At the beginning of 2021, as Congregation Shaar Hashomayim in Montreal sat empty due to COVID restrictions, its past president Claire Berger saw an opportunity to advance a project that began a year earlier: sorting through the effects of the Shaar’s longtime spiritual leader, Rabbi Wilfred Shuchat.
It was during that time that she noticed some file cabinets stored away in the building. The rabbi’s extensive papers turned out to be inside.
Rabbi Shuchat served the congregation from 1947 to 1993, and as emeritus rabbi until his passing in 2018. The files also included papers from Rabbi Herman Abramowitz, who led the congregation from 1902 to 1947.
With these discoveries, the floodgates opened, and now there’s an archives project at Shaar Hashomayim.
Founded in 1846 as the “German, Polish and English Congregation,” it was a breakaway from Montreal’s Shearith Israel—which is more commonly known to this day as the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue.
(The long and illustrious history that followed is best covered in Rabbi Shuchat’s book, The Gate of Heaven, published in 2000.)
I joined the Shaar as its archivist in June 2021, to oversee the arrangement and description of papers and artifacts. The archival boxes of the Shuchat Collection document not only his activities within the congregation, but also in the wider community.
Historical papers are also routinely discovered in nooks and crannies throughout the synagogue’s century-old Westmount building. These discoveries have sent me on an ongoing scavenger hunt.
And we’ve made many fascinating discoveries: Rabbi Shuchat corresponded with many Jewish personalities and thinkers of the 20th century, including A. M. Klein, Gershom Scholem, Chaim Potok, Abraham Heschel, as well as Canadian politicians and Israeli dignitaries.
There are photographs and recordings from Israeli presidents’ trips to Montreal, including Zalman Shazar’s visit for the opening of the Pavilion of Judaism at Expo 67—a project with which Rabbi Shuchat was closely involved—and visits to the synagogue by Chaim Herzog and Shimon Peres.
We’ve also uncovered numerous items relating to the Cohen family: addresses and reports by Lyon Cohen, and records referencing the involvement at the synagogue of his grandson, a future musical poetry legend who’s fondly referred to as “Lenny.”
Among the most interesting early finds was a 1906 photograph of Rabbi Herman Abramowitz with Dr. Solomon Schechter in Atlantic City.
Rabbi Abramowitz received his rabbinic ordination from the Jewish Theological Seminary, and was a student in Schechter’s first class. In fact, Schechter himself recommended Rabbi Abramowitz to the Shaar:
The preservation is more profound due to the fact that the Shaar’s history remains integral to Jewish life across Canada.
We’re also dedicated to public engagement that helps the collection be seen as living history, rather than papers in boxes. A website is regularly updated with items from the archives, as we aim to digitize as much of the collection as possible.
Moving forward, we hope to expand our online focus, collect oral history interviews—and also face the beast of records that originated in digital form, after computers moved into the office.
When I consider why this work matters, I call to mind a few words from historian Cecil Roth. He gave a chilling address to the Jewish Historical Society of England in 1943 about the ongoing destruction of our people and their heritage.
At the end, he pleaded for them to actively gather whatever they can.
“If our efforts are successful, I am convinced that future generations of Jewish scholars and students will have reason to remember our gathering with gratitude.”
Hannah Srour is the archivist of Congregation Shaar Hashomayim in Westmount, Quebec, and assistant archivist at the Alex Dworkin Canadian Jewish Archives. She can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter at @srour_hannah.