Abstract

"Aspirations and Adaptations" traces the development of the Jewish community of Montreal by tracking the growth, location, and movement of its early synagogues focusing on those established by the Eastern European immigrants from the 1880s until 1945. This is a study of material culture, a study of synagogues and the congregations who created and inhabited them. It is a story which considers these buildings as a reflection of the aspirations of the congregations and their adaptation to a new environment both architecturally and socially. Organized chronologically and geographically, the paper focuses on four consecutive and adjacent areas of settlement which formed the areas of greatest concentration of the Jewish community of Montreal during the period under study. As immigration intensified in the first decades of the twentieth century, the number of congregations swelled. The plethora of synagogues served not only the needs of a growing population, but also the varying expressions of communal identity. It was the more veteran immigrant congregations which aspired to obtain larger and more prominent synagogues. As the enterprise of synagogue building in nineteenth century Europe signaled a process of acculturation, so too, the building of larger synagogues by an immigrant community indicated a process of integration. As traditionalists in Europe resisted change and continued to worship in small houses of prayer and study, the more recent immigrants, seeking to remain connected to familiar practices, founded smaller synagogues, which, nevertheless, served not only a religious but also a social function.