April 1, 2019: New survey looks at Jewish life in Canada

By Michael Regenstreif

In 2013, the Pew Research Center released “A Portrait of Jewish Americans,” the results of a comprehensive survey of Jews in the United States covering everything from demographics and religious observance and attitudes, to levels of Jewish education, levels of intermarriage, attitudes toward the State of Israel, domestic politics and much more. Now, Toronto-based Environics Institute for Survey Research, in partnership with the University of Toronto and York University, has released its “2018 Survey of Jews in Canada,” a similar study of Jews in this country.

The survey sampled 2,335 Jews living in four cities – Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg and Vancouver. Those four cities currently boast Canada’s largest Jewish communities and are home to about 82 per cent of Canada’s estimated Jewish population of 392,000 (about one per cent of the entire Canadian population).

While Ottawa Jews were not sampled, we can reasonably assume that the “national” results are close to what would have been found here. The survey authors did note that the Jewish populations of Ottawa, along with Toronto, Calgary (also not sampled in the survey) and Vancouver are growing, as is the Jewish population of Canada as a whole, while the Jewish populations of Montreal and Winnipeg are declining.

For several years, Ottawa’s Jewish community has been close in size to Winnipeg’s – and with our community continuing to grow while Winnipeg’s continues to decline, I expect Ottawa will soon be Canada’s fourth largest Jewish community.

Asked to define their Jewish identity, almost half of respondents identified one of three main characteristics: culture (22 per cent); ancestry (15 per cent); or religion (12 per cent). The other half of the respondents identified either two of the three characteristics (16 per cent) or all three (33 per cent). The vast majority of respondents said being Jewish was either very important (64 per cent) or somewhat important (27 per cent). Only eight per cent said being Jewish was of little or no importance to them.

More than 60 per cent of Canadian Jews identified with a particular denomination. The largest denomination in Canada is Conservative Judaism at 26 per cent. Orthodoxy and modern Orthodoxy represents 17 per cent of respondents; Reform Judaism is at 16 per cent; and Reconstructionist Judaism at four per cent. A high number, 28 per cent, said they had no denomination or were “just Jewish.”

About 58 per cent of Canadian Jews said they belong to a synagogue – but asked how often they attend services other than for special occasions like bar/bat mitzvahs, weddings or funerals, only about 15 per cent said they attend once or more per week. Another 13 per cent attend once or twice per month. Forty per cent said they attend services a few times per year, while 31 per cent said they seldom or never attend.

Forty-seven per cent of Canadian Jews belong to Jewish organizations other than synagogues (JCCs for example), but fully 80 per cent of Canadian Jews live in households that made contributions to Jewish causes in 2017 – a remarkable level of engagement.

We are also a highly educated community, with 80 per cent of Canadian Jews aged 25 to 64 holding at least a bachelor’s degree – compared to 29 per cent of the Canadian population at large. And with 37 per cent of Canadian Jews holding a post-graduate or professional degree, the study suggests that “it may well be that Canadian Jews form the most highly educated ethnic group in the country.”

In terms of Jewish education, 43 per cent of Canadians attended Jewish day school for all or part of their elementary and high school years while 58 per cent have attended a Jewish overnight summer camp. As well, 67 per cent participated in some other type of Jewish educational program (supplemental schools, teen programs, etc.) while growing up.

While the 2013 Pew survey showed that the intermarriage rate had reached 50 per cent in the United States, it is much lower in Canada. Fully 77 per cent of Jewish Canadians over 18 who are married or in a common-law relationship have a Jewish partner. Perhaps surprisingly, the age group in which both partners are most likely to be Jewish is 18- to 29-year-olds at 84 per cent.

Canadian Jews also report a high level of connection to Israel. Forty-eight per cent say they are very attached and 31 per cent somewhat attached to the Jewish state. Only 11 per cent report being not very attached while eight per cent feel no attachment to Israel. Interestingly, the combined total of very and somewhat attached, 79 per cent, mirrors the proportion of Canadian Jews who have visited Israel at least once.

I’ve only had space in this column to scratch the surface of the results of the 2018 Survey of Jews in Canada. I hope to delve into more in a future column. In the meantime, though, you can visit https://tinyurl.com/jews-in-canada-survey to read or download the entire survey.

November 25, 2013: Pew report ties in to many of our conversations

By Michael Regenstreif

Recently, much of the conversation in North American Jewish circles has been dominated by the Pew Research Center Survey of U.S. Jews released at the beginning of October. Jewish federations throughout North America, including the Jewish Federation of Ottawa, and many other Jewish organizations, from local synagogues to the largest international bodies, have discussed the implications of the study and what to do about the trends it reports.

Indeed, the Pew study has been the No. 1 topic of late in much of the Jewish media.

It’s a primary focus of our report on page 3 about the Federation’s panel discussion about the Pew report, of Rabbi Howard Finkelstein’s From the Pulpit column on page 6, of a JTA report from the General Assembly of the Jewish Federations of North America on page 17, of a JTA report of how Conservative synagogues are wrestling with an effect of growing rates of intermarriage on page 26; and is also mentioned in the article about the challenges faced by Ottawa’s synagogues on page 1, and in Ilana Belfer’s Emerging Gen column on page 3, Andrea Freedman’s publisher’s column on page 8 and Bram Bregman’s guest column on page 18.

Although the Pew report statistics apply specifically to U.S. Jews, there is much for Canadian Jews to learn from the trends. The conventional wisdom used to be that Canadian Jews were a generation behind our American cousins in societal trends. I’ve seen some Canadian commentators who agree with that, others who think we’ve already caught up.

Perhaps the Pew report statistic that has caused the greatest anxiety in Jewish circles is the one about Jews who identify as being Jewish, but as “Jews of no religion.”

The Pew report shows that the younger one is, the more likely they are to be a Jew of no religion. Overall, 22 per cent of adult U.S. Jews identify as such. Broken down by generation, we see that it ranges from just seven per cent of the greatest generation – the generation that fought in the Second World War – to 32 per cent of the millenials, those born after 1980. My own cohort, baby boomers born between 1946 and 1964, is at 19 per cent.

A bit of perspective: According to 2010 polling data, 42 per cent of Jewish Israelis identify themselves as “secular,” that is to say “Jews of no religion.” That’s almost double the findings for American Jews in the Pew report. Another 25 per cent of Jewish Israelis in the 2010 poll identified as “not very religious.”

There are many reasons for the growing trend of Jews claiming no religion and a lot of them go back to the development of liberal thought and modernity and to how we now live in North America as citizens who fully participate in all aspects of our wider society. Perhaps that’s subject fodder for future columns.

In many ways, the Pew report statistics tie in to conversations that have dominated Jewish circles for a long time on how to engage young adults – the emerging generation in their 20s and 30s – in Jewish life. It has been one of the primary focus areas of the Federation in recent years and certainly in the pages of the Ottawa Jewish Bulletin. Putting the Bulletin fully online – which we’re doing for the first time with this issue – is a major component of our strategy to engage the emerging generation, most of whom have abandoned printed newspapers in favour of the digital world.

Aspects of these conversations always remind me of how the more things change, the more they stay the same. In Montreal in the 1970s and ’80s, when I was a member of the emerging generation, I took part in similar discussions. And mine was hardly the first generation to have those discussions.

The same can be said about the changes we’re seeing in synagogue life in Ottawa. The models that worked a century ago had been abandoned or changed by the 1950s and ’60s. The solutions we find now will be different than they were then; and, years from now, new solutions will have to be found when today’s emerging generation is wondering how to engage their grandchildren in Jewish life.