An Echo of the Hagia Sophia

Over the years I’ve heard people surmise it to be a temple, a mosque, an Orthodox church, even a synagogue. Familiar sight though it is in central Montreal, the first thing the huge domed building at Saint-Urbain and Saint-Viateur brings to mind is not the Roman Catholic church.

At the turn of the last century there was something of a migration of Irish-Canadian working people from their overcrowded Point St. Charles and Griffintown haunts north into Mile End. In 1902, the Catholic archbishop of Montreal, Mgr. Paul Bruchési, gave his approval for a new parish to be created. The first mass was said upstairs of a fire hall at Laurier and Saint-Denis that no longer exists. Their first small church building was on rue Boucher near there; it no longer exists either.

By 1914 the growing parish decided it needed something bigger and grander. In July of that year excavations began. Work stopped briefly when war broke out that autumn, but resumed in April 1915, and the church was ready to use by that December. The price tag was $232,000 and the church could hold 1400 people.

This information comes from a booklet published in 1927 when the parish was already 25 years old. The text describes, and images show, that the dome and the cap on the tower were both decorated with patterns, and the massive façade with the words Deo dicatum in honorem St. Michaeli and a smaller motto on a banner over the doors. Those flourishes are gone, but carved shamrocks are still part of the façade, a nod to the time when the parish was pretty well a monoculture, with priests called McGinnis, Fahey, McCrory, Walsh, O’Brien, Cooney and O’Conor and church wardens Keegan, Gorman, Dillon, McGee and Flood.

Also, unusually, there’s no mention of bells, and no evidence that the tower ever contained any: unlike most church towers it’s closed all the way to the top.

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Kowloon Mosque

Nathan Road near Haiphong Road, Tsim Sha Tsui

Chinatown’s Jewish History

If Chinatown’s Jewish heritage isn’t obvious, it’s probably because it has been erased by time and redevelopment, swept away like Chenneville St. and its quietly imposing synagogue.

Makom: Seeking Sacred Space, an ongoing exhibition at Hampstead’s Dorshei Emet synagogue, examines the historical traces of Montreal’s Jewish community with photos of former synagogues near the Main.

“The exhibition raises some really interesting questions about the way that spaces that are claimed by one group of people or one community are also claimed, in their own way, by other communities,” said Leanore Lieblein, a retired McGill English professor who helped organize the exhibition. Even in a synagogue that has been renovated and used for something else, she added, “you can feel the presence of past lives in that building.”

Chenneville’s synagogue was a case in point. Located on a small street (now shortened and written as Cheneville) between St. Urbain and Jeanne Mance Sts., below Dorchester (now René Lévesque) Blvd. and above Craig (now St. Antoine) St., it was built in 1838 by Montreal’s oldest Jewish congregation, Shearith Israel.

In 1887, when Shearith Israel moved to a much larger home on Stanley St. – following the westward migration of Montreal’s older generations of Canadian-born, anglicized Jews – the synagogue was rented by Beth David, a congregation of Romanian immigrants who arrived in the late 19th century, part of a huge wave of Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe. Over the next three decades, the area around present-day Chinatown – with Bleury St. to the west, Sanguinet St. to the east, Craig to the south and Ontario St. to the north – became the heart of Jewish Montreal, a haven for Yiddish-speaking immigrants who established businesses, synagogues and many of the Jewish institutions that still exist.

Israel Medresh, a journalist for the Kanader Adler, a Yiddish-language daily newspaper, sketched a portrait of the neighbourhood in his 1947 book Montreal Foun Nekhtn, translated into English in 2000 as Montreal of Yesterday.

“The corner of St. Urbain and Dorchester was the very heart of the Jewish neighbourhood,” he wrote. “Nearby was Dufferin Park, then a ‘Jewish park’ where Jewish immigrants went to breathe the fresh air, meet their landslayt (compatriots), hear the latest news, look for work and read the newspapers.”

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Place Falun Gong

Place Sun Yat Sen, a small square in the heart of Montreal’s Chinatown, is almost perenially occupied by members of Falun Gong, a psuedo-religious spiritual movement that originated in 1992 in China. Banned seven years later by the Chinese government, which insisted that it was a cult and devoted itself rather heavy-handedly to crushing it, Falun Gong has earned supporters and followers worldwide.

Here in Montreal, its members are a common sight on downtown streets, where they hand out pamplets explaining the movement’s philosophy and outlining the tactics used against it by the Chinese government, which allegedly include arrest, torture and systematic organ harvesting. In Sun Yat Sen Square, a diverse collection of Falun Gong followers can usually be found practicing meditation exercises next to posters that outline their group’s persecution in China.

