Just wasting words while they wait for the South African negotiators to arrive, Pete and Repeter are the ones most requested.
https://www.jpost.com/Diaspora/A-journey-to-Saskatchewans-Jewish-past-385283
This was meant to be an answer to a Zionist Homeland, an alternative to Uganda. 652,000 square kilometers of frozen soil in the remote province of Saskatchewan, Canada, awaited the mass migration of Jews who wanted to flee from the pogroms of the last century – but only a few actually arrived. A journey to a failed Promised Land somewhere on the borders of Canada and the United States. (241,314sq mi)
For a Jewish state here.
HERE IS SASKATCHEWAN. The local Native Americans gave it the name that means “Waters flowing from the mountain.” In aerial photographs this province in the southwest of Canada has the shape of a rectangle. 652,000 sq.km. of arid soil, frozen and empty. One million inhabitants with a density of 1.6 people per sq.km. Its emptiness reverberates. But the neighbors are pleasant. When you can rely on the US to the south, the guns are as silent as the hatchets of the Indian wars.
How did the Saskatchewan proposal come into being? In 1903, the sixth Zionist Congress buried the Uganda proposal but did not solve the problem of resettling the Jews. As opposed to the promoters of Zion who declared “Eretz Israel at all costs,” some Jewish leaders thought differently.
He wrote in a letter to his friend, the writer H.G. Wells, “Whatever the difficulties involved, they will certainly be far less difficult if Englishmen like you will support the idea of the new state. The Jews would be most grateful for British help in achieving a state if it would stem from pro-Jewish and not anti-Jewish sentiments; from justness and not hatred of the Jews.”
Zangwill turned to Lord Strathcona, the Canadian high commissioner in London. A few days before they were due to meet, pogroms occurred in the Polish city of Bialystok.
“The life of the Jews hangs in the balance,” he told Strathcona, “The Jews who will settle there will create an autonomous region within the dominion of Canada. As you know the area is still unpopulated. On every continent – outside Europe – there are many areas that can provide us with a refuge. Canada can only benefit from a merciful decision. The special corner that will be granted to us will rapidly develop – six times greater than it would without us. Our feelings of patriotism toward the Empire that came to our rescue will be more enthusiastic and wiser than that of the emigrants who came to the United States.”
The “special corner” was meant to be in the province of Saskatchewan, as Jews who had fled from the first pogroms in Eastern Europe had already settled there. They were meant to absorb the new immigrants and to teach them how to work the land. Zangwill hoped that the Canadian prime minister, Wilfrid Laurier, would raise the issue with the British minister for the Colonies, Joseph Chamberlain, but the Canadians did not pursue Zangwill’s proposal and it was shelved.
The notion of resettling the Jews in Canada was dropped from the national agenda in 1906. It was only 35 years later that the term “resettlement” gained special notoriety.
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https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/saskatchewan
Saskatchewan's first Jewish resident was Max Goldstein, a Russian-born tailor who opened a store in Fort Qu'Appelle in 1877. During the Second Riel Rebellion in 1885 he served as quartermaster. In 1882 a Jewish farm project, called New Jerusalem, was started in the Moosomin area, but adverse conditions forced the settlers to give up. Numerous Jews were among those who laid tracks for the Canadian Pacific Railroad in the early 1880s.
After 1888 farm colonies were started which survived several generations. Jewish farm colonies were sometimes utopian ventures directed from above, and sometimes independent initiatives. The first colony was established in 1888, near Wapella. In 1892 the Young Men's Hebrew and Benevolent Society, on behalf of the Jewish Colonization Association (ICA), established the colony of Hirsch (named after Baron De Hirsch) in southern Saskatchewan; its initial group consisted of 47 Russian Jewish families. The first Jews to settle in the Wapella area were John Heppner and Abraham Kleiman. By 1892 there were 20 Jewish families, and young men interested in farming came to Wapella for their training. Hirsch had the oldest Jewish cemetery in the province, and was the site of the province's first synagogue building. The town had public schools, but also a Hebrew school, a
shoḥet, and a Jewish community structure. Forty Jewish families (a total of 100 people) founded Lipton in 1901 with the help of ICA. They were taught by nearby Indians and Metis how to erect log houses chinked with clay and roofed with sod. In Lipton, too, Jewish teachers were engaged and a cemetery laid out. Edenbridge, also helped in its founding (1906) by ICA, was so named by its settlers. The name was conceived as "Yidn-Bridge" (Jews' Bridge), after a bridge across the Carrot River. The first settlers were 56 Lithuanian Jews who had lived in South Africa. Louis Vickar responded to an advertisement of the Canadian government offering 160 acres of virgin land for ten dollars. Edenbridge also had an active Jewish community. In the Sonnenfeld colony, which was aided in its founding (1906) by ICA, the villages of Oungre and Hoffer sprang up, the latter named after Moses Hoffer, the father of two brothers who were among the founders of the Sonnenfeld colony.
As was the case with others who settled in the west, many Jews did not succeed at farming, and left for the larger Jewish communities of western Canada. In addition to personal hardships, the great drought of the 1930s and the trend to mechanization and urbanization hastened the decline of Jewish farming. Of every 100 gainfully employed Jewish men in Saskatchewan in 1936, 11 were farmers and five were farm laborers. While the great majority of Jewish farmers in Canada in previous years were in Saskatchewan, since World War II the ICA devoted most of its efforts in Canada to Ontario, particularly the Niagara peninsula. The Jewish farm colonies are now mostly alive in memory alone. The Canadian government has placed the beautiful Beth Israel synagogue at Edenbridge on its national register of historic sites.
