Home Social Landscape Featured Articles From Pogrom to Prairie: Early Jewish Farm Settlements in Central Alberta

From Pogrom to Prairie: Early Jewish Farm Settlements in Central Alberta

by A. J. Armstrong

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However, the Rumsey settlement enjoyed considerable success, compared to its predecessor. The new community flourished, probably due to the larger Jewish population and the infrastructure that had developed in Calgary and nearby Stettler to support the new homesteaders. Roving cattle, insects, fouled wells, caterpillar worms, and other trials were met and overcome. Some accounts indicate that local gentile farmers helped the Jews learn the farming techniques they needed to know. However, by 1910, the majority of farmsteads and dwellings were sufficiently well established that wives could be sent for or courted. Several more years passed, though, before the occasional necessity for one or more sons to work in Calgary to support the family waned. By the beginning of WWI the settlement was firmly established.

Hackman noted in passing that his father would eat only kosher food and carried sandwiches when he travelled. His tone suggests that he and other members of the younger generation were not as strictly observant as their parents, which probably was a necessity for pioneer life, when the nearest source of kosher meat could be weeks away. Despite retaining a distinctly Jewish ethnicity (the wives courted in Calgary and other urban Jewish communities were universally Jewish), the Rumsey community was not distinctly religious, originally. However, greater leisure after 1914 permitted a recovery of those traditions. Sometime between 1917 and 1919 a modest synagogue was constructed with funds donated by the Baron de Hirsch fund. The synagogue housed Sabbath and High Holiday worship, as well as a Hebrew and Yiddish school for Jewish children. Social dances and meetings were also held at the synagogue, which rapidly became the social centre for the community. A shochet (ritual slaughterer) was engaged to provide kosher meat and instruct children in Jewish subjects. Matzah (unleavened bread) which Jews eat during the Pesakh (Passover) festival, and other kosher foods were imported from Calgary or Winnipeg for holidays.

Between the wars, the community gradually faded. Children, sent to study or find spouses in the urban centres, often found new homes there, too. Older members of the community, no longer able to withstand the rigours of farm life, retired to Calgary or Vancouver: "By 1940 it seemed that the synagogue had served its purpose as a community centre; even during the High Holidays, it was no longer used."¹³ Several families, although they remained in the area, sold, traded or rented their farms in order to open stores or other businesses. The urban shift, which so marks Jewish demographics in Canada, had come to Rumsey. By the 1950s, although a few families remained in the area, the Jewish farming settlement in Rumsey had faded away.

The Rumsey settlement, whose members succeeded in pioneering the land while retaining their Jewish identity, is an important chapter in the history of Jews in Alberta. With the notable exception of Israel, in few other places in the world could Jews experience the task of shaping a land and proving their place on it. Alberta Jews are now primarily urban, but they include many descendants of those early settlers, and share their origins with those of the Province — a unique and sobering experience for those whose ancestors left a land where they were reviled.

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From: Aspenland 1998 — Local Knowledge and Sense of Place
Edited by: David J. Goa and David Ridley
Published by: The Central Alberta Regional Museums Network (CARMN) with the assistance of the Provincial Museum of Alberta and the Red Deer and District Museum.