L'orthodoxie juive à la rencontre de la modernité : le groupe hassidique des Tasher face au Québec de la Révolution tranquille (1951-1967)

In 1963, an ultra-Orthodox Hasidic Jewish community, the Tosh Hasidim, left Montreal to settle in Ste-Thérèse, a Francophone community twenty-five kilometres north of the city. This was almost a decade after a handful of their members, who had escaped the Nazi genocide, first settled in Montreal. Led by their Grand Rebbe Meshulem Feisch Segal Lowy (1921-2015), the group's spiritual and temporal leader, thirteen families moved to a piece of land in the municipality of Ste-Thérèse. The author points out that they set up the community infrastructure necessary for the emergence of an ultra-Orthodox community, which has since experienced impressive growth due to a high birth rate. The author traces the first steps of the followers of this community and examines their relationship with the larger Montreal Jewish community - of non-Hasidic practice and established in Montreal mainly between 1880 and the 1920s - and the French-speaking and Catholic Quebec population. The author argues that during the post-war period, distinct contexts converged to favour the reconstruction of the Tosh community and of Hasidism in general. The first, the author points out, concerns the Montreal Jewish community as a whole, which was at that time on the rise in the province's socio-economic scale. This process involved assimilation into the English-speaking sphere of the city, but which contributed to a sense of nostalgia for the use of the Yiddish language and full Orthodox religious practice - something that the Hasidim aimed to maintain. Next, the author examines the early contacts between the Tosh and the population of Ste-Thérèse, a rural municipality in the midst of industrial expansion, of Catholic and French-speaking descent. He argues that the context of the Quiet Revolution, characterized by a drastic decrease in Catholic religious practice among Francophones and by a movement of national affirmation whose principal vector was the French language, favoured a new openness to Judaism. The author examines how Jewish orthodoxy finds a space of affirmation in the emerging modernity of Quebec and observes how the Tosh composes with the mechanisms of the modern era in order to better protect itself against its perils

Master's Thesis

Université d'Ottawa

Ottawa, ON

2016

fr