Landsmanshaften – Back River Memorial Gardens Cemetery

Landsmanshaften (mutual aid societies) were immigrant associations formed by Jews arriving from the same Eastern European shtetl (town). Providing new immigrants with a sense of community and stability, landsmanshaften helped retain ties with hometowns while also facilitating integration. Forming a critical component of North American immigrant Jewish communities from the 1880s to the 1950s, landsmanshaften provided a heymeshe (homelike) atmosphere through social services. These groups were so important that approximately one in every five Jews living in the United States in the late 1930s was a member of a landsmanshaft. Though no such statistics exist for Montreal, dozens of aid societies with thousands of members were established in the years of migration from Eastern Europe.

While most of these “immigrant hometown associations” named after their community of origin were secular, names preceded by ‘Anshe’ (People of) or ‘Khevre’ (Friends of) indicated affiliation with a synagogue. (Some examples of these synagogues in Montreal include Anshei Galicia, Anshei Moroshe, Anshei Ozeroff, Beth Hakneseth Anshei Ukraina, Knesset Israel Anshei Poland, and the Pinsker Kinyan Torah.) Associations were led by men, though women’s auxiliaries existed. With the exception of a number of landsmanshaften that aligned with the Arbeiter Ring (the socialist Workmen’s Circle) or Poale Zion (Labour Zionists), the majority were non-ideological, addressing immigrants’ social and cultural needs.

The lingua franca was Yiddish, and social gatherings and plays enhanced this cultural link to the hometown. Yiddish “souvenir journals” complemented prominent Yiddish newspapers like the Keneder Adler in Montreal, and featured poems, anecdotes and reminiscences of the “old country” alongside local news. In addition to assisting immigrants find work, the journals contributed to reuniting families displaced by war. In New York, where the Jewish community was more organized than in Montreal in the 1910s, ads were sold to help send remittances to rebuild communities destroyed by the First World War, to support local organizations, or to contribute to projects in Palestine.

Landsmanshaften were most active prior to the 1950s, as the Holocaust severed connections with hometowns. In addition to assisting with integration into Canadian society, interest-free loans for burials and shifskartn (ship’s passages) helped reunite many war-affected families. One of the associations’ most important functions was to provide affordable burial plots to members. This legacy is evident at many of Montreal’s Jewish cemeteries, where sections are reserved for various landsmanshaften.

Many of Montreal’s associations served political as well as social roles, pressuring both the Canadian and home governments to take action for their Jewish landsmen (fellow Jews from the same town). The Federation of Polish Jews of Canada insisted that the Polish government address the abysmal conditions to which Jews were subjected during the Second World War; the United Bukoviner Society sent ‘CARE’-like packages to relatives in Soviet Ukraine during the 1960s; and the North End Vilkomer Sick Benefit Society raised funds to support the Lithuanian independence effort in 1919-1920.

Today, the surviving minutes from landsmanshaften meetings, handwritten in Yiddish, are instrumental for tracing genealogies and for discovering the circumstances of relatives’ arrivals.

Compiled by Marian Pinsky.

Sources

9660 Berri

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