Rabbis and Their Community: Studies in the Eastern European Orthodox Rabbinate in Montreal, 1896 – 1930 (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Rabbis and Their Community: Studies in the Eastern European Orthodox Rabbinate in Montreal, 1896 – 1930 Matthew Lagrone (bio) Ira Robinson. Rabbis and Their Community: Studies in the Eastern European Orthodox Rabbinate in Montreal, 1896 – 1930. University of Calgary Press. xii, 168. $34.95 Ira Robinson’s latest book represents a significant addition to the study of Canadian/North American Jewry. Rabbis and Their Community focuses on the development, changes, and challenges in Montreal’s immigrant Orthodox rabbinate in the first third of the twentieth century. This work is part of a growing academic correction in the common portrayal of East European immigrants. Until recently, most scholarship in this area has tilted heavily towards secular and non-Orthodox Jewish immigrants, [End Page 359] although many immigrants in fact retained their Orthodoxy. Robinson’s work shows that the story of Orthodox Jews cannot be discounted in the account of East European migration to North America, because the arc of a community’s maturity is shaped by both internal Orthodox interaction and contact with secular and liberal Jews. This study of Montreal rabbis centres on clergy and intellectuals who, if not as well known as later and more prominent Jewish leaders, made the conditions possible for Orthodoxy to flourish. Robinson retrieves these men from the dust of history, situating them in the cultural, intellectual, and religious centre of Montreal Jewry as they strove to maintain the distinctiveness of traditional Judaism while adapting to the norms of North American society. For Orthodox rabbis in this period, clerical life was demanding and difficult. Salaries were almost universally inadequate in the East European immigrant community and had to be supplemented often through the supervision of kosher meat, a recurrent topic in Robinson’s narrative. He notes that East European–born rabbis arrived in North America for two reasons: some were young and sought brighter prospects outside of Europe, and some had failed in business and turned to the rabbinate as an alternative. These rabbis – important but largely ‘forgotten’ men such as Hirsh Cohen, Simon Glazer, Getsel Laxar, and Yudel Rosenberg – had to adjust to the libertarian ethos of North America in general and North American Jewry in particular. Jewish communities in the United States and Canada were less unified than their European counterparts, and subsequently issues of authority were trickier in the absence of an acknowledged leadership. Although attempts at communal unity were partially successful, these rabbis lacked the internally compelling authority, based on law, tradition, and custom, that their European colleagues expected. Robinson devotes much of the book to a discussion of the ‘kosher meat wars’ that occupied the Montreal Jewish community. Jewish law contains detailed regulations for the proper slaughter of permitted animals, and the supervision of this practice was contested between two rabbinic groups. Controlling supervision of kosher meat was one of the few profitable enterprises for an immigrant rabbi, and this supervision also suggested who had religious authority in the Orthodox community. The first group, led by the powerful Hirsh Cohen and his supporters, was opposed by a dissident group of rabbis, led by Rabbis Laxar and Rosenberg. Cohen’s group was supported by Hirsh Wolofsky, perhaps the most influential powerbroker in the community. An editor of the leading Yiddish- and English-language newspapers of the Jewish press, Wolofsky championed Cohen as the head of kosher meat regulation, forcing the second group to resort to ad hoc flyers to cheer their supervision. Advocates of each side accused the other of improper supervision, of [End Page 360] allowing Jews to purchase unfit meat and thus inadvertently commit a halakhic transgression. The dispute involved physical confrontations and lawsuits in secular courts, but eventually a clenched-teeth peace was reached. Rabbis and Their Community provides scholars of Canadian/North American Jewry an invaluable snapshot of a significant and changing immigrant Orthodox community. Without Robinson’s research, the contributions of these rabbis would be lost. Matthew Lagrone Matthew LaGrone, Jewish Studies Program, University of Delaware Copyright © 2009 University of Toronto Press Incorporated