Jewish Immigration in Montreal

Exploring the open expanses of downtown Montreal’s Quartier des spectacles, it’s difficult to believe this was once a bustling garment district. Packed with factories and sweatshops, tailors and seamstresses, manufacturers and union executives, the relatively small Rue Ste-Catherine corridor between University and Boulevard St-Laurent was a hotbed of clothing production, class confrontation and radical politics.
Picture Ste-Catherine on a busy day in the 1920s and 1930s: steam billowing out of factory windows and grey snow covering the muddied streets; children ferrying newspapers and bales of cloth from building to building; thousands of weary workers flooding the streets for a brief lunchtime break; the mingling sounds of French, English, Yiddish, Italian, Russian . . .
Welcome to Work upon Arrival, a geographic and historic guide to Jewish immigrant labour at the beginning of the twentieth century. We invite you to explore the ways in which these newcomers changed – and were changed by – the work world they found in Montreal. Coming to an unknown country and speaking a foreign language, how did these immigrants find work with little financial support and few personal connections at their disposal? How did so many Jews end up in the garment industry, working as cutters, machine operators and even as manufacturers? And how did so many Jews get involved in labour politics?
In the early 1970s, Seemah C. Berson conducted interviews with Eastern European Jews who had immigrated to Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg and Vancouver in the first decades of the twentieth century. I Have a Story to Tell You (WLU Press, 2010) is a compilation of these oral histories. On this tour, discover the stories of six Montrealers whose lives help illustrate the immigrant Jewish experience of labour. These witnesses, most of whom worked in the garment industry, tell us in their own words about immigrating, entering the needle trades, enduring terrible working conditions, union organizing and striking.