Historic Jewish Quarter
| “ | All day long, St. Lawrence Boulevard, or Main Street, is a frenzy of poor Jews, who gather there to buy groceries, furniture, clothing and meat. Most walls are plastered with fraying election bills, in Yiddish, French and English. The street reeks of garlic and quarrels and bill collectors: orange crates, stuffed full with garbage and decaying fruit, are piled slipshod in most alleys. Swift children gobble pilfered plums; slower cats prowl the fish market. — Mordecai Richler, Son of a Smaller Hero | ” |
The Jewish community on the Main sprang up after the heavy immigration of the early to mid-1900s. Jewish settlement occurred first on the lower Main, in a section that now is part of Montreal's Chinatown.
By 1871, a Jewish enclave numbering just over 400 people had formed by the corner of St. Lawrence and Dorchester Street, with the first Jewish educational institution, the Talmud Torah, located at the corner of Saint Urbain Street and De la Gauchetière Street. Middle class members of the community were already beginning to move up the Main towards Sherbrooke and Prince Arthur Streets, while further north, a small number of well-off Jews lived near McGill University.
The main axes of Jewish quarter were Saint Laurent Boulevard, Clark Street, Saint Urbain Street, Esplanade Street and Park Avenue, Montreal. By the 1920s and 30s, dozens of synagogues were in the area. Landmarks on Saint Laurent that bear witness to this historic community include Schwartz's Delicatessen.
Yiddish was the common language in the Jewish district on Saint Laurent Boulevard, with many Jewish immigrants working in clothing factories, once the street's main industry. Overall, Montreal was the main destination for the 125,000 Jews that settled in Canada between 1905 and 1920, making the area a centre of Yiddish language and culture. Despite Canada's poor record of Jewish immigration between 1933 and 1948, Montreal would also become home to the world’s third-largest concentration of Holocaust survivors, most of them Yiddish speakers.
Read more about this topic: Saint Laurent Boulevard
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