Ontario Jewish Communities | Belleville - Early Community History

George Benjamin

George Benjamin was an instrumental figure in the development of the city of Belleville. He was born in Sussex, England in 1799 to Emanuel and Hannah Cohen. His birth name was Benjamin Cohen. The family was descended from the Hakohens who fled the Spanish Inquisition during the 15th century. George left England around 1823 and settled in North Carolina. In 1832, he married Isabella Jacobs of New Orleans, a Jewish girl who was not yet 13 years old. They had 14 children. Their first son, Emanuel Hyman, was born in the United States in 1832.

The couple soon moved to Toronto, on the recommendation of George’s friend and possible relative, the Belleville barrister James Samson. After the financial failure of the Standard of Moira, the third local newspaper to attempt publication in the Belleville region since 1831, Benjamin purchased the paper’s press, moved to Hastings County and started the Weekly Intelligencer in 1834, one of the longest running newspapers in Canada. The couple began baptizing their children at the Anglican Church of Belleville in 1845, starting with their seventh offspring, Harry Ansel. They later baptized the two eldest at St. Thomas Church in 1847. Their third child drowned at the age of 11 in 1848 and because he had not been baptized, they were not permitted to bury him at the local church cemetery. The distance of Belleville from the large Jewish centres such as Montreal, Toronto and Buffalo as well as Benjamin’s desire to fit into the community and become one of its leaders likely prompted him to baptize his children and eventually he and his wife converted to the Protestant faith in 1832.

Although Benjamin attempted to become part of the Protestant elite by taking a leadership role in the Orange Order and other local groups, he ultimately remained tied to his Jewish roots in that he could read and write in Hebrew, contributed financially to the building of a synagogue in Montreal in 1835 and was slandered for his Jewish roots in the political press of his day. It is likely that he was unable to openly practise his chosen faith in the fiercely loyalist and Protestant community where he nonetheless attained considerable influence. He captained a loyalist militia that repelled an uprising in Gananoque in 1838, was elected to public office on numerous occasions, served as county warden for 13 years and served in the pre-Confederation Conservative parliament of John A. MacDonald from 1856 to 1863. During his term, he was a member of the parliamentary printing committee and wrote a guide to parliamentary rules and practices. He did not seek re-election due to illness, which ultimately claimed his life one year after his last term in the legislature. Hence, despite deliberate attempts to divest himself of his former religion, many of his contemporaries as well as Jewish scholars today view him as the first Canadian Jew to sit in the legislature in British North America.

Tobe family

Tobe children, 1917
From right to left: David (9), “Zeke” (Isaac) (4), Bluma (5), Sam (6) and Abe (2).
Ontario Jewish Archives, accession 2007-6/11

Moses (1881-1923) and Tamara Tobe came to Belleville in 1905, excited by the potential to lay down permanent roots after several years of transient work based out of Kingston. He had worked as a butcher in Russia and, like many of his countrymen, fled to avoid being conscripted into the Russian army. Tamara, also from Russia, came to Kingston via New York, with a goose down comforter as her prized possession. The couple were married in Kingston. Through the hamische boarding house the couple ran at the Rolling Mill, many of the first Jewish families in Belleville were welcomed into the home of the Tobes before establishing themselves in the city.

The Tobes had five children: David (b.1908), Sam (b.1910), Bluma (1912-2003), Isaac “Zeke” (b.1914) and Abe (b.1916). Sam moved to New York and worked for a biscuit company in the late 1920s. All of the children worked from an early age, especially after Moses, who suffered from asthma, died in 1923. Abe and Zeke were golf caddies at the Quinte Golf Club in their teens. All of the boys delivered papers. Bluma went to business school for a commercial course and helped keep books for local businessmen Sam Springer and Alex Lipson, as well as working for the family’s second-hand store.

In 1937, Abe and Zeke purchased land in Rossmore and set up a hamburger stand. After the war, the Tobe boys expanded their Frosty Freeze Fun Fair into the Tobe County Gardens, which included a 200-person capacity dancehall and the first drive-in restaurant in the city with carhop waitresses. The dance hall featured live bands and was a popular spot for country and round dancing. Clientele declined after the 1960s, when Highway 62 bypassed Rossmore, and the Tobes sold the dance hall, which became a flea market, a bingo hall and then a collision service centre under new ownership. In later years, the Tobes also lived outside of Belleville on an acre-sized lot where they planted a very large garden. Bluma Tobe (m. Weisinger) was famous for her pickles made from home-grown cucumbers and sold in gallon jars for $5 at all the Hadassah bazaars. Abe Tobe was recognized in 2000 by the United Israel Appeal for his community work.

First Jewish Settlers

George Benjamin (1799-1864) was elected grand master of the Orange Order and was an influential pre-Confederation Conservative politician. He rose to prominence in Belleville as a newspaper publisher, founding The Weekly Intelligencer in 1834. Though he converted, it has been speculated in several accounts that Benjamin may have privately practised the Jewish faith. Prior to the establishment of a permanent Jewish community in Belleville, there were Jewish individuals and families who eked out a living in the region, likely in isolation from their neighbours and in the extreme minority, given the Protestant, Loyalist background of the city’s founders. Gardner Moore, an Irish Jew born in 1818, is listed as a marble worker in Napanee in the 1871 Census of Canada. By 1891 at least four Jewish families lived in the Belleville area. The Franks and Cominskys, furriers and peddlers respectively, appear to have moved on by the turn of the century, but John Dabensky stayed with his family as a general merchant, living in both Belleville and Bancroft.

Moses Tobman (1881-1923), whose name was later anglicized to Tobe, was a Russian Jew from Minsk who came to Belleville as a peddler, bartering for chickens out of Kingston. In Belleville, he met Abraham Safe (b. 1885) and the two discussed the need for a hamische boarding house in the city, where travelling Jews could stay and eat a kosher meal. Moses and his wife Tamara established the Mary Street Home for Jewish Workers in the Rolling Mill building at the foot of South George Street in 1905. Through their rooming house, the couple established connections with other travelling Jewish workers in the region and Moses set up a second-hand shop on Front Street around the same time. These early families almost universally worked in the scrap business, as labourers or peddlers, often in fierce competition with each other for the same modest market. The Tobes and the Safes were soon followed by the Alberts, Dimes, Yanovers, Springers and Goodmans. The Alberts, Springers and Goodmans were all related through marriage to the three Palmer sisters. By 1911 there was an active minyan in Belleville and many of these families were increasingly able to afford their own shops and small businesses.

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