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  1. Museum of Jewish Montreal
  2. New World Club

New World Club

collection1947-1959

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Held by
Museum of Jewish Montreal via Museum of Jewish Montreal — map of Jewish Montreal
Dates
1947-1959 (indexed as 1947–1959)
Level
collection (source: Story)
Extent
6 places
Scope & content
The New World Club and the New Canadian Club were post-World War II communal organizations created to help Holocaust survivors who had immigrated to Montreal deal with the complications of their new lives and the pressures of their new environment. Survivors had to deal with the shock of what they had endured; the many ways in which Canada differed so greatly from the countries they previously called home; and, not infrequently, a skittish local Jewish community that was unsure of how to deal with these scarred newcomers in their midst. Though the pre-existing Jewish community attempted to settle Holocaust survivors and provide social and economic assistance through organizations such as the Jewish Immigrant Aid Society, they could not have anticipated how difficult the psychological integration would be for many survivors. This, combined with a sense of embarrassment and unwillingness amongst many North American Jews to deal frankly with the event of the Holocaust itself, meant that survivors were sometimes treated insensitively or even ostracized from the community. The New World Club, the New Canadian Club, and similar organizations were founded to make the refugees less lonely in their transition and more confident in establishing themselves on Canadian soil. The New World Club was founded by two German Jews, Dr. Reichman and Dr. Pfeifer, who, upon arriving in Canada in 1940, were promptly interned by the Canadian government as German prisoners-of-war – tragically ironic, as their co-religionists were slaughtered by the same state they were accused of supporting. The men were released in 1943 once the government was convinced they were victims of the Nazi regime rather than collaborators. After the war, they set up the New World Club, which eventually had more than 200 members and served as a social club and immigrant aid organization. Members met for dances, lectures, poetry readings, and informal get-togethers. Many people met their future spouses and closest friends at such meetings. For some young adult survivors, their first years in Montreal, while challenging, were also exhilarating as they finally had an opportunity to socialize and have fun. The New World Club dissolved around 1951, having largely accomplished its goal of easing the transition for Holocaust survivors into their new communities, both in Montreal and in Canada as a whole. The New Canadian Club, which was run from within the YM-YWHA, existed only from 1947 to 1948. It published a magazine during this year, New Life, in English and transliterated Yiddish. Today, Montreal hosts the world’s third-largest concentration of Holocaust refugees, after New York and Israel. Many survivors have gone on to make important contributions to the Montreal Jewish community and wider society. Montreal’s survivor population continues to play an important role in Holocaust education and genocide prevention, visiting schools and community groups and helping to support annual memorial ceremonies and the Montreal Holocaust Memorial Centre. By Richard Kreitner Sources: Bialystok, Franklin. Delayed Impact : the Holocaust and the Canadian Jewish Community . Montreal: McGill-Queens UP, 2000. Diner, Hasia R. We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence After the Holocaust, 1945-1962. New York: New York UP, 2009. Dinnerstein, Leonard. America and the Survivors of the Holocaust . New York: Columbia UP, 1982. Giberovitch, Myra. The Contributions of Montreal Holocaust Survivor Organizations to Jewish Communal Life. Montreal: McGill University, 1989. Novick, Peter. The Holocaust in American Life . Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999. Sheftel, Anna and Stacey Zembrzycki. 2010. “‘We Started Over Again, We Were Young’: Postwar Social Worlds of Child Holocaust Survivors in Montreal.” Urban History Review 39, 1. *Images courtesy of Canadian Jewish Congress Charities Committee National Archives and Jewish Public Library Archives.
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Subjects
Events
Language
English
Harvested
2026-10-17T06:33:35Z · source datestamp n/a · mjm
Original metadata as harvested (mjm)