Southern Alberta Jewish Family Histories

Welcome to the Southern Alberta Jewish Family Histories Page

Project Roots

JHSSA’s mandate is to record, preserve and present the history of the Jewish communities of southern Alberta, and since our incorporation, we have collected information on the individuals and families that have made up those communities.  In the mid-1990s, we put out a request for the families themselves to share their histories, and the majority of the stories you are about to explore were received in response to that request. Originally published in our 1996 volume Land of Promise, they were largely written by family members, based on memory as well as family or public records, and were shared in the style and format in which they were received.

The project to move these stories online was undertaken because the history of our communities didn’t end with our pioneers.

We want to include more families, and more up-to-date information, in a readily-accessible format that can be easily updated and amended as the need arises.  An online format also allows us to invite the broader community, Jewish and other, to more fully engage with our history.

The family unit was of great importance to our pioneering ancestors, especially to those who settled in isolation from major Jewish institutions. The majority were fleeing persecution and pogroms in eastern Europe, where they had lived in “shtetls” – the small towns and villages that arose as a result of forced segregation.  Those circumstances led to the development of strong social codes and strict rules governing daily Jewish life, resulting in tight-knit communities with a strong reliance on communal organizations.  When the earliest settlers arrived in southern Alberta, like Jacob and Rachel Diamond who became Calgary’s first permanent residents in 1889, they were tasked with establishing the institutions that would support those codes and rules.  Diamond, for example, led the first formal Jewish religious service in Calgary (1894), underwrote the purchase of a Jewish cemetery (1904), and brought in the first rabbi (1906). By the time he presided over the first synagogue building (Beth Jacob, 1911) the Jewish population of Calgary was nearing 600; the “Hebrew Congregation of Lethbridge” had been incorporated, with that city’s Jewish community growing rapidly after the arrival of Harris Goodman in 1905; and Medicine Hat was on the verge of establishing the Sons of Abraham Congregation (1912).

Around the same time, many Jewish families were coming to southern Alberta to homestead, either independently or in the agricultural communities around Rumsey, Trochu and Sibbald; many others settled in small towns where they were often the only Jewish household.  Over time and as children arrived and got older, the desire for access to religious and cultural institutions became stronger, and increasingly, the families left the rural and small-town environments. Post-war prosperity supported Lethbridge and Medicine Hat through the 1960s, but eventually, those communities, too, saw their populations diminish.  At the time of this writing (2025), the majority of Jewish communal organizations in southern Alberta are based in Calgary.

The stories included on this site are not presented as an exhaustive collection of the early Jewish families of southern Alberta, and a few may reflect less-than-perfect recall of the distant past.  Corrections have been made to the original submissions when we have been made aware of them.

The Southern Alberta Jewish Family Histories page is an ongoing project, as is the research behind it, and you may notice that the information for some families is sparse, or perhaps incorrect.  If you have can fill in blanks or provide more accurate details – and especially if your family history isn’t yet included — please contact us. Our submission guidelines are available here.

Information on many southern Alberta families can be found in the JHSSA subject files; please click on Family Subject Files (under Research on our website) for a full list of families and individuals included there. In addition, a wide variety of resources is available to those seeking family and genealogical information. Please contact our office for some suggestions.

The Southern Alberta Jewish Family Histories page has been made possible through the generous support of a Historical Society of Alberta Research Grant.

We are particularly grateful for all of the submissions from so many current and former members of the Jewish communities of southern Alberta. We would, quite literally, not be here without you.