***
Only a decade before, Annie’s family was a quiet model of Edwardian reserve, not likely to be identified with an interesting public ministry. Each Sunday morning Annie joined her parents in the great auditorium of Bloor Street Presbyterian Church, where she and her father sang in the choir. The large congregation had recently appointed one of Canada’s finest preachers to its pulpit, the Rev. George Campbell Pidgeon.
Miss Martin was enjoying the busy life of a gifted pianist with her own students. She was also receiving the attentions of a certain young gentleman likely to be approved by her father. (He wasn’t the one she married.) Then, sometime during the hard years of World War I, Annie heard Rev. Rohold make an appeal for workers to help at the Jewish mission. Despite its location in a squalid district called “the Ward,” she volunteered.3
Annie began supervising a program once a week that taught English to young girls from poor Jewish families whose first language at home was Yiddish. She loved the girls and enjoyed the work. Still, every week, she had a continuing irritation; his name was Morris Zeidman. Dark, short and energetic, he led the boys’ club that met on the same night, perhaps in the same large room or an adjacent one. Morris would arrive early and round up all the equipment he needed, as if the boys had some priority. It seemed to Annie that he blatantly disregarded the needs of the girls. She’d arrive to find her class in need of chairs or teaching aids, thanks to Mr. Zeidman, whom she quickly decided was far too brash.
The offending young man’s self-assurance was particularly irritating. He’d fled Poland only four or five years earlier from the city of Czestochowa. His mother, Hannah (Haindel), was the second wife of Alexander (Ziskind) Zeidman, a widower, and she oversaw a combined family of eight children—Morris had a younger brother and six sisters, although the oldest sister was by this time married and in her own home. A pious Orthodox Jew, Ziskind owned a prosperous fruit and vegetable store. Morris was born on Shavuoth (known to Christians as Pentecost) in 1894 and attended a neighbourhood Hebrew school. Haindel was a woman of sturdy common sense, frequently managing the business while her husband attended to daily prayers in the synagogue.4 Charity—tzedaka—was very important. Whatever the family’s situation, every week, well before the eve of the Sabbath (Erev Shabbat), Morris helped his father put together a parcel of groceries that he’d deliver to a needy family.
The region’s painful history of Russian anti-Semitic persecution had bred resistance against Czarist rule. Some of Morris’s contemporaries recalled his involvement in a small local socialist organization; then he was arrested for being in the street during a demonstration. The police station was in such a furor when Hannah arrived with two of his stepsisters that no one noticed when his mother left, ushering out three girls through the front door. No disguise, though, could help Morris after a second arrest and appearance before the local magistrate. While there’s no specific explanation for Morris leaving Poland, the family memory was that he’d already been fortunate. One more arrest and he’d have been deported to Siberia. Life at home was increasingly uncomfortable; none of this had his father’s approval.
Morris’s passport, still a fond family keepsake, is stamped with the year of his arrival in the port of Montreal, 1912. After providing for the long journey and ocean passage, the family had little more to offer and only a few parting gifts. These included his grandfather’s sacred phylacteries or tefillin (special bindings and boxes with Scriptures enclosed that are used in daily prayers) “so that he should not forget” the faith of Israel. With no English and few friends, Morris made his way to Toronto, where there was a growing community from his hometown in Poland. He was trying to find work as a manual labourer and often passed the time walking alone through the city.
Fellow Jewish immigrants would have warned him about the imposing three-storey brick building at the corner of Elm and Elizabeth Streets—the Jewish mission. Nothing was more contemptible for Jewish people than a meshummad, literally a “traitor,” one who converted to the religion of the Gentiles. The local missionary may have been tolerated; getting too familiar with him would be suspicious.
But one Sunday afternoon, Morris, who’d been walking the deserted streets and brooding over a way to learn English for free, caught sight of the sign in a window. It said in Hebrew “The House of the Good News of Messiah for the Children of Israel.” Morris, no stranger to controversy, discarded a lifetime of training to be wary of the goyim and found his way inside. Soon afterwards, he was enrolled in English classes and able to find employment in a machine shop, working 10 hours a day. He also received that forbidden book known in English as the New Testament. At first he may have tried to hide his copy from the Jewish family with whom he was boarding. When they found him reading it and talking like the missionary, they sent him packing.
***
Why did the Presbyterians have a mission to Jews in the centre of Edwardian Toronto? This proudly multicultural city has long since lost touch with the less tolerant society of the early 1900s. It was rife with anti-Semitism, and its growing number of Jewish immigrants was generally welcomed with disdain and mistrust. The newcomers often lived as peddlers, dealers in cast-off goods and second-hand clothes. Some found work in the needle trades or turned their homes into little storefronts in the city’s poorest district.
In Toronto, that location was “the Ward” (properly called St. John’s Ward), in the very heart of the city, bordered by College Street on the north, Yonge Street to the east and University Avenue to the west and extending south to Queen Street. Currently, it’s a district that boasts major office towers and some of the city’s leading hospitals. Back then it was a maze of narrow alleyways lined with dilapidated housing, some dating back to the 1840s. The drafty stucco frame homes were rented out by absentee landlords; many lacked indoor plumbing and had dirt floors. New immigrants kept the cheap housing in demand, and city officials ignored complaints from public health officials. Here, as in New York’s Lower East Side and cities across North America, one of the poorest districts in Toronto became the hub of a thriving Jewish community.
According to the 1901 census, Toronto had 15,000 Jewish residents out of a total population of 208,000, but they quickly became one of the largest, most visible, immigrant groups. The vast majority of recent arrivals had fled Russia and its satellites: Poland, the Ukraine, Slavic and Baltic states. Their numbers grew even more dramatically from 1903 to 1906 when the Czarist government allowed indiscriminate attacks on the Jewish populace. Their homes and businesses were looted; families ran for their lives, while the Russian authorities did nothing. The Americans, also inundated by refugees, compelled the Czarist government to bring the worst excesses to a halt, though the immigrants kept coming.
A growing Jewish presence in the heart of Toronto was of special interest to local Presbyterian church leaders. All through the 19th century, Protestant Jewish missions were expanding. In England and North America, they would provide Jewish immigrants with English lessons, life skills education and family-friendly programs while their founders, a rising number of Jewish followers of Jesus, spread the gospel.
The rise of Jewish missionary efforts helped to spark a growing fascination in the fulfillment of Bible prophecies during the 19th century. Popular interpretations of prophetic Scriptures pointed to specific prophecies, both in the Jewish Bible and the New Testament, that “in the last days” Jewish people would experience a spiritual revival, be drawn to their Messiah and resettle in the Holy Land. With the impending close of the second millennium, visionary Christian leaders were preaching the Lord’s soon return. Others recognized that centuries of Christian persecution had hardened Jewish people against the gospel. The emerging leadership among the Jewish believers in Jesus—Hebrew Christians of various denominations—began to form sizable missionary organizations and strongly influenced the Christian approach to Jewish people.
As early as 1838, the Church of Scotland was excited