Mount Rabbi Stern
When looking at the names of places, including roads and schools and even mountains and rivers, we have to look at what was going on in the world and locally to understand the temper of the times during which those names were chosen. What would have caused that choice, the story behind that name? In our current times, does the choice seem odd or inappropriate, or has it stood the test of time?
There is a mountain in Val-des-Lacs called Mount Rabbi Stern. It rises 2,250 feet above sea level to the northeast of the village. If you ask at the municipality why it is called Mont le Rabbin-Stern, you will likely be answered with a blank stare.
The Quebec Toponymie website says that, in 1985, the Toponymie Commission named the mountain as part of a programme to commemorate people who had made outstanding contributions to Quebec society.
Harry Joshua Stern was born in Eragoly, Lithuania, a small, segregated village inhabited only by Jews in the ‘Pale of Settlement,’ in 1897. Lithuania was a farming country, but Jews were generally not allowed to farm or work in industry. Nor were they allowed to speak Yiddish or Hebrew. Despite these rules, Harry lived in a culturally rich environment, attending the Chedder, the elementary school, and learning both illegal languages. In this rural ghetto, the Torah was the main window on the world, and biblical heroes became the immediate role models of the young. Moses was Harry’s hero. From ages five to eleven, he learned the Hebrew Bible including all the books that Christians know as the Old Testament, as well as the Mishnah, the Gemara and the Talmud, the commentaries and elaborations that sum up Jewish study of the Bible over the last two thousand years. He also learned the history and culture of the Jewish people.
In 1905, when he was nine, the settlement was attacked and terrorised by a contingent of Russian soldiers. This attack would have a profound effect on Harry’s future, because it convinced his father that he must get the family out of Lithuania.
When he was eleven, his family moved to Steubenville, Ohio, and re-established itself with the help of Harry’s uncle, who had moved long before. In this new environment, there was no segregation, no Pale of Settlement or ghetto. The town was in the coal belt and it was peopled with immigrants from many sources all of whom wished simply to get ahead in this new land of opportunity. While Steubenville had a small Jewish community and a synagogue, it had no permanent rabbi. This was quite a contrast for young Harry, and he became familiar with other traditions. In fact, it was a teacher in the public school whom Harry credited with encouraging him to pursue his desire to become a rabbi.
During his younger years, more Jews arrived in North America fleeing pogroms in Eastern Europe, driven out of places that had been their homes for countless generations. These people, who considered themselves to be of the country where they had always lived, learned from their neighbours that the ‘collectivity,’ the majority consensus of the people, did not consider them to be countrymen, but unwelcome foreigners. This intolerant attitude drove many to support Zionism, the movement to re-establish a Jewish homeland in the ancient lands of Israel and Judah. Young Harry Stern became an adherent. Witnessing the intolerant attitudes of people in the old country, he also dedicated himself to opening communications between members of different faiths.
When he became a rabbi in 1922, his first posting was to Uniontown, Pennsylvania. There he had many occasions to stand up for persecuted minorities, taking the Catholic side against intolerance in the majority Protestant public school system, and encouraging exchanges of sermons among different denominations of Christian and Jewish congregations.
In 1927 Rabbi Stern was invited to take over the large Reform temple in Montreal, Temple Emanu-El. Almost upon his arrival, he chose very publicly to back the promoters of a Jewish hospital. The wealthy and powerful Westmount Jewish community felt generally that the idea was ill advised and could be an economic disaster, but many others argued that such an institution would help open McGill University to Jewish medical students. It was a bold position to have been taken by a rabbi of a large Westmount congregation and there was a lot of disagreement, but he argued that even little Uniontown, Pennsylvania, managed to support a Jewish hospital. Time and effort proved him right, and the secular Jewish General Hospital opened in 1934.
Rabbi Stern also continued his aggressive encouragement of exchange among the different denominations, and he soon became known as the Ecumenical Rabbi. In his own words, he said, “I tried to Christianize the Christians and Judaize the Jews.” He carried on despite opposition and through the pre-war period of anti-Semitism. He initiated annual Fellowship Dinners to which leaders of different congregations were invited. A Brotherhood Award of Merit was given, honouring individuals who had made some contribution to the fellowship of Canadians. The Rabbi also founded the Institute for Clergy and Religious Educators in 1942, that from the beginning hosted distinguished Christian and Jewish leaders who came to speak on their respective religious traditions. While this might all seem like church stuff of little relevance or importance to the layman, an example of the bridges that had to be built is the fact that it took 16 years before the Catholic participants attended the Institute in an official capacity. His interfaith mission initially made him as many enemies as friends, as was demonstrated in 1933, at a mass protest against the treatment of Jews and social democrats in Germany. Despite his crucial role as one of the chief organisers, Rabbi Stern’s name was omitted from the roster of speakers, and when the minister of the Erskine United Church forced the issue by giving up a part of his speaking time in favour of the rabbi, the non-Jewish media generally refused to publish what he had said. In December 1938, the month following the horrid Kristallnacht, or Night of Glass, in which German synagogues were burned, the rabbi addressed the Montreal Rotary Club thanking Westminster Abbey for its prayers for the Jewish victims, but he went on to say that the prayers were not enough, that action must be taken before it was too late. At the end of the speech the chairman of the club stated that he wanted it clearly understood that the remarks of the speaker were his own and did not reflect the views of the Club. During the war years, Rabbi Stern petitioned and spoke on behalf of the fate of European Jews and even toured parts of Canada trying to explain the problems. Again and again his information proved correct and revealing of shortsightedness on the part of the British. The main issue revolved around the British White Paper restricting Jewish immigration to Palestine between 1939 and 1944. It played into the German plans to annihilate the Jews of Europe. Stern carried the message of the Zionists that said, “We will fight the war as if there were no White Paper, and we will fight the White Paper as if there were no war.” While the Germans were defeated, the spirit of the White Paper was intensified under the new Labour government in Britain in 1946. A year later, though, the British government turned the matter over to the United Nations, which ruled in favour of the creation of two states, one Jewish and one Arab.
Rabbi Stern’s initiatives continued to grow in importance, and eventually Quebec and Ontario divinity schools had to accommodate the schedule of the Institute for Clergy and Religious Educators. His annual Fellowship Dinners received personages such as Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, Cardinal Paul Émile Léger, Mayor Jean Drapeau, Quebec Premier Jean-Jacques Bertrand and Ontario Premier John Robarts as well as Martin Luther King and many others from beyond our borders. In 1972, the Rabbi became the Rabbi Emeritus of Temple Emanu-El and over the remaining years of his life he continued to write and speak. He passed away in 1984, the year before the mountain was named in his honour.