Community Activities and Relations
For a community that has never amounted to more than 1 percent of the total population of North Bay, the Jewish community has been extraordinarily influential in the cultural history of the city. Mrs. Abe Freedman was on the Old Home Week Entertainment Committee that planned festivities for the city’s incorporation in 1925. Virtually every committee or board in the city has had at least one Jewish member, even groups with explicitly Christian programs, such as the St. Joseph’s Hospital Board, on which Herbert Brown sat as chairman. Gordon Rosenberg, in turn, served on the board of the North Bay Civic Hospital. This kind of inclusive interfaith congeniality is reflected in the responses of interviewees for the Ontario Jewish Archives’ oral histories conducted for North Bay, in which very little anti-Semitism was recalled among the experiences of growing up Jewish in the city.
