You think about many weighty things on the back roads. We know the proverbial phrase “Gone but not forgotten.”
This will be different. This one is about a downtown Toronto art gallery and a curated exhibit that reflects part of our northern Ontario immigrant history.
It stems from a past Village Media story where Bill connected with an artist who had read an earlier story of one of the only Jewish cemeteries in the north.
Northern Ontario has its own diversified culture starting with Indigenous peoples. Then explorers, voyageurs, trappers and settlers built on the cultural mosaic. It transitioned, based on farming, logging and mining - pioneers began to dot the landscape along with burgeoning service communities often linked to the railways.
The exhibit
First, look at the photos of the Fentster gallery exhibit - I WILL RELATE TO YOU- of Toronto-based artist Meichen Waxer. She is a queer visual artist, curator, and arts worker. She recuperated a relationship with the place where her family traces its roots in northern Ontario – Kirkland Lake.
Fentster (meaning window in Yiddish) is an independent, artist-run exhibition space located in the storefront window of the grassroots Jewish community, Makom on College St. This eight-year-old gallery presents rotating, site-specific installations of contemporary art connected to the Jewish experience.
After finding journals written by her late grandmother, Meichen methodically uncovered the little-known story, beginning in the early 20th century, of how Jewish immigrants settled in pockets across northern Ontario and Quebec.
Immigrants often left their homelands because of persecution. They arrived fleeing eastern Europe and what is historically known as the Russian Pale of Settlement where Jews faced increasing restrictions on their livelihoods, legal discrimination, and persistent pogrom attacks. The region was a western region of the former Russian Empire with varying borders that existed from 1791 to 1917 in which permanent residency by Jews was mostly forbidden.
Written retrospectively with lively descriptions, the Waxer’s journals relay her own beloved grandmother Betsy’s accounts of the Jewish community in the Temiskaming region.
Meichen explains, “I spent the last few years deeply entrenched in my Bubbie’s (grandmother) journals, where she tells and retells my family history in a very lively and conversational style. She passed when I was 12, and both her absence and presence have marked my life. She writes about her childhood in Cochrane and, along the way, accounts bleed in from what her own Bubbie and her mother and aunt told her about the establishment of the Jewish communities in northern Ontario. These accounts prompted me to seek out others to try to fill in a broader understanding of the north."
Setting
By the time Betsy (Betty - Meichen’s great-great-grandmother, Betty Perkus) and her daughters arrived in the area from Romania in 1907, her husband and son (who had set out years earlier) had tragically drowned in a canoeing accident.
(These deaths were the first in the Jewish community of Krugerdorf in 1905, prompting the establishment of the Northern Hebrew Cemetery.) His wife, Betty Perkus arrived in northern Ontario as a widow and needed to quickly figure out how to support her family.
“In my Bubbie’s journals, she describes how Betty’s surviving son, Morris, suggested opening a store:
“Someone – it may have been the shochet (traditional slaughterer as in the Torah) said – there are certain needs that must be met in this community – if we are to grow. They are very basic. We need a butcher, a baker, a hardware store.
“Yes – we will lease some land, I’ll get some carpenters from the railway – and we will put down a plank floor – half walls and a canvas. Roof and sides – wood stoves – tables and a dough box – and [sic] you in business. Everyone was enthused about the project. Sleep evaded them that night. Dawn would never come.”
“For the widowed newcomer, opening a general store with modest start-up needs enabled her family to sustain itself.”
The Perkus general store, in turn, became central to Kirkland Lake’s existence. And there was a pan-northern influence.
“My Bubbie recounts in her journals: Opening day was May 12, 1910. Betty, Bessie and Fanny with their daughters Rebecca and Minerva proudly attended the festivities. The family was afloat in clouds of euphoria — a new business and two beautiful babies filled all with joy.”
As the family grew and spread across “the north,” so did the store: opening locations in Cochrane, Kapuskasing, and Kirkland Lake.
“As my conversations with others from the Jewish community spread across the north of Eastern Ontario and into Western Quebec in recent years, what became evident was that the family store was a symbol of both autonomy and community. My Bubbie’s journals highlighted that it was her grandmother Betty’s ‘business acumen’ that not only sustained the family and community but also laid the foundation for future generations to thrive.
