The Jewish legacy of Toronto’s Kensington Market, a self-contained downtown village of sorts that grew out of Jewish immigration to the city in the 1900s, isn’t confined to its remaining visible touchstones like the Kiever Shul, according to Stuart Clarfield.
The director of the documentary film Kensington Market: Heart of the City, screening June 10 at Leah Posluns Theatre for this year’s Toronto Jewish Film Festival (TJFF), included scenes in the film of congregants davening in the synagogue, which was founded in 1912 by Ukrainian immigrants.
For Clarfield, it’s the spirt of acceptance, belonging, and safety for immigrant communities in Kensington Market that most embodies the area’s Jewish legacy, he told The CJN in an interview.
Everyone has their own version of Kensington Market, says Clarfield, from those who grew up in and around the market, to generations of diverse cultural and countercultural backgrounds that have considered the market home for decades.
“Why is it that almost everybody comes to the market and feels comfortable here? Shockingly, no matter where they’re from, whether it’s the punks or the homeless folks that are here, or people camping in the middle of the square, or wealthy people going to Tom’s [Place] for a suit, there’s this [flattening]… everyone’s in the village together,” Clarfield said over coffee.
“How is that possible, and why has it continued? It seems to have continued from the time I first found it to now. Talk to various cultures… they all say the same thing.”
He references a moment from the film when Liberal MP Charles Sousa, who grew up in the market and now represents Mississauga-Lakeshore, and his father are interviewed. Sousa says after their Portuguese family arrived, their Jewish neighbours in the market called his father “the Portuguese Jew.” The title, Sousa’s father tells the camera, acknowledged his level of respect for those who had established the market’s welcoming mix of residential homes with storefronts on the main floor.
“That early phase, when there was the kind of the end of the Jewish Market, which is in the ‘50s-’60s, as people were phasing out, the new folks were phasing in. They felt… like they were accepted.”
“The market begins, say in the early 1920s, as this village for the marginal in Toronto,” said Clarfield, noting the market’s roots as a place where “outsiders” at the time made a welcoming home in the neighbourhood.
“[They were] people who spoke Yiddish, had a different religion, looked different. They were not comfortable in Anglo-Saxon Toronto in the post-World War I in the ‘20s, so they had to build their own little place where their culture, their synagogues, their kosher food, even the schedule of their weeks,” worked for them, said Clarfield.
The market’s Jewish wave of immigrants that began around or after the turn of the century, picking up in the 1920s and ‘30s, lasted until around the 1950s and ‘60s. By the ‘60s and ‘70s, waves of Portuguese, Italian, Chinese, Caribbean, and Vietnamese immigrants arrived in the market as many Jewish families, and in some cases their businesses, moved to other parts of the city.
“Afterwards, as other folks came in, that feeling of inclusiveness was transmitted… and to me, that feeling is still here.”
The spirit “has weirdly transmitted in a way that people can’t even consciously know where it came from originally,” which inspired him to make the film as a document of the 150-year-old market, in particular its “magic and inclusiveness.”
Now a bohemian enclave, known for thrift shops, music venues, and cafes, the market became more of an urban destination to many. While many of the family greengrocers that once populated several market corners have given way to the likes of cannabis shops and taco spots, grocery shoppers seeking quality goods on a budget can still be seen among tourists strolling the sidewalks with iced coffees.
The market’s only real constant is change, though, and its independent, anti-corporate spirit has played heavily into the many debates over the years around aspects of its planning, development, and preservation of its heritage character.
In the 1990s, activists kept Nike from opening a store by spray painting their disapproval, while in the early 2000s, advocates pushed back on a proposed Loblaws supermarket in the area (which came and went, on College Street).
From murals to political theatre mourning businesses forced out due to high rent – as Clarfield spontaneously captures in the documentary – street art can take many forms in an area where expression runs wilder than other corners of Toronto.
