RUSSIAN JEWISH ARCHIVES IMMIGRATE TO CJCNA
by Janice Rosen, Archives Director

For the past few months, a stream of Russian speaking visitors have enlivened the atmosphere at the Canadian Jewish Congress National Archives, thanks to a novel archives-collecting project initiated by Latvian-born and Russian-trained archivist Tatiana Jour.

Upon hearing of her proposal, the Jewish Community Foundation of Montreal provided a generous 6 month grant to support Tatiana’s collecting efforts among the recently immigrated Russian Jewish community of Montreal. This project is being carried out in cooperation with the staff of the CJC Archives. 

The general mandate of the Canadian Jewish Congress National Archives is to "collect and preserve documentation of the Jewish presence in Quebec and Canada." The CJCNA has been collecting material since the founding of Canadian Jewish Congress in 1919, and our entire collection now totals over 4200 boxes of paper records, hundreds of cassettes and videos, and tens of thousands of photographs.  

Prior to beginning the project, we could already find many traces of the Russian-Jewish presence in Canada in our Archives, but little of this came directly from the immigrants themselves. Our largest resource is our collection of files from the Montreal office of JIAS, dating back to 1921.  

Since its official inception in May 2004, the project has been proceeding at an intensive rate. Tatiana comes to the CJC Archives with a donor or group of donors at least once a week, thereby providing a tour of this community resource to a new and appreciative audience.

To date she has collected material from 27 Russian-speaking individuals and 3 organizations serving the Russian immigrant community. Her initial approach was to offer to scan and return material to donors when they were not yet ready to cede their personal papers and photographs.  However, in addition to creating a CD of scanned material from almost every donor, she has been able to obtain original material from an increasing number of individuals as the reputation of the project grows. To date about a linear metre (three large boxes) of records has been added to our collection, in a variety of media, including photographs, artwork, books, old and recent documents from Russia and Montreal. Tatiana has conducted video interviews in Russian with four individuals thus far, and has videotaped about an equal number of Russian Jewish community events.

 The individuals represented in this growing collection include several artists and poets, journalists, scientists and engineers, teachers, and translators. Their experiences prior to immigrating to Canada include the experiences of Holocaust survivors and former refusniks. The individuals represented so far originated in various Russian cities and the provinces, the Ukraine, and the Baltic States. At the present time we are concentrating our collecting efforts on Montreal, but we welcome material from people living in all areas of Canada.

Complementing the donations from individuals, CJC Archives has also become the recipient of all past and future issues of the Russian language Canadian Jewish newspaper The Voice of Community. This newspaper is not currently archived by any other Jewish library and is a valuable resource for studying the growing Russian-speaking Jewish community.

While Tatiana, as project archivist, will be doing most of the interpretive cataloguing for the collection, I have been studying the Cyrillic alphabet in order to be able to understand the basic elements of the collection. Although I can now make out words such as “Archives” and “Montreal” with ease, I must confess that progress with the rest of the language is coming very slowly!

We expect to complete the project at the end of 6 months. Working with CJC National Archives chair Dr. Norma Joseph, we have begun to plan a late October public event to summarize and draw attention to the project as well as to thank our sponsor. Since so much of our new material is visual and artistic, we would make the artists and the music a large element of this evening.

The material collected for the Russian Jewish Archives Project can be seen and studied by the public on request, during our regular hours from 9:30AM to 5PM, Monday to Friday (except for early closing on Fridays.) We recommend that visitors first make an appointment, by calling 514-931-7531, ext. 2, or by emailing archives@cjc.ca