Montreal, Canada – Positive Profile for Montreal’s Hasidic Community

Montreal, Canada – In an interesting article this weekend, the Montreal Gazette transcribes the results of a reporter’s attempts at going undercover in Quebec’s Hasidic community.

“Although I left Montreal for New York almost two decades ago, I return to my beloved hometown most summers, and this season finds me residing in my childhood “arrondissement” of Outremont.

I hadn’t spent much time here since my late teens, and these many decades it is later for the most part gloriously unchanged – aesthetically, at least – except for the métro station, and, of course, the dramatic growth of its Hasidic community.

Today’s Outremont is a very different place. The modern Orthodox and secular Jews have given way to the Hasidim and, sadly, there is a dearth of positive interaction between them and their francophone neighbours. This became painfully evident to me upon my arrival in Montreal in late June, when the press was ablaze with stories, scandalous cartoons and editorials sparked by the problematic, occasionally violent, relations between these ethnic communities. The argument most frequently levelled against the insular Hasidim, not only in the Quebec French press but most recently even in the National Post by a Montreal-based Jewish journalist, was that the Hasidim were just downright unfriendly and, thus, made for bad neighbours. But, as I soon discovered as an accidental covert Hasidic agent, the lack of cordiality is far from unidirectional.”

In his story, Mr. Nadler articulately reports the challenges and richness of the community’s lifestyle. Click here for the entire article.