Rabbi Shaul Osadchey, recently of Houston, Tex., clued in almost immediately to the Canadian character when he arrived in Calgary a year ago to lead the Beth Tzedec Congregation. He found the members of his new synagogue far more gracious, and more polite. “In Houston I used to send anniversary notes to couples and hardly anyone ever responded. In Calgary, I always receive a note or get a phone call. I could not believe how warm and welcoming people are here.”
But he found something else, something deeper than the usual clichés of diffidence — a “conflicted personality in Canadian Jews.” He was speaking about the larger gap between Canadian Jewish life in the synagogue and Jewish home life compared with what he had observed in the United States.
