Religion
During the late 1960s, members of the local Jewish community actively resisted efforts to include religious instruction in public schools on the grounds that it discriminated against minority religious groups. In 1967, Alex Devon, Saul Laskin and Rabbi Barnett Hasden prepared a brief articulating their opposition, which was submitted to the Committee on Religious Education in the Public Schools.
The last full-time rabbi in Thunder Bay was Rabbi Daniel Siegel, who lived in the community with his wife Chana. He was raised in New York and was educated at the Reconstructionist Rabbincal College in Philadelphia. He then studied in the Hassidic tradition in Winnipeg before taking the position in Thunder Bay. In a letter of his impressions of Thunder Bay, he writes of his struggles with the expectation of the community that the rabbi be Orthodox, even though only the Siegels and the Halters were practicing Orthodox Jews among the congregation’s membership at that time. Rabbi Siegel favoured mixed-gender seating in the synagogue and the introduction of a more liberal service to reflect the changing Jewish community in Thunder Bay.
The shul also faced the difficulty of drawing enough members together to form a minyan for Friday Shabbat services. After Rabbi Siegel and his family moved to Saskatoon in 1974, many of his suggestions were adopted by Shaarey Shomayim, which has since followed an egalitarian service. Rabbis are usually hired to lead High Holiday services. Later on, Chezzi Zion came up from Toronto to lead services for some time.
In the 1970s and early 1980s, Sholom Schacter of Winnipeg was flown in by the congregation to teach Hebrew to the children on Sundays. Hebrew school was taught by Barry Rosenberg, Judy Rosenberg and Penny Grief in the 1980s. In recent years, however, the school program has not been viable in Thunder Bay, because of the small number of students. Young people preparing for their Bar and Bat Mitzvahs have had to rely on audio tapes and the assistance of local family members.
The Shaarey Shomayim executive in 1984 included three women: the vice-president Carol Morris, secretary Arlene Goldstein and treasurer Lynda Betcherman. The shul’s president was Fred Ball, who arrived in Thunder Bay in 1978 and worked for the Ontario Health Laboratory as a microbiologist.
