Ontario Jewish Communities | North Bay - Early Community History

George Benjamin

George Benjamin was an instrumental figure in the development of the city of North Bay. 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 northbay barrister James Samson. After the financial failure of the Standard of Moira, the third local newspaper to attempt publication in the northbay 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 northbay 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 northbay 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.

First Jewish Settlers

Louis Smith arrived in Canada from Russia in 1895 with his nephew Nathan. They were followed a year later by Louis’s wife Hannah and the family moved to North Bay, where both Louis and Nathan worked as junk and scrap metal dealers. They were soon followed by Isadore and Sophie Caplan, Russian-born merchants who opened a gentlemen’s clothing store. Jennie and Max Clavir arrived in Ontario in 1904 and had four children in North Bay. The Clavirs were very quickly established as one of the wealthier families in the city. Other early settlers included Benjamin and Hannah Levitt, Russian merchants who had four children, and Philip and Bertha Adams, also from Russia, who owned a general store on Oak Street. The Adams family had lived in England briefly before moving to Canada in 1907.

By the First World War, there was a small enclave of Jewish settlements in North Bay and the surrounding region. Many of these early settlers set up businesses as junk dealers or worked as scrap metal traders, professions that required them to travel between North Bay and Sturgeon Falls, Kirkland Lake and other frontier northern settlements that had been opened up by the expansion of the railroad, the discovery of mineral resources and the growth of the lumber industry.

These early settlers lived in close proximity to each other, near Oak Street, in a neighbourhood that was distinguished by its immigrant population, which included a significant number of Chinese and Syrians. Moishe Rosenberg (1873-1925) arrived in Canada from Szumsk, Poland in 1910 with his eldest daughters Rebeccah and Miriam. He soon found his way to North Bay, where he opened a small second-hand store, travelling the region collecting and selling scrap metal. His wife Gittel (née Stein) arrived with their youngest daughter, Ruth in August 1922. Moishe died in an accident in Sturgeon Falls on 13 October 1925. Philip Brown (1888-1925), a custom tailor, arrived from Poland in 1910 and married Moishe’s daughter Rebeccah Rosenberg in Toronto on 29 January 1919.

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