There were 90,250 Jews in Montreal in 2021, according to the most recent Canadian census—580 more individuals than were counted a decade earlier.
And while 0.6 percent increase might seem like a blip, it represented the first gain in 50 years.
McGill sociology professor Morton Weinfeld considers it noteworthy enough, given that Montreal had the larger Jewish population than Toronto prior to the decline: “The reason some people were so delighted with these results is because it may indicate a reversal of that trend.”
And yet, Montreal’s community hasn’t bounced back to its 1991 high of 101,000. The number has remained sharp in the minds of many since the community contracted following Quebec’s nationalist and language surrounding Bill 101.
Four years ago, Jews comprised 2.1 percent of Greater Montreal’s total population of 4,206,445, which accounted for 22.3 percent of Jewish Canadians, who are ranked 11th among the city’s ethnic groups, and fifth in size among religious groups, trailing Catholics, Protestants, Muslims and Christian Orthodox.
The calculation was also adjusted since 2011, when Jewish identification in the census was different. The category of those who had no religion, but a Jewish ethnicity was broadened to better define oneself as Jewishly, today the internationally accepted Jewish Standard Definition (JSD) defining a Jewish person as anyone who said they were: Jewish by religion and ethnicity, Jewish by religion and having another ethnicity, and Jewish by ethnicity with no religious affiliation, i.e., culturally Jewish.
Some surprises in the stats
Last month, Federation CJA released an in-depth community analysis based on the 2021 census, highlighting key demographic, economic and cultural trends—and there were some surprises, according to Federation’s chief strategy and impact officer Pamela Teitelbaum.
Chief among them was decreasing poverty, with the percentage of Jewish households living below the poverty line dropping from 19.7 to 8.4 percent.
There are many factors for that, says Teitelbaun, the improvement mostly attributed to government subsidies, child tax benefits, and pandemic-related support such as the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB) according to Federation CJA. (Those 2021 numbers don’t consider the last four years, nor the inflation realities of the last two which has seen a rise in reported poverty levels for all Canadians.)
Even with the reported decline, there were still 7,605 Jews living in poverty in Greater Montreal, 8.4 percent of the community (a number below Montreal’s 10.2 percent), 1,790 ‘very poor’ Jews (whose annual income is below 50 percent of the low-income cut-off or poverty line), along with another 5,000 hovering at the threshold. A total of 2,615 elderly Jews live below the poverty line, comprising more than a third of Montreal’s Jewish poor.
(Poverty is measured by the 2018-based Market Basket Measure (MBM), whereby a family of four lives in poverty if they cannot afford the cost of a specific basket of goods and services in their community. In 2020 it stood just above $41,000 for Montreal.)
Despite the unprecedented challenges of recent years, the dramatic drop originally cited “is a testament to strategic investments in housing and other measures that speak to the strength of community support as well as government policies during challenging times,” said Federation CJA president and CEO Yair Szlak in a news release. “However, we remain committed to addressing the persistent needs of vulnerable groups and ensuring no one is left behind.”
Federation’s part in that is community assistance programs, funding food security and housing supports, like Kehilla housing subsidies and rental assistance programs, adds Teitelbaum: “So there actually are many different ways in which Federation is also providing financial support to the community in need, the socio-economically vulnerable and through partners, we’re contributing to the change in poverty levels.”
That means social services, and anything related to people in need, from food and personal security to subsidizing Jewish living, i.e., access to schooling, camp, and food. “There’s actually a lot of ways in which people want to live Jewishly and can’t afford it, and today even middle-income families need support. That’s something we’re continuously monitoring, especially trying to assess how to better understand it.”
Poverty numbers tell several stories, explains McGill’s Morton Weinfeld. “Jewish poverty is interesting” he said, in that it differs from the mainstream; Jews are under-represented in multi-generational poverty. “The poverty is there for one generation, and if it’s an immigrant family, the kids will go to school and maybe get out of that association with Jewish poverty,” whereas elements like crime or addiction that can impact generations are less common.
He also notes that low-income haredi households are largely a result of the number of children, “and many of males have not really been fully committed to work. That’s slowly starting to change, but that is a significant fact of life with regards to the haredi population, not only in Montreal but in the world and in Israel as a whole. There’s a challenge of whether or not to integrate into the mainstream Jewish society” he said, “and there have been some efforts to try to open things up for the male population in terms of their education.”
