israel. That discomfort may not be completely gone, but the official Jewish approach is recognizing that individuals are free to determine their destiny, including where in the Jewish world they settle down.

Israeli migrants take many forms and have distinct stories. Many of the émigrés are "flow-through" sojourners, originating from places like the former Soviet Union, who have resettled twice. Others have made their choices based on economic, entrepreneurial, family, cultural, educational or quality-of-life determinants. The stories are as diverse as those of any immigrant group.

British Columbia's Jewish community has its own unique migration patterns. In addition to significant growth from the former Soviet Union, we also had a spurt of Argentineans in the past decade, as well as a large contingent of South Africans. This is to say nothing of the Canadians who migrate in droves to the West Coast as if the continent is tilted to the Pacific. The character of B.C. Jewish life has always been determined disproportionately by the waves of immigrant communities that have built it, from the American Jews who settled in Victoria during the Klondike and the central European Jews who made the trek on the earliest railroads, to the eastern European Jews who snuck in before the immigration gates effectively shut in the 1920s and the few who managed to escape Nazi persecution and find safe haven here before the war.

After the Holocaust, Canada's Jewish community was deeply recast by the survivors we received. More than the United States, it has been noted, Canada's Jewish communal structure was impacted by these survivors. The United States already had a strong and organized Jewish community and survivors were integrated into it relatively seamlessly. Canada's comparatively small Jewish community wasgreatly impacted by the survivors, who became not only some of Canada's leading educators, entrepreneurs and artists, but who form a significant proportion of the community's leadership to this day.

These apparently unconnected stories of Jewish migration and its impact on Canadian communities are notable, if for no other reason, to demonstrate that the diversity that has always defined Jewish life remains a defining characteristic. It is also worth recalling, as we spend much of this year celebrating Israel on its 60th anniversary, that Jewish life, even after the Zionist dream has been realized, remains complex, varied and changeable.

^TOP