TORONTO —  When starting a new life in a foreign country, it’s normal to face challenges in adapting to a different culture, language, and climate.

Rabbi Israel Landa teaches children how to shake a lulav on Sukkot.  [Ronen Kedem photo]

But some Israelis who immigrated to Toronto years ago didn’t realize how different the concept of belonging to a Jewish community would be here compared to the environment they left behind.

Ora Shulman, 51, said that when she and her husband decided to move to Toronto in the mid-1980s, she quickly learned that feeling Jewish in Toronto takes more of an effort than it does in Israel.  

Shulman, vice-principal of Associated Hebrew Schools’ Posluns campus on Neptune Drive, said that when she lived in Israel, she “could feel the presence of Shabbat when the Egged [public transportation] buses stopped their service, and the siren announced that Shabbat is beginning. While I was not so observant myself at this time, I was surrounded by the atmosphere around me, and when everything came to a standstill, I knew Shabbat was there.”

Shulman said that when she came to Canada, she realized that “it is my responsibility to create rituals and symbolism to distinguish Shabbat from other days and to find new meaning in the concept of Shabbat, as the inherent practices in Israel are not present here.”

Rabbi Israel Landa, who came to Toronto as an emissary of Chabad-Lubavitch in 1989, and is the director of the Chabad Israeli Community Centre, said that each Israeli who moves here goes through his or her own process of coming to terms with the differences between being a Jew in Israel and being a Jew in Canada.

“Israelis come from a ‘default’ Judaism. The traffic in the street reminds you if it’s Shabbat or Yom Kippur, the language is the biblical language and everything is intertwined with the family,” said Rabbi Landa, who leads an Israeli congregation at the Lubavitch shul at Chabad Gate in Thornhill.

“But people in Israel are making a mistake by thinking that you don’t need more than that – that you don’t need religion because they have Israel and the language.”

He said that when they come here, they’re faced with a new situation.

“All of a sudden, they don’t know what it means to be a Jew. The traffic doesn’t do it for me. The newspapers don’t do it for me. I have to do it for me. So there is a search for meaning, a search for understanding and identity.”

Israel Meidan, who immigrated to Toronto in 1986 when he was 35 years old with his wife and two children, said he was brought up in an observant home in Ramat Gan.

He said that about four years after they moved to Toronto, they realized that they weren’t able to fulfil their Jewish needs on their own.

“We felt that, to quote my wife’s words, that once in Canada, one needs to belong to a community to be able to keep our Jewish heritage and roots alive,” Meidan said.

“The way life in Israel is arranged – and I’m talking about the relationship between the people and the shul – is different from what it is here. In Israel, one simply walks into a shul and he doesn’t need to be member, because [shuls are supported by] the government.”

Shulman said the concept of belonging to a synagogue is much more central to Jewish Canadians, because it serves as a centre for Jewish life.

“The celebration of holidays and life-cycle events are connected to the synagogue. When I was in Israel, this was not as much the case. Life here forces one to put their ‘Jewishness’ into practice,” Shulman added.

Rabbi Landa, who estimated that there are about 50,000 former Israelis in the Greater Toronto Area, said that even if Israelis do go to shul, they most likely aren’t members.

“That concept doesn’t exist in Israel. In Israel, religion and state is one. The government builds the synagogues, pays the rabbis and buys prayer books every two years. So it’s very foreign to them,” he said.

Meidan said that since he and his wife decided to reach out to Rabbi Landa and the Chabad community, his family has become much more observant and connected to the Israeli community here.

“Now, I pray three times a day. I used to… only do it during Shabbat or holidays,” he said.

Shulman and Meidan both said that they’ve become more observant since they moved to Toronto, because feeling like they’re part of the Jewish community depends on their direct involvement.

But Anat Hoffman, executive director of Jerusalem’s Israel Religious Action Center, a legal advocacy arm of the Reform movement in Israel, said that some of her experiences growing up in Jerusalem actually turned her off from being more observant.

“Talk to the Israelis in Toronto,” she said. “They will tell you they started to warm up to Judaism at minus 20 [degrees] in Toronto, because of rabbis that actually could talk to them, teachers who didn’t tell them what they’re not, but told them what they could be.”

She said when she was 10 years old, her grandmother sent her into an Orthodox synagogue to tell her grandfather to come home for lunch.

She was stopped by a man who said, “Girl, doesn’t your mother teach you how to dress?” and kept her from giving him the message.

“That person that kicked me out thought he was protecting Judaism. What he did is stop me from going to shul until I came to [Los Angeles] 10 years later,” Hoffman said.

Hoffman believes that attitudes like those is what makes Israeli immigrants the hardest Jews to attract to synagogues.

“They were exposed to a state religion that they rejected.”

Rabbi Landa said that he sees that in some of the Israelis he serves in Toronto.

“They come with a negative feeling toward the establishment. They are not fans of the establishment system.”

So when they are asked to become members of synagogues and become affiliated with Jewish organizations, they are wary of doing so.

One of the ways that Rabbi Landa reached out to the Israeli community in Toronto was by establishing a congregation where “they speak Hebrew, there is no one at the door collecting tickets, and no fees.”

Manny Yehoshua, 63, who moved to Toronto in 1994, said that when he lived in Israel, he observed Shabbat and all the Jewish holidays, but like Hoffman, he has negative memories about the Orthodox community.

Yehoshua explained that when he and his family moved from Iraq to Israel in the 1950s, when he was just a toddler, they were part of the Ma’aborot, Jews who lived in refugee camps that were erected to accommodate Jewish European and Middle Eastern refugees.

Yehoshua said they lived in a tent for  2-1/2 years and later moved to a shack, where they resided for another six years, near the Orthodox town of Bnei Brak.

He said he recalled the way Orthodox European Jews would look down on his family.

“They never accepted us as Jewish. Even my father who would be on his way to the synagogue… they would call us ‘goyim.’ I really didn’t like them. They rejected us. I felt really bad. I thought, ‘My father, who was on his way, with a kippah, to the synagogue, they called him a goy?’ I couldn’t understand that,” Yehoshua said.

Despite the discrimination his family faced from other religious Jews, he never distanced himself from the religion, which he credits to his parents who always set an example at home.

Still, he recalled that as a teenager, when he was a soldier with the Israel Defence Forces, he was skeptical about the  Chabad representatives who visited his army base as part of their outreach initiative.

“To me, the Chabad people were like the neighbours who had called us goyim.”

Yehoshua said that he didn’t feel the need to go to shul regularly, and like most other Israelis, he would only go on the High Holidays.

However, that attitude changed once he moved to Toronto. He realized that he would have to lead his children by example in the same way that his father did.

After connecting with the Israeli Chabad community, Yehoshua said he is  more observant here in Toronto than he was in Israel.

“There’s no doubt about it. I go every Shabbat to shul, and I never used to do that,” he said.

“I have a lot of respect for Chabad and what they’re doing. I can’t imagine myself without Chabad the last 14, 15 years. I’m quite sure we’d be at least 30 per cent less [observant] that what we are now. Whether or not you have a kippah on your head, you are equal. You can go and learn whatever you want.”

Rabbi Landa, who has developed a reputation as an Orthodox rabbi who serves a secular community, said that his strategy to connect with the Israeli community is not to approach it like an Orthodox rabbi would.

“It’s my title, but I’m not doing the work of a rabbi, preaching and teaching. My work is not rabbinical work,” he said.

“It’s about helping them with their Jewish needs.”

With files from Frances Kraft