It’s part of an ongoing process, in which the ultra-Orthodox population—which includes a variety of groups—is still negotiating its integration into the general Jewish community.
Population changing, shifting across island
As for population growth, the numbers beneath the numbers also tell a story about what’s going on around the island of Montreal and beyond.
“The population is changing, not necessarily expanding so much, but shifting” said Federation CJA’s Pamela Teitelbaum: “Five-hundred-and-eighty is a small bump, but taken in context, it’s something to be pleased about.” In 1991 the population was at 101,000 but declined by almost 8,500 people by 2001, and kept shrinking so while certainly not a boom, it’s not bad news and certainly holds no bad surprises. “Yeah, you know, the truth is, we’re facing so many continued challenges across the board, as we always do. That would be nice.”
The island suburbs of Côte Saint-Luc and Hampstead still boast the highest percentages of Jew—at 54 percent and 64 percent respectively—even while those two communities lost several hundreds of Jewish people to other neighbourhoods: There is notable growth in neighbourhoods such as Park Avenue/Extension, Westmount, Outremont, and the “Rest of Montreal,” with an increase of over 5,000 individuals in smaller Jewish pockets in more than a dozen boroughs, cities and neighbourhoods across the island and beyond.
Part of the growth in the Parc Extension and Outremont areas stems from the largest concentration of Montreal island’s ultra-Orthodox community. Along with the significant Tosh Hasidic population of more than 2,400 people in Boisbriand, north of the island, the haredi comprise about a fifth of the overall Jewish population of Greater Montreal.
There have also been small decreases in the Jewish population of Côte des Neiges, while its western borough half of Notre-Dame-de-Grâce saw a slight bump. “It’s just really where population is shifting in the city,” said Teitelbaum, some of that likely attributed to cost of living, as Montreal’s traditionally lower rental costs have been catching up with the rest of the country’s major cities.
The west island Jewish community of Dollard-des-Ormeaux has declined since its 2001 peak of 10,385 Jews— losing more than 2,700 over 20 years—while Jewish populations increased rapidly elsewhere in the West Island and South Shores in the last decade (89.7 and 63.8 percent, respectively).
In all, those 580 more Jews, roughly the size of an English elementary school or typical neighborhood, “isn’t bad,” Teitelbaum agrees, “because the population has not grown in decades.”
Median ages tell a story too
The median age of Montreal’s Jewish community is 39.6 years, somewhat younger than Canada’s Jewish population (41.6), likely due to large numbers of haredim in the metropolitan area with typically larger families. The number of children between 0-14 years also increased in 2021 to 18,785, (up 525 from 2011). A significant proportion of this cohort also comprised of ultra-Orthodox Jews, about 52 percent of that population in that age category. In fact, the mainstream Jewish population dropped by 4.2 percent, says Teitelbaum, but grew an equal amount among haredim.
The highest median age of Jews is in the Chomedey district of Laval (64.5 years) with the lowest in the Tosh community of Boisbriand (14.7 years) followed by Outremont (17.6 years).
The total number of Jewish seniors (65-plus) increased significantly over a decade, from 18,480 to 21,710, representing 24.1 percent of Montreal-area Jews. Almost half were 75-plus, and the senior population’s footprint is growing. “There has never been a greater proportion of elderly among the local Jewish community,” reads the Federation report, noting the percentage of elderly Jews is much higher than Montreal’s and Canada’s overall senior populations (16.7 and 23.2 percent respectively). Increases across major Canadian Jewish communities reflects the Baby Boomer swell between 2011 and 2021.
There were 3,225 Holocaust survivors residing in the Montreal area in 2021, with 2,570 having passed since 2011. Survivors are more than twice as likely to live below the poverty line as their counterparts. The Federation report also predicts the Jewish elderly population will diminish slightly, to 19,011 individuals by 2041, but still higher than the 2011 number of 18,475.
Sephardim, language, intermarriage: la différence Québécoise
Sephardim account for 25.6 percent of the population, some 61.7 percent of Canada’s Sephardi community. Sephardim and Ashkenazim have similar median ages (43.2 years and 42.4 years respectively) but when ultra-Orthodox are removed from Ashkenazi figures, the latter’s median age rises significantly. Seniors make up 24 percent of Montreal Sephardim.
