When I was young, the North was a place of my imagination. My father grew up in Kirkland Lake, Northern Ontario, in a small but active Jewish community. Without knowing what the towns and lands in or around Kirkland Lake looked, sounded, or felt like, I tried to imagine in between the wind-swept trees of A.Y. Jackson’s paintings what a Jewish life could be like outside Toronto.
As a child, I never ventured further north than Georgian Bay with my family because my dad said there was “nothing left,” just horse flies and winters where snow went up to your elbows. As a kid, the North didn't hold the allure of the ancient empires or fantastical lands my ever changing interests were fixated on.
Growing up secular in a mixed cultural home in Aurora, located in the outer suburbs of Toronto (which is home to Canada’s largest Jewish population), I felt a separation and distance from my Jewish identity and cultural history in Canada. I lived in the old section of town where virtually every home, including mine, had a historical plaque. The British-Victorian pride of Aurora was echoed in my family home through its everblooming floral wallpapers, chinoiserie carpets, quaker furniture, and paintings of ornate Victorian homes hung on almost every wall. Religion was absent in my home in material and practice, and in many ways this gave me freedom of self exploration and determination of identity. With the exception of celebrating Hanukkah, I lacked the sense of what a Jewish home with my immediate family could have looked and felt like. It's not as if I had no semblance of my family histories, or a greater cultural exposure, I was simply not entrenched in a Jewish culture. I always felt out of place in Aurora, like I was between two panes of glass. I consequently looked to where I could to understand Jewish history and life, mostly connecting to the histories of my family. Movies and my imagination coloured what I thought a Northern Jewish experience to be. As the years passed and the curiosity for my family history grew I’d imagine characters like Tevye, in Fiddler on the Roof, transported from the farm of his fictional shtetl of Anatevka to the barns of Krugerdorf, a Northern Ontario town where Jewish immigrants settled, reverberating Yiddish across the expanse of the Canadian North instead.
I lost my bubbi when I was twelve, and nine years later my zadie. I felt seen by her like no one else in my family, between us there was a secret thread, a soul connection that transcends time, where words weren’t needed to understand one another. With my zadie’s passing I inherited a box of ephemera, photographs, their old passports, cards, letters, address books, and my bubbi’s journals. Though these were much more than journals; they were a writing and rewriting chronicling my family’s journey from the ports to Odessa to Krugerdorf. A Jewish North. The pages are filled with the hardship and love that shaped my family history and gave me the first candid understanding of what they had gone through.
The North was becoming more than horse flies and formidable snow.
For the last twenty years, I’ve periodically dug into my ancestor’s stories and the history of the North. I’ve read all there is online, poking around without much of a compass. And now, in my forties, I've found a community to help guide my search. I am spending time connecting with and listening to stories from the elders, children, and grandchildren of interconnected Jewish communities of Kirkland Lake and Rouyn-Noranda. Punctuated by periodic visits to the Ontario Jewish Archives where I was able to see, for the first time, images of my great-great-grandmother Betty Perkus. In 1905, her husband, Ben Tsion ben Nehemia ha-Kohen (Benjamin Perkus), son, Moshe (Morris), and his cousin, Simcha Mevoznisensom, who had arrived sometime prior, drowned in a canoeing accident. My great-great-grandmother received her husband’s death notice on the day she left the old country to join him. In the pictures she is among the Jewish community that helped her build an independent life as a widow.
My journey into the North began on February 27, 2023, when I sent an email to an active member of the Jewish community in Kirkland Lake, which surprisingly led to an introduction to a distant cousin. From there, introductions snowballed and I became acquainted with more members of the Jewish community that descended from Northern Ontario. The uncertainty of knowing what to expect transformed into witnessing vibrant vignettes of life and community. Snapshots of childhood infused with a reverence for parents and grandparents. My meetings, which were either over the phone, Zoom, or in-person coffee dates, brought forward cinematic vignettes that wove the personal and universal. I vividly recall a conversation early on in the process with Marc Gurvitch, whose grandfather came to Krugerdorf the same time as my great-great grandfather. Marc spoke highly of his grandfather Aaron, who was a blacksmith and was given about 40 acres of land in Krugerdorf. He was a well respected member of the Russian Army and found his way to this part of Canada via the United Kingdom. Tradition was important to Aaron, through time and place, tradition asserted his Jewish identity. He never shaved his beard and kept Shabbos. The farming lands were given to Jews in Krugerdorf by means of the Baron de Hirsch Institute of Montreal—an organization that helped Jewish immigrants move to Canada to escape the extreme antisemitic conditions of Eastern Europe. Marc lamented that farming was difficult due to harsh seasons that made harvesting food challenging.