Regina, the capital of the province, had nine Jews in 1891, but the true beginnings of the present community would have to wait about 20 years. By the time of the 1911 census there were 130 residents. That year a
shoḥet was hired, and services were held in his home. Two years later the members of the community erected a synagogue, Beth Jacob, with the lieutenant-governor of the province laying the cornerstone. In 1914 a building was rented to serve as a
talmud torah, and 10 years later a building was erected to house it. In 1926 a central budgeting structure was created, and the Regina Federated Community was established. In 1951 the Beth Jacob Congregation built a new synagogue, with a new annex added four years later to house the school and the community center under one roof. At its height in 1931 there were just over 1,000 Jews. By 1951 the number had fallen to 740 and the 2001 census enumerated 720 Jews in Regina. In 2006 there were two synagogues in Regina. In addition to Beth Jacob, with its Conservative-style service, there was the Reform Temple Beth Tikvah, established in 1990. Because of the relatively high rate of interfaith marriages, some members of the community took the initiative to build a burial ground where Jewish and non-Jewish partners could lie next to each other, separated by a fence deemed halakhically acceptable. It opened in the summer of 2005.
The first known settlers of Saskatoon were William and Fanny Landa, who arrived in 1907 with their two children. The first
minyan was on Rosh ha-Shanah in 1908. The members of the congregation Agudas Israel built a synagogue in 1912 and a new one was erected in 1919. In 1958 a Jewish community center was built that also served as a house of worship. Saskatoon had a Jewish mayor, Sydney Buckwold, for several terms. Agudas Israel became a Conservative congregation, and in March, 2000 Congregation Shir Chadash, also Conservative, was established. In 1911 the census counted 77 Jews. Since 1931 the number has hovered around 700 Jews, with as many as 793 Jews in 1961. The census of 2001 enumerated 700 Jews exactly, making it roughly the same size as Regina's community.
In addition to the settlements in the farm colonies and in the large urban centers, Jews settled in many of the small towns of rural Saskatchewan in the interwar period. In their time, Jewish general stores, like Chinese cafes, were part of small-town Saskatchewan. In the 1931 census there was at least one Jew in almost 200 cities, towns, villages or hamlets in the province. Sometimes Jews constituted a remarkably high percentage of the total population. Thus, for 1931, the demographer Louis Rosenberg noted that the "urban centre with the largest percentage of Jews in its population is not Montreal, Toronto, or some larger Eastern city, but is the little village of Lipton in Saskatchewan, where the Jewish population of 53 formed 15.01 % of its total population."
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/new...iaspora-a-study-in-apartheid/article16201295/
He said he is unlike his traditional Afrikaner forebears: D.F. Malan, his grandfather's cousin, was a National Party prime minister whose 1948 to 1954 government established some of the early apartheid policies. But Dr. Malan said he is still in regular contact with Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who gives him a hard time about coming to Canada. He thinks he may return to South Africa eventually.
"There's no reason for me to turn my back on South Africa," he added. "Never. It's still my country. … If I had another choice, if it would be better for my career there, I'd certainly be there tomorrow."
Colin Baskind left South Africa for Toronto in 1987, when the country was exploding with violence. "I left because I didn't see a future in South Africa for my kids, for me as a business person. My wife was petrified walking in the streets," said Mr. Baskind, a management consultant who is also chairman of the Southern African Jewish Association. He hasn't returned in 20 years and doesn't want to go back.
"I don't like it there," he said. "I honestly think as an immigrant you've got to say, 'I'm here, let's get on with it.'" His feelings about South Africa are in part shaped by his own reluctance to speak out politically while he lived there. "There's an inherent issue that I regret, and I really do, that I did nothing politically," he said.
South Africans are an unusually well-educated and wealthy group of migrants. Immigration data going back as far as 1980 shows that nearly 80 per cent of South Africans came as skilled migrants and just 3 per cent as refugees. One in four earns more than $200,000 annually, roughly the top 1 per cent in Canada, according to a survey of the post-1990 diaspora conducted by Prof. Crush; more than 40 per cent earn more than $100,000, equivalent to the top 6 per cent.
A partial explanation for such prosperity is the controversial recruitment of South Africa physicians to help address Canada's doctor shortage, making South Africa the leading source of foreign-trained doctors. There are roughly 2,500 practising here today. In 2001, the South African government publicly pleaded with Canada to stop recruiting its doctors after 200 decamped in a single year. The flow has slowed to about 60 annually, still the highest of any country.
The physicians were recruited to fill gaps in service all over the country, particularly in Saskatchewan and Newfoundland and often in rural areas and small towns. Charl Badenhorst, 62, came to Canada 10 years ago and now works in Fort St. John, B.C. He had been a top administrator at one of South Africa's largest psychiatric hospitals but felt his career was unlikely to progress in post-apartheid South Africa.
He was a liberal who had long opposed segregation. He sent his son, who is white, to a black school at a time when he was heavily criticized for doing so. But he wanted new academic challenges, which he could only find abroad, he said. He enjoys Fort St. John, where there are roughly 20 other South African physicians, but expects to return to South Africa some day.
"The older doctors like me, I think most of us want to go back at some stage," he said. "The younger doctors who came and have young children, they're more into the system here. They won't go back."
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