Shul Stories

Sharing mementos and memories

This web site is a resource to continue to share traces of the past. Send us your "shul stories" — memories of growing up in Montreal (or any community), or photos taken from the 1880s -1945 and we will post them here. Keep checking back to discover new stories!
Send to: tracesofthepastbook@gmail.com, please include your name as you would like it to be listed, the community you are from and the community you are writing about. Please indicate if we can share your contribution with the Interactive Museum of Jewish Montreal.

Your Shul Stories

Bagg Street Shul Reinvigorated

Temple Solomon (or Beis Shloime) is popularly known as The Bagg Street Shul. It is the only pre-war synagogue still functioning in the former immigrant neighbourhoods of the Plateau Mont Royal. The shul was kept open through some four difficult decades …
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The interior of the Bagg Street shul. Photo: David Kaufman, 2000

From the Pen of an Architect

Harry Stilman, Montreal architect, shares his sketches and memories of Montreal’s early synagogues. The following is an excerpt of a short memoir written in 1997: In the 1960s and 70s it was my custom to draw my own Jewish New …
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Harry drawing of the Minsker Shul in Toronto's Kensington Market

Memories of the Kiever, Toronto

My mother’s parents, newly arrived immigrants (1911 and 1913) from Brusilov, Russia, were members of the Kiever Shul and lived near Kensington Market. If the service was long and the youngsters got restless, they would go across the road and …
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Kiever Synagogue, Toronto