Canada: a History of the Jews in Newfoundland and Labrador

Theodor Herzl, World Zionist Council president, sought support from the world’s great powers for the creation of a Jewish homeland. At the Sixth Zionist Congress at Basel in 1903, it seemed as if it would take too long to save all the Jews in Europe by establishing a Jewish homeland in Israel. While waiting for the great powers to act, the was a risk that the 6 million Jews in Russia and the 3 million Jews in Poland could be put in dire peril. A temporary refuge was desperately needed.

So Herzl proposed the British Uganda Programme as a possible refuge for Jews and sent a commission to examine the territory.  The Uganda Programme was finally rejected by the Zionist movement at the Seventh Zionist Congress in 1905, largely because the British found it impracticable. 

Attention was turned to possible settlements in other extremely remote territories in Canada and Australia, Iraq, Libya and Angola; but little came of these commissions. A project that did have some success was the Galveston Scheme which contemplated the settle­ment of Jews in Texas. The project received assistance from an imp­ort­ant American banker, and some 9,300 Jews arrived in that area between 1907-1914.

After WW1, the search continued in remote territories. In 1930, the General Executive Committee of the Russian Soviet Republic accepted the decree "On formation of the Biro-bidzhan national region in the structure of the Far Eastern Territory". Birobidzhan national region, located on the Trans-Siberian Railway close to the border with China, would become a separate economic unit. In 1934, the Presidium accepted the decree on its transformation in the Jewish Autonomous Region within the Russian Republic. The number of Jewish citizens peaked at 30,000 in 1948, a quarter of the region's population.

The provinces of Labrador and Newfoundland in far NE Canada

The Madagascar Plan of 1940 was a suggested policy of the Third Reich government of Nazi Germany to forcibly relocate the surviving Jewish population of Europe to the island of Madagascar. Perhaps we can call the Madagascar plan a Search for a Jewish Homeland, even if it was not the Jews who were doing the planning.

The Kimberley Plan was first considered by the Freeland League in the 1930s; it was to resettle Jewish refugees from Europe in the NW Australian desert. In July 1944 the Prime Minister John Curtin informed the League that the Australian government would not "depart from the long-established policy in regard to alien settlement in Australia". That was the end of that plan!

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When I saw Robin McGrath’s book Salt Fish & Shmattes: A History of the Jews in Newfoundland and Labrador (published by Creative Book Pub., 2006), I assumed it was going to be another search for a remote place of safe haven for potentially millions of Jews in the inter-war era. But no. It is a history of the Jews in Britain’s oldest col­ony, tracing the waves of settlement of Jews in Newfoundland and Labrador. The history of the Jews in Newfoundland and Labrador follows the same basic sequence as in the rest of Canada and North America. The first to settle were Span­ish Sephardi traders who began arriving after the English conquest of Eastern Canada in 1761.

During the 1890s, Russian and Polish pogroms brought a diff­erent group of settlers to Canada - Ashkenazim who were peddlers and tailors, merchants and farmers. They were ready and willing to open up the isolated Canadian towns to a new form of re­tail trade. In Newfoundland, most of the first members of this group became ped­dlers who travelled throughout the island. Mer­chants traded salt fish and textiles with Newfound­landers in outlying areas. Shop owners, textile workers or manufacturers worked in the small garment industry of St John’s. St. John's was and is the capital and largest city in Newfoundland and Labrador.

The Hebrew Congregation of Newfoundland was officially incorporated in 1909. The first free standing synagogue was built in Henry St, St John's in 1931. Never huge, the Jewish community of Newfoundland grew slowly from 215 in 1935 to 360 in 1971; the majority of the congregants lived in St. John’s itself. The current synagogue on Elizabeth Avenue at Downing St was constructed in the 1950s.

Beth-el Synagogue St. John's, Newfoundland

Many schemes were put forward by citizens of Newfoundland and Labrador to provide a safe haven for European Jews and to service the needs of Canada’s eastern most provinces. One proposal, put forth in 1934 by Simon Belkin, could have solved Newfoundland’s des­perate shortage of medical professionals at a time when the territory was struggling to control TB epidemics. Belkin, who headed the Canadian office of the Paris-based Jewish Colonisation Association, suggested that 50 German Jewish doctors could be housed in isolated fishing ports, if they were willing “to answer calls using open boats in the summer and sleighs in the winter.”

But the Newfoundland government, ruled by a joint council of British and local commissioners because the province was not yet federated into Canada, ultimately rejected these proposals. Appar­ently the Newfoundland Immigration Commiss­ion­ers followed the decision of a small group of 300 British merchant fam­ilies who controlled the fishing and lumber industry. Despite the desperate need for population growth, they opposed the admission of anyone who was not of British stock.

Worse still was the reply these commissioners gave to a proposal made by Budapest lawyer George Lichtenstern in 1939. The plan was to bring 1,000 highly educated and skilled Hungarian Jewish farming families to the region. The Immigration Commission, without any sense of irony, wrote that “there is no prospect of room being found on the island for new settlers”. Irony because Labrador and Newfoundland have a land mass twice the size of the entire United Kingdom yet even today have a population of just 525,000.

The only refugees who were admitted were some female German and Austrian Jewish doctors who'd already escaped their homelands and had arrived in Britain. As desper­at­ely as doctors were needed in Newfoundland and Labrador’s remote fishing ports, those Jewish women were given jobs as nurses. [Canada was not alone in its self-defeating nastiness by the way. Australia was probably worse].

Robin McGrath’s book Salt Fish & Shmattes

Thus McGrath showed that just before, during & after the war, there was no safe haven here; few Jewish immigrants were allowed into Canada at all. The few German Jews who got to Newfoundland were treated badly by the authorities who suspected them of being German spies. Only in 1948 did Canada began to open its doors to the European Jewish survivors who had been located in Displaced Persons camps to wait for a visa. But 1948? A bit late!

Robin McGrath’s book Salt Fish & Shmattes is a very welcome addition to a history library. If you cannot find a copy, you might like to read Bernard Dichek’s discussion in the Jerusalem Report (21st Oct 2013).

Perhaps someone can help here, since I have not read S Medjuck's book Jews of Atlantic Canada, myself. It was published in St John’s by Breakwater Books in 1986.