The report also tells a story in different tongues, with 53 percent of Jews reporting English as mother tongue, 22.1 percent French, and 10 percent Yiddish (with Hebrew and Russian also commonly reported). The majority are English-French bilingual (conversation) but three quarters aged 15-24 report fluency in both, less than their older peers (25-44) who are 80.1 percent bilingual, and 77.8 percent of those aged 45-64. Only 60.2 percent of seniors are bilingual.
Those numbers may be viewed through political context of language in Quebec, where for years many English speakers have been mindful that the government has sought to revoke bilingual status of municipalities where mother tongue English-speaking populations—per the census—drop below 51 percent, prodding many to report English, rather than Russian, Hebrew, Polish, Yiddish, etc.
Intermarriage also offers a distinct portrait of Montreal Jews. “It’s quite interesting because Montreal maintains some of the lowest intermarriage numbers in the country,” said Teitelbaum, with rates for 2021 at 22 percent versus Toronto (22.3) Vancouver (47.6) and the Canadian average (31.1). “If you remove the Orthodox population… it could go up about two or three percent, so it’s still on the very low end of the average for Canada.”
There were 8,780 Jews married/partnered to non-Jews in Montreal, and between 2011 and 2021, the number of Jews living in intermarried families grew 29 percent to 12,760. Jewish men are more likely to intermarry than Jewish women; 55.2 percent of intermarried couples feature a Jewish husband and non-Jewish wife. Less than a third of the youngest children of intermarried couples are identified by their parents as Jews. Sephardim have a slightly lower level of intermarriage than Ashkenazim (17.6 and 18.5 percent respectively).
Why the Montreal difference? “Everything’s different in Quebec, right? I think we are a very unique community in terms of our culture, and historically where we sort of sit within the Quebec fabric,” said Teitelbaum, suggesting more cohesion as a minority community.
McGill sociology professor Morton Weinfeld says intermarriage rates should be looked at with historical context. “There was a kind of golden age, from say 1967 through the 1990s. After the Six-Day War, there was this period of exhilaration, and Jews in both Canada and the United States were integrating more into society. There was a fear about intermarriage lowering the population, which I think has now subsided in Canada. But in a way, it’s been replaced by antisemitism. Until the past decade, the main item on the Jewish communal agenda was assimilation and intermarriage, now that’s been replaced by antisemitism, which also started before October 2023.”
He says while Montreal and Toronto have similar patterns, with higher rates in Vancouver, Edmonton and other cities, research should look not so much at counting numbers, but characteristics, “the quality of the life of those individuals where there’s been no conversion to Judaism, Chrismukkah families. The question often on the table now is to what extent is there space in modern Jewish life in Montreal for these mixed marriages… there are people clearly who will identify as Jewish, but their framework will be different from what it has been in the past. So how will other Jews in the community respond?” Jewish immigration; world events and people’s choices.
Where do newcomers come from?
About 30 percent of Montreal’s 2021 Jewish population were immigrants. Of the 124,545 Jewish immigrants in Canada, 22 percent live in Greater Montreal, with more than half from North Africa/Middle East (7,145), Israel (4,050), and the Former Soviet Union (3,400). A fifth are U.S.-born. Between 2010 and 2021, the largest number of immigrants came from the United States, many likely ultra-Orthodox Jews. The youngest median ages of any immigrant group in the Montreal Jewish community are those born in the United States (36), the oldest from Poland (82). Côte Saint-Luc has the largest number of foreign-born Jews in Montreal.
Compared to 60 years ago, as a whole, the Montreal community is much older, more Francophone, observant and Sephardi. It all makes for a more diverse Jewry for sure according to Morton Weinfeld, who holds the Chair in Canadian Ethnic Studies. “But it’s not just Montreal, it’s true for Toronto as well.”
He says no numbers are enough to predict the future. “There’s a lot going on in the world, and it’s hard to predict how that will impact Jewish populations in the diaspora.” He cites a recent U.K.-based Institute for Jewish Policy Research study that counted 630,000 Israelis living abroad. “Add to that people born elsewhere but to Israeli parents, it’s close to a million.
“The question will be, how will various trends impact cities like Montreal? We live in a period where a lot of Jewish life, pre- and post-Oct. 7, is in a state of flux.
“When you don’t step back and look at it from a higher altitude, on these numbers and trends, you forget how often these things can affect the choices people make.”
You can view the complete report via Federation CJA. And look for more about population trends across Jewish Canada as the cover story for the debut issue of Scribe Quarterly, the new magazine published by The CJN, available in April.