In the beginning: then/now
At one time there was the first wave of Jewish immigrants into northeastern Ontario and the exhibit identifies the original destination for these eastern European immigrants.
In 1902, Simon Henerofsky, David Korman, Samuel Levy, and Aaron Gurevitch left Montreal and established themselves in an area that would become Krugerdorf just northeast of Englehart.
Over the first few years, they constructed a synagogue and schoolhouse, shared with German-Prussian immigrants.
By 1912, most Jews followed mining rushes in surrounding townships, including Kirkland Lake. The region experienced significant population growth through the 1920s and 30s.
At the community’s height in 1939, there were roughly 125 Jewish families in nearby Kirkland Lake with a robust Jewish social and organizational network. Circumstances changed during the Second World War. Many left for military service or war-related jobs in the South.
Then younger members of the Jewish communities moved to larger city centres to pursue higher education and careers, with parents often trailing along. By the 1960s, northern Jewish life had significantly diminished from its pre-war prominence. A decade later, buildings that once housed synagogues were sold, with the contents donated to Jewish institutions in the south.
(For example. The Sons of Jacob Synagogue in North Bay is the oldest synagogue north of Toronto still in use as a place of worship. Built in 1913 as a grocery store, it became a hardware store and later a furniture store. The first services in this building as a synagogue were held in 1925, the year North Bay was incorporated as a city.
From 1925 to 1980 there were at least 60 Jewish families living in North Bay and area. Through the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s many of the retailers on Main Street were Jewish merchants. As with all Northern Ontario Jewish communities, as members of the community retired and moved south, and as their children moved south for school and careers, the Jewish community here declined.
There are presently 15 or fewer Jewish households in North Bay and area, with several of those having moved to North Bay in the past decade for employment. The Synagogue continues to be maintained for occasional religious services and has the only remaining kosher kitchen in the area.
Exhibit story
Evelyn Tauben is the curator for the Fentster exhibit she said it is a window into Jewish life.
“Our project is a partnership with the Ontario Jewish Archives,” said Ms. Tauben. “Art is a powerful entry point for many to stories of history and community.
“Even in the small space of the window gallery, we were able to combine Meichen's very detailed, textured contemporary art installation and a rather thorough historical exhibition.”
It was fortuitous to connect with the artist again.
“Hi Bill, lovely to connect again.” She recounted, “I reached out a long time ago when first starting this research, so it's awesome to connect again to be able to expand the reach of the story."
“Memory is a theme, both my own and in a larger cultural sense, as I explore the difficulty of locating my own history within a culture that worked specifically to obscure it, queerness and Judaism.”
She explained her connection. "The north was a place of my imagination, a vast uncertainty partially filled with the wind-swept trees of A.Y. Jackson’s paintings (of Group of Seven fame); uncertainty of what it looked like, felt like, and sounded like. My father was born up north in Kirkland Lake, in a small but present Jewish community – which even most Canadian Jews don’t know ever existed. Today it is a 6-hour drive from Toronto but when my great-great-grandfather arrived in Canada in 1905, this journey was not simply a drive between places but a multi-day trek from the main centres of Montreal and Toronto.”
She was 20 when her Zadie (grandfather) passed. I lost my Bubbie (grandmother) when I was 12. I felt seen by her in a way unmatched in my inter-cultural family where I often felt a separation and distance from my own Jewish identity. With my Zadie’s passing, I inherited a box of ephemera: photographs, old passports, cards, letters, address books, and many journals my Bubbie wrote. Not daily diaries, the journals are a writing and re-writing of my family’s life establishing themselves in a remote, isolated part of the country, detailing in imaginative language the hardships and love that shaped our history and the Jewish community.”
In recent years, Mechen went beyond digging around that box of family stuff, finally travelling to Kirkland Lake and then reaching out to meet with elders, children, and grandchildren of interconnected Jewish communities of Kirkland Lake and nearby Rouyn-Noranda in Quebec. Lifelong uncertainty transformed into vignettes of community.
She said the stories were generously shared with me and passed down to her. “I began making art. The installation I created for the Fenster window gallery is the most ambitious project to date inspired by this past; channelling threads teased out of my grandmother’s writings, drawing inspiration from materials I found at the Ontario Jewish Archives, and paying homage to the general store that my great-great-grandmother opened to sustain her family and the local community. This work serves as a portal, connecting across time and generations—from grandmothers to granddaughters. It reflects on the bonds strengthened by the transmission of knowledge, community care, and resourceful perseverance.
