As a young girl in 1950s and 60s Toronto, I attended the Workmen’s Circle Peretz School (Arbeter Ring Peretz Shul) each day after public school. Most of my classmates were like me: children of Holocaust survivors from Poland affiliated with the secular socialist movement called the Jewish Labor Bund. The Bund valued Yiddish over Hebrew, the Diaspora over Israel, and culture over religion. At the Peretz Shul, we did not study Mishnah or Talmud, or the prayerbook. Instead, we learned Yiddish, read the works of the great Yiddish authors, and sang songs from the Yiddish theater. We also studied Jewish history, from the Babylonian exile in 586 BCE through the Maccabean revolt; the revolts against Rome; the Golden Age in Spain; the Inquisition and expulsion; the pogroms, blood libels, and ghettoes of Europe and Russia; the creation of the State of Israel, and Jewish life in North America.
In our corner of the Jewish community, Jews did not attend synagogue, even on the High Holidays, nor did we fast on Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement) or refrain from bread on Passover. We had our own rituals and traditions, our secular seders commemorating the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, our Sunday evening gatherings to eat, sing, and argue about politics. We had a strong Jewish identity rooted not only — and not primarily — in the Holocaust but in the rich secular Yiddish culture in which our parents had been raised. Only at the age of 11, when we moved “up north,” did I meet Jewish children with Canadian-born parents. Only then did I learn that synagogue life had not died with the East European shtetl but was alive and well in suburban Toronto. And only then did I understand that there were different ways of being Jewish, and that some of these even included religion.
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