Our Collections

The OJA’s records span all segments of Ontario’s Jewish community. We have records from businesses, families, labour unions, organizations, and synagogues. These records date from the community’s earliest days to its present. What’s more, they come from all over Ontario and in every format you can think of. If you were to lay out all of our boxes, they would stretch from the foot of Yonge Street to Dundas Square!

Below you can find highlights from our newest acquisitions as well as collections that have recently been processed and added to our website search.

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Acquisition of the Month

June 2025

In June, Mandy Smith donated her father's collection of Gelman family photographs to the Ontario Jewish Archives. The collection consists of 144 black-and-white and colour photographs that trace three generations of Jewish life in Toronto from 1926 to 2000. Beginning with a portrait of matriarch Molly (Mulka) Gelman taken in 1926, the photographs follow the Gelmans from their first rented rooms on Denison Street and Baldwin Village through the postwar boom in Bathurst Manor. Candid scenes—Jack leading Cub Scouts, Esther cheering at a Blue Jays game, cousins posing at Camp Northland—sit beside rare sports views such as a 1947 team shot of the Afro Communities Negro Fliers basketball squad featuring brothers Jack and Sam Gelman. Because most faces are identified, the accession offers a rich visual record for neighbourhood historians and a treasure trove for genealogists researching extended kin networks in the city’s downtown Jewish enclave.

Born in Toronto in 1929, Jack Gelman grew up above his father Philip’s vegetable stall at 206 Baldwin Street, learning early to “fight back” against the anti-Jewish bullying common in the 1930s schoolyard. His future wife Esther Davidson (b. 1934) met Jack at the YM-YWHA and married him in 1951; within a decade, the young family moved north to Bathurst Manor, joining the wave of Jewish suburban migration then reshaping the city. While Jack drove a delivery truck for Canadian Paper and Specialties, he also ran a thriving Cub Scout pack, modelling the volunteer spirit that would shape their children Alan, Sharon, Glenn and Mandy.

The photos capture these transitions in remarkable detail: wagon deliveries and market stalls in Kensington, post-war Scouts parades outside Beth Emeth, school portraits pinned lovingly into scrapbooks, and layered collage pages tracing each sibling’s milestones from the 1930s through the 1990s. Together the images map how one immigrant family navigated poverty, prejudice, prosperity and pride—turning Toronto’s streets, camps, shuls and ballparks into stages for a distinctly Canadian Jewish story.