Aaron left a lasting impression on Marc because he was a man of infallible moral character. One winter, Aaron was working with a team of men and horses. When the boss came by to check on the group of working men during their much-needed break, everyone pretended to be busy while Aaron continued to rest and smoke his pipe. If you are doing nothing wrong, then why worry? They were entitled to a break.
Months after our meeting, I came across photos of Aaron in the Ontario Jewish Archives—his face like a familiar friend. On the back of the photo was written: “A giant of a man.”
Through my research I was able to piece together different parts of Jewish history in the region. The history of Krugerdorf stretched back to the early 20th century. This small homestead, just south of Kirkland Lake, is home to the active Northern Hebrew Cemetery, which formed because they needed to bury my ancestors who had drowned. The gold rush of the 1930s brought in a wave of Jews. Some returned after moving to other parts of the province, while many arrived from Europe to live freely. Here they had the ability to prosper, which was no longer possible in Europe. Morris Langer, a senior in his nineties, who started the northern chapter of Young Judea, told me the Jews during this time came to Kirkland Lake for the opportunity to thrive, noting that “the town was on wheels.” One third of the stores in Kirkland Lake at the time were run by the Jewish community.
Going into the meetings, I didn’t know what I’d hear. Family photos and images from online archives gave me a sense of the time between the 1930s and 1960s; visualizing the buildings and community of the early settlement was difficult because they remained shrouded in mystery. I wanted to know what people brought over, in tradition and material. I wanted to learn how their homes in a foreign place became familiar. These conversations brought forward more than dates and names to a history.
The North began to
feel like goulash being kept warm by blankets,
taste like wild blueberries picked from hills while contemplating one’s place in life,
sound like the shuffling of poker cards amidst the chatter of women,
look like people adapting and connecting together in subtle and consistent ways in order to maintain what was almost lost, Jewish life.
Connecting with the people and descendants from these communities gave me access to what I yearned for when I was unsure of how to access it. I can breathe into the history of my ancestors in a way that is not distant, disconnected, or fictionalized.
I am indebted to the generosity of the North.
Meichen Waxer acknowledges the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts which made this research possible.
When I was young, the North was a place of my imagination. My father grew up in Kirkland Lake, Northern Ontario, in a small but active Jewish community. Without knowing what the towns and lands in or around Kirkland Lake looked, sounded, or felt like, I tried to imagine in between the wind-swept trees of A.Y. Jackson’s paintings what a Jewish life could be like outside Toronto.
As a child, I never ventured further north than Georgian Bay with my family because my dad said there was “nothing left,” just horse flies and winters where snow went up to your elbows. As a kid, the North didn't hold the allure of the ancient empires or fantastical lands my ever changing interests were fixated on.
Growing up secular in a mixed cultural home in Aurora, located in the outer suburbs of Toronto (which is home to Canada’s largest Jewish population), I felt a separation and distance from my Jewish identity and cultural history in Canada. I lived in the old section of town where virtually every home, including mine, had a historical plaque. The British-Victorian pride of Aurora was echoed in my family home through its everblooming floral wallpapers, chinoiserie carpets, quaker furniture, and paintings of ornate Victorian homes hung on almost every wall. Religion was absent in my home in material and practice, and in many ways this gave me freedom of self exploration and determination of identity. With the exception of celebrating Hanukkah, I lacked the sense of what a Jewish home with my immediate family could have looked and felt like. It's not as if I had no semblance of my family histories, or a greater cultural exposure, I was simply not entrenched in a Jewish culture. I always felt out of place in Aurora, like I was between two panes of glass. I consequently looked to where I could to understand Jewish history and life, mostly connecting to the histories of my family. Movies and my imagination coloured what I thought a Northern Jewish experience to be. As the years passed and the curiosity for my family history grew I’d imagine characters like Tevye, in Fiddler on the Roof, transported from the farm of his fictional shtetl of Anatevka to the barns of Krugerdorf, a Northern Ontario town where Jewish immigrants settled, reverberating Yiddish across the expanse of the Canadian North instead.
I lost my bubbi when I was twelve, and nine years later my zadie. I felt seen by her like no one else in my family, between us there was a secret thread, a soul connection that transcends time, where words weren’t needed to understand one another. With my zadie’s passing I inherited a box of ephemera, photographs, their old passports, cards, letters, address books, and my bubbi’s journals. Though these were much more than journals; they were a writing and rewriting chronicling my family’s journey from the ports to Odessa to Krugerdorf. A Jewish North. The pages are filled with the hardship and love that shaped my family history and gave me the first candid understanding of what they had gone through.