"Following the conversation my Bubbie (Jessie Waxer) reimagined between her own Bubbie (Betty Perkus) and her uncles about the notion for founding the shop, for the Fenster installation, we put down a plank floor that bisects the small space of the window gallery. Above the floor are objects that relate to provisional life in the north: an antique dough bowl, a vintage flour sifter, old skis and a blanket that my Bubbie wove by hand.”
The area beneath the floor is inspired by a passage in the journals where Meichen’s grandmother describes how they used to stuff old clothes beneath the floorboards of the shop for insulation. It is a wonderful visual interpretation.
She sourced vintage clothing of the types that would have been sold either at Perkus Limited or the other Jewish-run shops in Kirkland Lake and the nearby small townships.
“I layered these textiles with old family photos of my Bubbie and Zadie enjoying fun times in and by the water with my father as a little boy and his sister. My family’s story in Canada begins in a watery grave (drowning incident) and I wanted to also draw attention to the good times they had in the area’s lakes and rivers.”
These photos have taken on new resonances since the exhibition has been on view.
"On August 31st, my sweet father, Peter Waxer, passed away unexpectedly. My Dad shared with me that he was so grateful for a daughter who honoured his ancestry and brought him closer to what it meant to be Jewish. Born during WWII, being Jewish was not an easy thing for him, and something he wrestled with throughout his life.
“As I’ve grown closer to my own sense of Jewish-ness, I see how his wrestling was indeed very Jewish all along. He was proud of this work, and deeply moved that people cared about a small and not well-known Jewish community of the North.”
Art installation
This art installation came together much like the original store itself. Meichen says… “pulling in friends, repurposing and borrowing objects that relate to provisional life in the north.”
Waxer found a description in her Bubbie’s journals of old clothes stuffed under the shop’s floorboards as insulation. Look at the installation, it is an interesting artistic interpretation from top to bottom.
In response, the artist creates a landscape beneath the floorboards composed of the kind of garments once found at the Jewish-run stores, from sportswear to formal suits.
Jessie describes preparations for a wedding celebration.
“Like bright butterflies, women with covered dishes…hovered above the tables seeking the most advantageous spot for their treasured recipes.”
The artist then invited friends from her Jewish community to embroider colourful butterflies onto the sort of canvas sold at Perkus alongside tools, corned beef, and canoes.
The exhibit’s colourful subterranean textiles merge with family photos—"a reminder that despite their isolation, hardships and loss, there was closeness born out of adversity and proximity. There was new love and life, outdoor adventures and simple pleasures before the community experienced the inevitable emptying out for big cities.
The exhibition title truncates Jessie’s dedication to her descendants: I will relate to you as it was told to me.
“The excerpted words highlight how we make meaning out of our closest relations, our personal and collective histories, our inherited memories, and the places we call home.” Something for all of us to reflect upon family stories.
Explanation of artifacts
The installation items are inspired by and reference a constellation of connections to the north and community, heavily drawing on these time-honoured journal entries Meichan poured through.
Upon closer examination of the exhibit, you see the butterflies stitched on the canvas. The butterflies stitched into the canvas connect to three distinct references.
“The first shop my ancestors built had canvas walls, bringing in the large roll of canvas was to invite inside the exterior walls of the shop,” she said.
“In my Bubbie's journals, she has a paragraph about the women of the community gathering over a table to place their dishes for dinner, like beautiful hovering butterflies. I in turn invited my Jewish community of women and queers to embroider around my table. This community gathering transpired into largely a sharing circle of everyone's grandmothers.
“The gold thread stitched throughout is my Bubbie's, and when I first went to Krugerdrof Cemetery a dragonfly was on my great-great grandmother's headstone, it stayed there my entire visit - I believe it was great-great-grandmother meeting me and I stitched her into this distinctly as a dragonfly.
“'Like bright butterflies, women with covered dishes hovered above the tables seeking the most advantageous spot for their treasured recipes.' I love this description in my Bubbie’s journal of this scene where the community’s women flutter around, preparing for a community wedding.”
