Synagogue Architecture in Canada

In recent decades much has been written about architecture in Canada as well as on synagogue architecture, the house of worship in Judaism. However, these as well as other Canadian architecture publications have addressed synagogue architecture in a piecemeal fashion, either investigating individual buildings or specific communities. Synagogue architecture scholarship also treats Canada peripherally, with their being a more interest in Ancient, Medieval, and Early Modern period synagogues that have their emphasis in the Old World. Modern and contemporary synagogue architectural studies primarily focus on Europe, Israel, and the United States. Canada’s Jewish population has migrated and changed significantly through suburbanization and upward socioeconomic mobility. The synagogues that existed in 1975 compared to 2022 as a signifier of Jewish expressions on the built environment, are different from one another as night and day from the snapshot perspective of a broader cultural landscape. Pre-1970 synagogues were a product of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Eastern European Jewish immigrants, mostly with modest economic means; they reflect the practice of adaptively reusing pre-existing buildings and borrowing Canadian vernacular architectural traditions, with an occasional monumental structure through the pooling of larger community resources. After 1970, larger Modern architecture synagogues became abundant as new and conglomerated Jewish congregations replaced the former smaller, immigrant-oriented institutions. Other aspects of Jewish communal infrastructure on the built environment include schools, community centers, museums, memorials, ritual baths (mikvaot), and ritual enclosures (eruvin). In recent years, there has also been a growing interest in built environment heritage conservation of synagogues. Therefore, this paper will revisit and explore synagogue architecture in Canada thematically with a focus on social and cultural history, instead of taxonomical assessment of quantitative building surveys.