Content area
Full Text
"L'Chaim, L'Chaim," -- to life. We raise our glasses brimming with homemade kosher wine and make a toast in Hebrew spiced with a heavy Yiddish accent -- to life, to success, to a good living and to the arrival of the Messiah speedily in our days. My fellow revellers are Tascher Chassidim, ultra-Orthodox Jews dressed in black gaberdine robes and sable hats, their faces framed by bushy beards and long sidecurls in a tradition-bound style unchanged for generations. There are no women present.
The scenario is straight out of Fiddler on the Roof. Here in Kiryas Tasch, Que., a thriving Yiddish-speaking Eastern European shtetl, or village, has been recreated amid the fields of francophone farmers. The 52-hectare enclave of 1,700 people is the only rural Chassidic community in Canada, a truly distinct society. The 135 families here form a neighbourhood on the outskirts of Boisbriand, a city of 21,000 about 50 minutes north of Montreal. Kiryas means neighbourhood, while Tasch recalls the Hungarian home town of the sect's spiritual leader.
Jewish fundamentalists -- Chassidim means pietists in Hebrew -- are no strangers to Canada's major cities. Dressed in black suits and white shirts, they add a distinctive dash to the multicultural mosaic of Montreal, where they number 8,000, divided unequally into eight holy communities. Each of those dynastic sects -- Belz, Lubavitch, Satmar, Klausenburg, Bobov, Skvar, Munkacs and Vishnitz -- is named after the locale in Eastern Europe where its spiritual founder, called a rebbe, originated. Toronto has 3,000 followers of different rebbes.
Jews have lived in Canada since 1759, when they arrived with Gen. James Wolfe to fight on the Plains of Abraham. Most of Canada's 356,000 Jews are first, second or third generation, speak English as their mother tongue, are well educated, and participate in the nation's business and cultural life. But the Tascher Chassidim, cloistered in their self-imposed ghetto in Boisbriand, lead a life of strict devotion totally dedicated to carrying out the will of Ha-Shem on Earth and to raising children to do the same. (Ha-Shem means "the name" [of God]. To observant Jews it means the ineffable four-letter Hebrew name that gentiles sometimes write as Yahweh or Jehovah.)
At first glance, Kiryas Tasch looks much like a 1970s suburb anywhere...