Jewish Anarchists and the Long Lost Yom Kippur Ball of Montreal

(Advertisement for a Yom Kippur Ball in New York, courtesy of Eddy Portnoy at Tablet Magazine. Translation below.)

It’s easy to lose sight of the fact that Montreal’s Jewish community was not a single, unified pillar, even in its earliest years. As with the French and the English, Montreal has always been a case of solitudes within solitudes, always a multiplicity of experiences, always elements in conflict with one another.

One story that forcefully reminds us of this of the Yom Kippur Ball that Jewish anarchists held in St. Joseph’s Hall on Ste. Catherine Street in 1905.

Rebecca Margolis - professor at the University of Ottawa, author of the new book Jewish Roots, Canadian Soil: Yiddish Culture in Montreal, 1905-1945, and a fact checker for this museum – wrote the definitive account of the 1905 Yom Kippur Ball in an article for the Canadian Jewish Studies Journal . She wrote that the short-lived anarchist tradition of the Yom Kippur Ball can be traced back to 1888, when a group of Jewish “free-thinkers” in London rented out a hall in the East End. For the duration of Yom Kippur – the day of atonement, fasting, and repentance, the holiest day of the Jewish year – the ball featured “antireligious lectures, music, and refreshments.” Their more devout co-religionists were not amused:

By early Yom Kippur morning, despite the angry mob outside, the hall was packed with people, and police were stationed in the street. Speeches against religion were held, followed by discussion, joyous singing, and recitations.

On Yom Kippur afternoon tables with refreshments were set up. Because of the unexpectedly high attendance the food was soon depleted and three individuals…had to leave the hall and obtain more food from a nearby restaurant and make their way back through a furious crowd…Despite disruptions, the Arbayter Fraynd [a radical Yiddish paper] reported, “Thus the day, a day which can truly be called historic, passed in a festive manner.”

In later years, Yom Kippur balls were also held in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago. They were as heralded in the radical Yiddish press as they were lambasted in the politically conservative English-language publications of the Jewish establishment. More often than not, the festivities would be interrupted by angry mobs of offended religious Jews (who, Margolis cites one anarchist saying, probably should have been in shul) and police enforcing legal injunctions against the celebrations as disturbing the peace.

The reason that the Yom Kippur ball didn’t come to Montreal until 1905, Margolis writes, is because Eastern European immigration to Canada didn’t begin until a generation after Jews had already started to fill up London’s East End and New York’s Lower East Side by the hundreds of thousands. Moreover, unlike in the other two cities, Montreal’s chasm between “uptown” establishment Jews and recent “downtown” immigrants wasn’t so large. Most of the few thousand Jews living in Montreal before 1900 were themselves Eastern European (while the Establishment in New York, for instance, was overwhelmingly of German origin, and the few religious and cultural institutions that did exist for Montreal Jews before the wave of post-pogrom immigration were overwhelmed and dwarfed by the those set up by the new immigrants in the first decades of the 20^th century. Thus, the Montreal Jewish community was largely set up by and for the same type of impoverished shtetl immigrant who, in other circumstances in New York, rebelled against a more affluent establishment by partaking in blatantly irreligious demonstrations like the Yom Kippur balls that thrived there in the 1890s. Non-religious Montreal Jews had less of an establishment to rebel against than their New York cousins.

There was nonetheless, especially in the first years of the century, a vibrant anarchist community among the Jews of Montreal. They generally congregated around bookstores like Hirsch Hershman’s on St. Lawrence Boulevard, described by the historian and journalist Israel Medres in Montreal of Yesterday:

When the storekeeper was asked for a glass of soda water or a package of cigarettes by a customer he would take his time and lend an ear to the discussions that were being waged, and would throw in his comment as well. The cigarettes would wait while he championed the teachings of Karl Marx, Peter Kropotkin, Rudolf Rocker, Johann Most, or Emma Goldman.

The Montreal anarchist movement in Montreal, Margolis writes, “was a satellite of nearby New York.”

So, true to their own radical tradition, Montreal’s anti-religious Jews staged their own Yom Kippur Ball on October 9, 1905. The rented out St. Joseph’s Hall on Ste. Catherine Street East, at Sanguinet Street, and, according to the historian B.G. Sack, “distributed circulars inviting the Jewish people to partake of dancing and refreshments on Yom Kippur day.”

Soon after the proceedings began, however, a commotion broke out. Successive waves of mobs broke into the meeting: some objected to its antireligious nature, others simply wanted to steal the food. One man, Harry Rabinovtich, was arrested and “charged with obstruction and assault of Benjamin Jauff, one of the speakers at the event, by punching him in the forehead with his fist.”

Margolis notes that the Montreal ball differed from its predecessors in that it was sponsored not by any organization structure, as in New York and London, but by a few radically-minded individuals. The 1905 Yom Kippur Ball in Montreal was more or less a hastily scrapped-together affair, and, as Margolis writes, “marked by general confusion and pandemonium.”

Interestingly, Margolis argues that the founding of the Yiddish daily newspaper, the Keneder Adler, two years after this incident effectively put an end to the movement of the Jewish anarchists in Montreal and their anti-religious Yom Kippur festivities. Margolis writes:

“Although the Adler expressed clear Socialistic inclinations and was, for example, sympathetic to the plight of workers in its coverage of strikes, its stance on religious observance was consistently traditional and antiradical.”

This was because the Adler, unlike the generally marginal anarchist papers in New York and London, had the responsibility of representing the entire Jewish community, not only the radical, anti-religious fringe:

“The Adler’s publisher, Hirsch Wolofsky, simultaneously a businessman and an active figure in the Montreal Jewish community, created a popular newspaper that addressed the widest possible readership. This readership included both workers and bosses, both secular and observant Jews. Rather than represent any one stance, the Adler strove to supply Canadian Jews with an organ to inform, educate, entertain, and represent their general interests, and to strengthen and ultimately to consolidate the Yiddish-speaking immigrant community in Montreal, and in Canada as a whole.”

This lack of a reliably radical Yiddish periodical, the lack of an organized anarchist leadership, and the lack of strong opposition from the Montreal Jewish establishment (which generally adopted the policy of ignoring anti-religious behaviour) combined to make the Yom Kippur Ball a one-time incident in Montreal, and to make the anarchist movement a generally short-lived one as well. Margolis writes that these fierce radicals were eventually absorbed into the less anti-religious socialist movement popular among Jews in Montreal, and the whole idea of hosting a festive gathering on Yom Kippur faded away. Now, Margolis writes, it’s just “an oddity of history.”

Click here to read Rebecca Margolis’ article.