Jewish Immigrant Aid Services celebrates centennial

It has been a busy century for the Toronto-based Jewish Immigrant Aid Services. As the only Jewish agency in the country devoted exclusively to the sponsorship, settlement and assimilation of refugees and immigrants, JIAS, as it is known, has helped hundreds of thousands of newcomers — Jews and non-Jews alike — start new lives in Canada. Now, as its centennial year and anniversary celebrations come to a close, JIAS’s services and supports are in as much demand as at any time in the past.

“JIAS was founded by the Jewish community a hundred years ago to support Jewish refugees fleeing pogroms in Europe,” explains Jodi Block, the organization’s manager of community engagement. “Like many settlement agencies that are now part of the government-supported settlement sector, JIAS started as a community agency to meet the specific needs of a minority community experiencing significant immigration and has grown and expanded over time.”

Originally incorporated as the Emergency Jewish Immigrant Aid Committee, JIAS’s earliest efforts included providing post-First World War emergency relief to European Jews and lobbying the federal government to relax restrictive immigration policy and quotas that were denying Jewish people entry into Canada. It was embroiled in that same issue on the eve of the Second World War, when European Jews were desperate to escape Nazism, and at the end of the war, when the remnant who had survived Hitler needed somewhere new to call home.

At that time, JIAS had regional offices across Canada, including one in Winnipeg. That local office was instrumental in resettling the 134 refugees who arrived with their families in the Prairie city as part of the Tailor’s Project, and the 137 teenagers — among them future Manitoba Theatre Centre founder John Hirsch — who arrived in Winnipeg with the War Orphans Project. When the Winnipeg JIAS office closed, its responsibilities were assumed by Jewish Child and Family Service which, among other endeavours, continues to offer immigration and settlement services to Jewish newcomers to the city, and more recently, to non-Jewish refugees as well.

In the years following the resettlement of Holocaust survivors, JIAS’s attention turned to Jewish immigrants and refugees fleeing political instability in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, the former Soviet Union, North Africa and Vietnam. When JIAS was granted Sponsorship Agreement Holder (SAH) status in 2014, it further expanded its reach by partnering with private citizens across Canada to sponsor refugees from, among other countries, Iraq, Rwanda, Syria and Eritrea.

“We see having SAH status as part of our role in acting as a Jewish 911,” Block says, “while also of course acting as a partner of the Canadian government in supporting humanitarian immigration from around the world.”

The critical and continuing role that JIAS has played on the global refugee stage was highlighted in an exhibit created in celebration of the agency’s centennial. The Love the Stranger exhibit chronicled the organization’s past, as well as the personal narratives of many of those it saved.

For Avi Margolis, the Ontario Jewish Archives curatorial intern who created the exhibit, one of the most striking stories in the exhibit was that of Jack Shindman.

“When Jack’s parents were killed in a pogrom, he promised to take care of his younger siblings and knew they had no future in Ukraine,” Margolis elaborates. “Jack spent several years trying to immigrate and being rejected due to lack of money or skill in a key industry such as agriculture.”

He finally made it to Canada in 1923 with the help of JIAS and went on to become a volunteer and president with the organization that had saved his life.

Decades later, JIAS is still helping Ukrainian refugees settle in Canada.

“The Jewish commandment to welcome the stranger, to love the stranger, is the very foundation of JIAS’s mission and mandate,” Block says. “This commandment is repeated in a variety of ways throughout the Torah — more than any other single commandment.”

“JIAS certainly believes that it is our responsibility to help refugees,” she continues. “As a people who have been homeless, who have been wanderers, who have been refugees many times over — historically and in recent memory — we know what it means to be stateless and to lack protection.”

As the ever-increasing refugee crisis affects the entire world, Block maintains that it is incumbent upon developed and democratic countries to grant people safety to live in freedom and to realize their potential.

“Refugee sponsorship saves lives and changes lives,” Block says.

JIAS has been proving that for one hundred years.

swchisvin@gmail.com

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