Population
The largest group of Jewish immigrants settled in Peterborough in the first two decades of the 20th century. From one or two in 1881 and 3 to 5 in 1901, the Jewish population grew to 29 in 1911 and to 136 in 1921. A second group of immigrants came in the 1930s, but their arrival did not show up in the population statistics, because migration to Toronto and other Jewish settlements kept the total down. After the 1930s, the growth in Peterborough’s Jewish population was due mostly to natural increase rather than to immigration. In 1951, the population had grown to 259 people and in 1961, it stood at 265.
By the mid 1950s, 78.7 percent of Peterborough’s Jews had been born in Canada and another 20.5 percent were naturalized Canadians, meaning that almost all members of the community had Canadian citizenship. In Canada overall at this period, 57 percent of Jews were Canadian-born. The high figure in Peterborough reflected a group in which many of the original families had remained in town, as had their children and, in some cases, grandchildren.