The North was becoming more than horse flies and formidable snow.
For the last twenty years, I’ve periodically dug into my ancestor’s stories and the history of the North. I’ve read all there is online, poking around without much of a compass. And now, in my forties, I've found a community to help guide my search. I am spending time connecting with and listening to stories from the elders, children, and grandchildren of interconnected Jewish communities of Kirkland Lake and Rouyn-Noranda. Punctuated by periodic visits to the Ontario Jewish Archives where I was able to see, for the first time, images of my great-great-grandmother Betty Perkus. In 1905, her husband, Ben Tsion ben Nehemia ha-Kohen (Benjamin Perkus), son, Moshe (Morris), and his cousin, Simcha Mevoznisensom, who had arrived sometime prior, drowned in a canoeing accident. My great-great-grandmother received her husband’s death notice on the day she left the old country to join him. In the pictures she is among the Jewish community that helped her build an independent life as a widow.
My journey into the North began on February 27, 2023, when I sent an email to an active member of the Jewish community in Kirkland Lake, which surprisingly led to an introduction to a distant cousin. From there, introductions snowballed and I became acquainted with more members of the Jewish community that descended from Northern Ontario. The uncertainty of knowing what to expect transformed into witnessing vibrant vignettes of life and community. Snapshots of childhood infused with a reverence for parents and grandparents. My meetings, which were either over the phone, Zoom, or in-person coffee dates, brought forward cinematic vignettes that wove the personal and universal. I vividly recall a conversation early on in the process with Marc Gurvitch, whose grandfather came to Krugerdorf the same time as my great-great grandfather. Marc spoke highly of his grandfather Aaron, who was a blacksmith and was given about 40 acres of land in Krugerdorf. He was a well respected member of the Russian Army and found his way to this part of Canada via the United Kingdom. Tradition was important to Aaron, through time and place, tradition asserted his Jewish identity. He never shaved his beard and kept Shabbos. The farming lands were given to Jews in Krugerdorf by means of the Baron de Hirsch Institute of Montreal—an organization that helped Jewish immigrants move to Canada to escape the extreme antisemitic conditions of Eastern Europe. Marc lamented that farming was difficult due to harsh seasons that made harvesting food challenging.
Aaron left a lasting impression on Marc because he was a man of infallible moral character. One winter, Aaron was working with a team of men and horses. When the boss came by to check on the group of working men during their much-needed break, everyone pretended to be busy while Aaron continued to rest and smoke his pipe. If you are doing nothing wrong, then why worry? They were entitled to a break.
Months after our meeting, I came across photos of Aaron in the Ontario Jewish Archives—his face like a familiar friend. On the back of the photo was written: “A giant of a man.”
Through my research I was able to piece together different parts of Jewish history in the region. The history of Krugerdorf stretched back to the early 20th century. This small homestead, just south of Kirkland Lake, is home to the active Northern Hebrew Cemetery, which formed because they needed to bury my ancestors who had drowned. The gold rush of the 1930s brought in a wave of Jews. Some returned after moving to other parts of the province, while many arrived from Europe to live freely. Here they had the ability to prosper, which was no longer possible in Europe. Morris Langer, a senior in his nineties, who started the northern chapter of Young Judea, told me the Jews during this time came to Kirkland Lake for the opportunity to thrive, noting that “the town was on wheels.” One third of the stores in Kirkland Lake at the time were run by the Jewish community.
Going into the meetings, I didn’t know what I’d hear. Family photos and images from online archives gave me a sense of the time between the 1930s and 1960s; visualizing the buildings and community of the early settlement was difficult because they remained shrouded in mystery. I wanted to know what people brought over, in tradition and material. I wanted to learn how their homes in a foreign place became familiar. These conversations brought forward more than dates and names to a history.
The North began to
feel like goulash being kept warm by blankets,
taste like wild blueberries picked from hills while contemplating one’s place in life,
sound like the shuffling of poker cards amidst the chatter of women,
look like people adapting and connecting together in subtle and consistent ways in order to maintain what was almost lost, Jewish life.
Connecting with the people and descendants from these communities gave me access to what I yearned for when I was unsure of how to access it. I can breathe into the history of my ancestors in a way that is not distant, disconnected, or fictionalized.
I am indebted to the generosity of the North.
Meichen Waxer acknowledges the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts which made this research possible.