Moved by this image of women’s collectivity and care, she reached out to the women and queers in her Jewish community to embroider together.
“Over several wintery weekends, I sat with my friends, teaching some to embroider, and refreshing my skills with others who were more adept at textile arts. We chatted about our lives, good and tough times, and, of course, about our grandmothers. I delicately stitched in golden thread from my Bubbie’s weaving supplies so she could be threaded into these moments and the work.”
I asked about the railway spike and the gloves.
“The railroad spike was found on the tracks just north of Krugerdorf cemetery, my great-great-grandfather worked on the railroad. This was inviting his hand into the work. I have no images of him and no description of what he looked like, so this was my most direct way of visualizing him.
“The gloves are Evelyn's Bubbie's, and the other curator, Na'ama's Bubbie's fur coat, is stuffed between the floorboards in the mass of clothing. It felt important to me and to us to have our grandmothers all represented somehow.”
How about those skis in the top back of the exhibit?
“The skis were a found object from Evelyn, but they are a nod to, Steve's family (Adelbaum), the director of Northern Hebrew Cemetery (Krugerdorf). His father Abe cared for the cemetery for a very long time and also was instrumental in laying many of the ski trails up in the region.”
She thinks it's important to remind people that although there was a lot of hardship and dark circumstances that led to the formation of the Jewish communities of the north - there was also joy and leisure.
“The images at the bottom are my family photos of my grandparents, great-aunt, aunt, and father. These are the iconic images in my collection of life in the North before they moved to Toronto. The images float between clothes that reference how my family's first store had old clothes shoved under the floor boards as insulation. the clothing all pieced together is like a bit of an abstract landscape of colours and textures connected to the generations of clothing found and described to me from the general stores. The metaphors here are around generational support, memory, and joy.”
Immigration
In context through this exhibit immigration remains a big part of the Canadian and northern Ontario populus, I asked both the artist and the curator.
Evelyn: “This is a story about immigration and also good to frame it in a way that makes a distinction that not all immigration stories are the same.
“So while we believe that this is a universally relatable narrative, it should also be clear that the Jewish immigrants at this time were fleeing extreme persecution in Eastern Europe. And what was unique about the experience in the north (as opposed to the urban centres) were the particular ways that the community had to pull together to fashion Jewish life even while relatively isolated, and also how they had to establish all the pillars of communal life.”
Here's a map from the exhibit’s background of early Jewish communities in Northern Ontario. And a new website on the cemetery.
Meichen said about her work. “This work is not so much about immigration, as my installation connects to the narratives of migration and immigration. These stones are a way to serve as a conduit of remembrance, so many cannot make the journey to Krugerdorf due to age and distance. I had the most profound experience when I first visited the cemetery, and hope that this offering to descendants serves as a way to stay connected to their ancestors.”
What’s next for Meichen? This project continues.
“I also have formed a real connection with the director of Northern Hebrew Cemetery and am working on new art connected to it.
“I’m continuing to work on researching the Jewish communities of the north. My next project will be focused on the distance and remembrance surrounding the Jewish cemetery in the north.”
She will cast approximately 155 small stones in bronze collected by the river near Northern Chevra Kadisha Cemetery (also commonly called Krugerdorf by the community members).
“This cemetery is the last active space of Jewish history of Northern Ontario. It is also personally important to me since my family members were the first to be buried here. Through the project, I will offer to the descendants I have come to know from the Northern Jewish communities a bronze stone. I will place the originating stone at the headstone of an ancestor of theirs buried in Krugerdorf. This part of the project acts as a conduit for memory and connection, a way for those unable to visit Krugerdorf to stay connected to their family, the cemetery, and the history of the Jewish north."
I often stop here to leave my own rocks. (My father was one of those long gone Jewish retailers – ‘The Joke Shop’ - on the Main St. of North Bay.)
The past is never forgotten, we have learned that. Maybe William Shakespeare's assessment through the utterance of his treacherous character Antonio “Wherof what's past is prologue,” (Act 2, Scene 1-The Tempest), rings true? The phrase has been embraced by many researchers to emphasize the importance of studying history.
In this contemporary interpretation, the events of the past – like those of immigration - set the stage for the societal story yet to come. Something to think about on the back roads.