It’s common for advocacy groups to lay claim to specific bits of public space. I’m reminded of the bizarre protester who picketed McGill University’s Roddick Gates every day for more than a year, hosting signs with messages that many considered to be anti-Semitic. (His goal, he said, was to protest his “wrongful dismissal” from the Jewish General Hospital and to “enlighten the global Jewish community of the virtues of Christianity.”) In Vancouver, the wall of the Chinese consulate is home to a perennial protest against China’s control of Tibet.

These kinds of permanent protests might seem a nuisance to some, but I think they are perfectly legitimate, no matter how strange or unsavoury their message. After all, the beauty of public space is that it’s public.

The Falun Gong people in Chinatown seem especially mindful of that. They never interfere with the many special events that take place there, they pack up their stuff at sundown every evening and they even lent a hand during last month’s Chinatown Clean Up.

Is Civility Just a Mask?

Every so often there is a reminder that Montreal, for all its history as a capital of Jewish culture in North America, still has a problem with anti-Semitism. In the past year alone, a molotov cocktail was thrown at a Jewish school on Van Horne and a bomb exploded outside of a Jewish community centre on Victoria Avenue. It wasn’t so long ago that a Jewish school’s library was destroyed in a vicious firebombing.

Just the other day, a friend told me about this piece of graffiti on Clark Street, between St. Viateur and Fairmount. Someone has scribbled the likeness of a Hasidic Jew with the inscription “Parásit.” It might seem harmless in and of itself, but these thoughtless displays of racism are usually symptoms of a much larger and more insidious problem. If we accept the legitimacy of messages such as this, aren’t we tacitly accepting their message?

Montreal is home to one of the world’s largest communities of Hasidic Jews. Numbering about 15,000, they live mostly within one kilometre of Van Horne Street between Mile End in the east and Côte St. Luc in the west. Historically, since the Hasidic population started growing in the 1980s, there have been some tense moments in the relationship between Outremont’s Hasidim and their mostly French-Canadian neighbours. Some Outremonters have fought against every one of the Hasidic community’s attempts to make a home for themselves by building new schools, synagogues and businesses.

For the most part, though, day-to-day relations between the Hasidim and non-Hasidim are civil. (I wrote about this last winter in “My Heimishe Bakery.”) That’s what makes it so disheartening to see this kind of graffiti. It makes me wonder: is that civility just a mask?

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Mosques in the City

New mural at a mosque in downtown Montreal

In last week’s issue of the Economist, a couple of interesting articles looked at the challenge of building mosques in Western cities. All too often, it seems, cities and neighbourhoods in Europe and North America become divided when faced with the possibility that a minaret might rise on the horizon. What is it, though, that scares people about mosques? Is it the fear of terrorism fed by media reports of radical imams preaching their jihadist rhetoric at suburban mosques? Or is it something more elemental, a simple fear of a changing society?

In Cologne, whose population population numbers about 120,000, the question of whether or not to build a lavish central mosque has split the city along deep, though unexpected, lines. Apparently, many Roman Catholic clergy support the mosque, but one prominent Jewish intellectual — Ralph Giordano, a Holocaust survivor — has come out strongly against it, claiming that it would encourage the creation of a parallel Muslim society in Germany. The whole matter has given a boost to Germany’s far right, which has used the mosque issue to win support for its extremist agenda.

If anything, though, the establishment of proper mosques — that is to say, grand and highly-visible public structures — is one sure way to integrate Muslims into mainstream society. But that is exactly what mosque opponents are fighting against: they don’t want Muslims to be accepted by the mainstream. They see Muslims as fundamentally foreign, so their opposition to mosques is rooted in xenophobia and little else. (Even Ralph Giordano admits that his opposition to the Cologne stems from his belief that Germany is a fundamentally “Judeo-Christian” country.) The idea of minarets becoming an everyday part of the urban fabric, like church steeples, is abhorrent to them. Perhaps that is why a number of Swiss politicians are currently advocating a nation-wide ban on minarets; not mosques, just minarets.

North America, the Economist notes, offers better legal protection to mosque builders, despite having its own “Islam-bashers ready to play on people’s fears.” There have been many controversies over the construction of new mosques but, in the end, Canadian and American courts are likely to rule on the side of religious freedom.

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City of God

Holiday spectacle, Herald Square, New York

Moshiach is Coming Now!, Midtown Manhattan

Hell is for Fools!, Times Square subway station