“People feel free to put the art on the walls, to express themselves… this whole neighbourhood is found art. There aren’t many neighbourhoods where every wall is an open canvas in this city, and I’m not saying the Jewish Market was a capital of surreal art and graffiti, but this vibe of ‘you can be who you are’… it seems to be here, and I think that is the greatest gift for the city, and I think it’s also the greatest legacy is that spirit.”
From shopkeeper philosophers, to musicians and residents’ advocates, many of the film’s interview subjects express that there’s a wild, weird, independent essence to the market’s character and those who inhabit it.
The spirit is not about being Jewish, says Clarfield, but about being human.
“I think the Jewish Market wanted to be seen as just human by a lot of the folks [that] didn’t give them some space. They wouldn’t hire them. It wasn’t comforting and easy for the first generation that landed here. So, the question of what’s still here of the Jewish market? To me, that soul in spirit of, we need to create a little village where people are going to be okay as they are and not judged,” he said.
“It was very focused on the Jewish culture originally, but they seemed to have passed that on and, the Portuguese, Italians, and Hungarians, seemed to have passed it on, and the Caribbean folks you talked to, or the Vietnamese folks, everybody always has this vibe of ‘outside of these four corners, you know [when] you’re in the market, in the city… Toronto is a welcoming place, but this place [the market] is hyper-welcoming and non-judgmental.”
Clarfield, who filmed between Dec. 21, 2015, at the annual Kensington Market Festival of Lights on the winter solstice, and early 2020, shot more than 75 hours of footage, including interviews.
He notes that while shooting, several businesses, waves of short-term rentals (such as AirBnb) and rising rents came and went during the period he refers to as Toronto’s transition from People City to Property City.
“Kensington, to me, is the capital of People City in Toronto. And it emanated out from here in many ways and still does, but… Property City is impacting us too.”
The film’s second half covers factors such as rising property values, displacement, gentrification, and a retiring old guard of shopkeepers (including Jewish, Asian, and Portuguese grocers).
Residents like Dominique Russell of the Kensington Market Land Trust, who appears in the film, continue years-long advocacy against bigger businesses encroaching into the area amid competing urban planning visions for the market.
Finished in 2024, the film has played at Innis Town Hall and the Faculty Club at the University of Toronto; the Centre for Social Innovation; and at Toronto Public Library (TPL) branches. In April, the doc played at Winnipeg’s Architecture and Design Film Festival. The film is set to be licensed for educational use by the Toronto District School Board in the fall.
Interspersed with images from current bohemian Kensington, the first part of the film focuses on the market’s history, including one interviewee, David Pinkus, whose family moved into their market home in 1927. In one black-and-white archival image, a giant braided challah extends across several people’s arms. Former Toronto councillor for the area Joe Cressy mentions how there used to be 90 synagogues in the area, and former mayor John Sewell calls Kensington one of the last remnants of Old Toronto.
Clarfield often attends screenings for a chat and Q&A following the film, as is planned for the TJFF screening June 10. He says there are usually a couple of main themes in reaction to Kensington Market: Heart of the City.
Two of the strongest emotional responses to the film involve people relating to the market, and wanting to preserve it.
“People love the market, and they love the idea that they can see something reflected about the market … There are people who want to voice their really strong relationship to Kensington… tell a personal story, or something that they saw that they can relate to.”
However, another reaction, at times, is “a very strong sense of depression,” according to Clarfield.
“We showed it at the Revue Cinema on Roncesvalles Avenue, and that audience who came were neighbourhood people… and a lot of them can’t afford their rent.”
The personal connection to Kensington Market and its history, together with questions like “what the heck are we going to do here in this transition of People City to Property City?” and “the whole urban planning piece” often serve as a catalyst for a larger conversation, he says.
“What are the things about Kensington that allowed it to have that vibe that you could apply elsewhere?”
The neighbourhood’s several one-way streets mean people don’t have to look two ways for traffic, and streets are narrow for easy crossing.
“The houses are very close together. That’s a physical footprint thing. It was a residential neighbourhood… what’s obvious when you walk around is that the stores and the retail went on the ground floor. But subconsciously, you’re looking at a house, and I think your brain tells you … ‘I’m actually in someone’s house when I walk into this place.’
