Canada

    Much like developments across the border in the U.S., colonies in Canada depended on support and expertise from philanthropic organizations, particularly Baron de Hirsch’s Jewish Colonization Association in cooperation with the Jewish Agricultural and Industrial Aid Society of New York.  Together, the JCA and JAS established a total of ten colonies in Western Canada and Northern Quebec at the start of the 20th century:

Saskatchewan: These colonies grew mostly grains, making them very vulnerable to environmental conditions.

• Qu’Appelle, constituted by the Lipton (1901) and Cupar (1904) colonies

• Edenbridge (1906)

• New Herman, later known as Sonnenfeld and Hoffer (1906), considered one of the more successful colonies in Canada. Most of the pioneering settlers had graduated before emigration to Canada from the Jewish Colonization Society’s 400-acre Baron de Hirsch Agricultural School at Słobódka-Leśna in eastern Galicia, Poland. 

Jewish colonists threshing wheat, near Lipton

Credit: Canadian National Archives

Manitoba: Colonists in this province mostly cultivated vegetables

Bender Hamlet, also called Narcisse (1903)

Quebec: Colonists here mainly raised dairy herds, providing them with steady, relatively dependable income.

• La Macaza (1904) 

• New Glasgow (1904) 

• Sainte Sophie (1904)

Willie Rudy, a third-generation Jewish farmer born in New Glasgow, manager of the local hotel and served two terms as mayor of Sainte Sophie in the 1960s.

Credit: Jewish Farmers of Ste. Sophie, New Glasgow & St. Lin

Alberta: These colonies had mixed grain, vegetable and livestock farms, helping to stabilize their household economies.

• Rumsey (1906)

• Trochu (1906). Trochu was the largest of the Jewish settlements in Canada, with 89 families, totaling 238 people, and 19,520 acres.

Sam Raskin, left, with Curly Gurevitch, the “Jewish Cowboy” from the Rumsey-Trochu colonies, 1930

Credit: “Exhibit Celebrates Jewish Canadians,” Calgary Herald, July 8, 2017 

    By 1906 there were hundreds of settlers in the Canadian colonies. Their relative success brought the Jewish Colonization Society to resettle thousands more refugees fleeing pogroms in Russia.  This partial list of new colonies reflects the sense of urgency at the time in the Society: 

Manitoba:

• Pine Ridge (1907)

• Bid’s Hill (1911)

• Camper, also called New Hirsch (1911). Some of its members had emigrated to Canada from the Israelovka Colony in southern Ukraine.

Saskatchewan:

• Eyre (1910)

• Montefiore, also called Alsask (1911). Some of Montefiore colonists had already previously acquired homesteads in North Dakota.

• Rosetown (1911)

Beth Israel Synagogue, Edenbridge Colony. The plaque adjoining the building states that colonists built the synagogue in 1908. In the early 1920s Edenbridge was home to 50 families but declined in later decades.

Credit: https://web.ncf.ca/lavitt/jewishfarmcolonies/edenbridge/edenbrdg.html

    By 1914 the Canadian branches of the Jewish Colonization Society and the Jewish Agricultural Society had helped to settle approximately 1000 people on 250 family farms totaling about 50,000 acres, of which more than 15,000 were already cultivated. This pace accelerated during the First World War due to growing national demand for farm produce.

 Colonists’ homes, Narcisse Colony, Bender Hamlet, Manitoba 1921

Founded in 1903 and named after its founder, Jacob Bender. Abandoned in 1927 due to poor soil, environmental challenges and plummeting commodity prices

Credit: Wikiwand

    Postwar recession caused prices for agricultural goods to plunge, bringing economic ruin to many Canadian colonists during the first half of the 1920s; four of the smaller settlements – Eyre, Montefiore, Narcisse and New Hirsch – disappeared entirely, while most others saw communities shrink.

    Morris Saxe, an immigrant from Odessa trained in agriculture and a strong advocate of Jews returning to the land, opened the Canadian Jewish Farm School in 1927 on his farm in Georgetown, Ontario.  Evidently, Saxe modeled the School on Woodbine and Peekskill. [link to Philanthropy page]. He intended to train young Jewish immigrants fleeing hyper-nationalist Poland. The School’s promise to prepare them as future farmers enabled the boys to secure entrance visas into Canada.

Credit: Canadian Jewish Archives, Montreal

    Having hosted 79 refugee teenagers starting in 1928, Saxe’s Farm School was short-lived. It closed in 1930 due to lack of funds and under a cloud of mistrust with its main funder in Detroit.

The Canadian Jewish Farm School, 1928

Credit: Ellen Bessner, “Canada’s Schindler: Meet the Man Who Gave 79 Jewish Orphans a New Life on Canadian Soil,” Canadian Jewish Newsletter, July 7, 2021

    Colonies that survived the national recession in the early 1920s rebounded and repopulated somewhat later in the decade. But the Great Depression proved devastating for them all. Most of the colonies in the western provinces dissolved by the mid-1930s, although individual Jewish farmers did remain on the land. As in the United States, the JCA worked to resettle Displaced Persons in Canada after the Holocaust. From 1949-1954 it purchased farms and resettled survivor families as dairy, poultry, and fruit farmers.  Following an exodus of Hungarian Jews fleeing repression after the country’s anti-Soviet uprising, in 1957 the JCA settled about 100 families in Beamsville, Ontario.