Untitled | The Museum of Jewish Montreal

Sholem Lamdan was a poultry shochet (butcher) whose prosecution and ultimate imprisonment for illegally slaughtering chickens in his St. Dominique Street home attracted local attention during Montreal’s “Kosher Meat Squabbles” of 1907–1909. The supervision of kosher meat went beyond ensuring that the meat was prepared in ways consistent with Jewish dietary laws (kashrut), but was emblematic of rabbinic battles over control of this lucrative and influential element of community life.

Struggles over the control of kashrut supervision were most magnified between rivaling rabbis Simon Glazer and Zvi Hirsch Cohen. Rabbi Cohen, having the support of the Jewish elite and the influential Keneder adler (the Montreal Yiddish newspaper), along with fellow rabbis Herman Abramowitz, Meldola de Sola, Lauterman, and Blitz, rebuffed Rabbi Glazer’s challenges by removing him from the Board of Kashruth. In response, Rabbi Glazer created his own list of establishments deemed kosher under his supervision. Each Rabbi tried to discredit his rival’s butchers by depicting them as slaughtering and selling traif (unkosher) meat.

Upon Lamdan’s arrest, Rabbi Glazer sought to visit the imprisoned shochet, bringing kosher food and accessories for daily prayer, actions which directly challenged the authority of Rabbi Cohen who had earlier been appointed Jewish chaplain of the jail. The ensuing struggle left Rabbi Glazer seeking the assistance of not only the prison administration, but also the mayor of Montreal and, ultimately, Quebec Premier Lomer Gouin. Having garnered the support of the poorer Jewish immigrant population, Rabbi Glazer’s actions were consistently opposed by Rabbi Hirsch Cohen and the Jewish establishment, known as “uptowners.” In the midst of this struggle, some in the Jewish community seemed to have been more concerned with the encroaching challenge of Rabbi Glazer rather than the plight of Lamdan, the butcher.

Compiled by Marian Pinsky.

Sources

Keinosuke, Oiwa. “Tradition and Social Change: An Ideological Analysis of the Montreal Jewish Immigrant Ghetto in the Early Twentieth Century.” PhD Dissertation, Cornell University, 1988.

Gilliland, Jason, and Mary Anne Poutanen. “Mapping Work in Early Twentieth-Century Montreal: Rabbi Simon Glazer, Social Mobility, and the Jewish Community.” Unpublished, 2010.

Robinson, Ira. Rabbis and Their Community: Studies in the Eastern European Orthodox Rabbinate in Montreal, 1896–1930. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2007.

*The images are courtesy of CJCCCNA.