“Even though I think consciously, you understand it’s a commercial neighbourhood, there’s something else that goes on knowing people live here. It’s human scale… those two things have been mixed, commercial and residential. You can yell at people on the second floor, and they can yell at you. It’s human connection capable.”
Yet even recent news points to the constant cycle of difficulties for businesses, with questions this year around the return of the popular Pedestrian Sundays in Kensington Market, when parts of the area are closed to cars on the last Sundays of summer and early fall months.
The May 2025 edition was cancelled, and local business owners include some who aren’t happy that independent vendors sometimes take up sidewalk space to hawk their goods while some store owners have had to close up shop, unable to make the high rents.
And in a recent Toronto Life story, a sustainable fishmonger who’d opened up shop in 2012 lamented having to shutter the business’s market location, while acknowledging she’d been part of a wave of upscale shops that play a role in the gentrification that’s displaced many such market grocers and fishmongers in recent years.
Clarfield’s own Jewish connections to the area are also set to come full circle with another upcoming screening, at the Cecil Street Community Centre. The beloved community building was originally founded as the Ostrovsker synagogue, including, he says, by members of his family who’d arrived in Canada from Ostrovietz in Poland.
“Turns out my great-grandfather when he was the first [to immigrate] here… [he] and his wife are inscribed in the marble panels in the lobby of the Cecil Street [building], which has all the founding families of the Ostrovsker synagogue,” dating back, says Clarfield, to about 1925.
Clarfield’s great-grandfather came first in 1910, then returned to Ostrovietz, to bring his wife and three daughters, including Clarfield’s grandmother, to Toronto in 1918 or 1919; she was married in Toronto in 1920.
For Clarfield, that screening of the film, at the synagogue his great-grandfather helped establish, represents “a 105-year echo” from his family’s roots in the city.
“It’ll be kind of freaky to know that four generations later, his great-grandson is, helping [present] something in the room that he helped organize,” he said.
No longer a synagogue building, the historic place on Cecil Street has been a church, and now as a community centre that serves as a warming centre during the winter months.
According to Stuart Hands, TJFF’s director of programming, while there are a number of Canadian Jewish films about Montreal and Winnipeg, there aren’t very many specifically Toronto Jewish films.
Luckily for TJFF’s program, “just around this time I was thinking this,” Hands received Clarfield’s documentary.
“It’s great to see this history and I think there’s a big demand” for “broadly Canadian Jewish history” as well as those focusing on specific cities or places, says Hands.
“[Clarfield] taps into the history beautifully.”
Canadian content and screenings with special guests at this year’s festival also include Montreal filmmaker Simcha Shul in attendance for a Q&A following his short film The Windows of Rue St. Dominique, in which a woman returns to a former synagogue, where her family ran an egg distribution business while she was growing up. The story merges a personal history with that of Montreal’s Plateau neighbourhood.
That film screens with Iron Ladies, a feature about a group of Jewish housewives in London and Dublin during the Cold War (dubbed “the 35s” for their ages at the time) who started a movement to support the eventual immigration of Russian Jewish refuseniks. Wendy Eisen, who formed a Canadian group at the time, leads a discussion following the film.
“I’ve learned that if you… contextualize as much as you can, some of these films to here in Canada, the better,” said Hands. “It sort of localizes it.”
This year, TJFF offers “Unkosher Nightmares,” a program of short horror films that includes shorts by two Canadians: Josh Saltzman’s Shiva and Sara Farb and Farhang Ghajar’s The Shomer.
International films at this year’s TJFF include a documentary about the Maus author titled Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse; Torn, which documents the tearing down of hostage posters in New York after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks in Israel and ensuing Gaza war; and Torah Tropical, which follows an Orthodox family from Colombia, who converted to Judaism and move to Israel to escape gang violence.
The full program is available on the Toronto Jewish Film Festival website.
