Toronto: The City Across the Metro

You can read the history of Jewish Toronto off a single street. Bathurst runs north out of the old downtown, and the community walked up it over a hundred years: from the cramped tenements of The Ward, west to the stalls of Kensington Market, then up and up through Forest Hill and on into the suburbs beyond the city line. The address kept changing. The street stayed the same. That slow northward migration is the spine of the whole story.

This is not the kind of Jewish city that announces itself with a thousand-year-old synagogue or a famous ghetto. Toronto's Jewish history is barely two centuries deep, and most of the drama is the undramatic kind: a congregation founded, a cemetery bought, a market filled, a school opened, a family moving one neighbourhood further out than its parents. It grew by accretion, immigrant wave on immigrant wave, until it became the largest Jewish community in Canada and one of the larger ones in North America.

The undramatic kind of history is easy to undervalue and hard to build. It takes a city willing to let newcomers become neighbours, and a community confident enough to spread out rather than huddle. Toronto turned out to have both, which is why its Jewish life is now measured not in one quarter but across an entire metropolitan region.

From The Ward to Kensington

The beginnings were small. A handful of Jewish merchants and pedlars were trading in clothing, jewellery and dry goods in Toronto by the late 1840s. In 1849 Abraham Nordheimer bought land for a Jewish cemetery on behalf of the small congregation, and in September 1856 seventeen men met to organise a congregation in time for the High Holy Days. That body became Holy Blossom, the oldest Jewish congregation in the city, which still functions today.

The real growth came with the great eastern European migration around the turn of the twentieth century. The newcomers, poor and Yiddish-speaking, crowded into The Ward, the dense immigrant district north of the old downtown, and then shifted west into Kensington Market, where by the 1930s Jews made up the large majority of residents. The Market became the working heart of Jewish Toronto: synagogues on residential streets, pushcarts, garment workshops, the whole noisy apparatus of an immigrant community making its own living. It was crowded, it was loud, and it worked.

After the Second World War the centre of gravity moved decisively north. Families left the old downtown for Forest Hill and then for the districts strung along Bathurst, and the institutions followed: Holy Blossom itself had already relocated up to Bathurst Street. Later arrivals layered on top of the eastern European base, Holocaust survivors first, then Sephardim, Soviet Jews, Israelis and a substantial Persian community. Each layer found room.

A community measured by the region

The shape of Jewish Toronto today is not a neighbourhood but a corridor that runs out of the city into the municipalities to the north, Thornhill and Vaughan above all, where Jewish institutions cluster thickly. The 2021 Canadian census counted roughly 74,000 people in the city of Toronto reporting Jewish ethnic or cultural origin and close to 99,000 reporting Judaism as their religion; across the wider Greater Toronto Area the Jewish population runs to something approaching 190,000. By either count it is the largest Jewish community in Canada, home to nearly half of the country's Jews.

Numbers like that are worth saying plainly, because they describe something quietly remarkable. A community that began with seventeen men meeting before the High Holy Days in 1856 has become a metropolitan population of close to a fifth of a million, with its own day schools, kosher commerce, social agencies and a federation large enough to run an archive. It did this without a wall around it and without staying put. The city was wide enough to hold a tribe, and the tribe was confident enough to use the whole of it.