Romania to Saskatchewan: A Jewish Odyssey | Rabbi Tuffs
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- 7 min read
There is a graveyard on the Saskatchewan prairie where a young woman is buried near the fence. In Jewish tradition, burial near the fence means one thing: suicide. She had come from Romania with her husband and children, and when her husband was called back to Europe for a family emergency, she was left alone in a small cabin through a Canadian winter with nothing but her children, the cold, and the silence of a landscape that offered no relief and no company. She went mad. She took her own life.
Her story — recovered by Rabbi Tuffs in conversation with Montes-Bradley — is the moral and human center of this documentary. It is a story about what happens when a community is broken apart. It is a story about a government policy and a ten-acre calculation that turned out to be deadly. And it is a story that reaches back more than a century, to a mass migration that has largely slipped from collective memory: the arrival of Romanian Jewish families on the Canadian prairie, their attempt to build a life from the ground up in the most literal sense possible, and the fragile, essential thing they were trying to preserve in doing so.
Romania, 110 Years Ago
Most of Rabbi Tuffs's family arrived in North America in the late 1800s or early 1900s — roughly 110 years before the events of this film. They came from Romania, the majority of them, with one branch from Moldova, in the region where Romanian was spoken alongside Yiddish. Yiddish was the first language of the household, as it was in most Jewish homes of that world. Romanian was learned for commerce, for the practical necessity of doing business with neighbors. It was a language of transaction, not of intimacy.
Life for Romanian Jews at the turn of the century was governed by two pressures that operated simultaneously and reinforced each other: physical persecution and economic exclusion. Pogroms — organized waves of anti-Jewish violence — were a recurring feature of life in the northern regions of the country, in cities like Chișinău (Kishinev) and the surrounding territories. And beneath the threat of violence ran the quieter, more constant pressure of poverty: Jews were barred from many trades, excluded from land ownership, and confined to an economic existence that offered little stability and less dignity. The combination made leaving not a choice but a necessity. The question was only where to go.
Baron de Hirsch and the Return to the Soil
The answer, for many Romanian Jewish families, was provided by one of the nineteenth century's most remarkable philanthropists: Baron Maurice de Hirsch, a German-born Jewish financier of enormous wealth who became convinced that the salvation of European Jewry lay in returning to agricultural labor. The Jews of the Diaspora had been separated from the land for centuries — pushed into trades, moneylending, and urban commerce by legal restrictions that prevented land ownership across most of Europe. De Hirsch's argument was simple and radical: give poor Jews land, teach them to farm it, and restore the connection between a people and the earth that persecution had severed.
To this end he established the Jewish Colonization Association and financed agricultural settlements for Jewish immigrants across multiple continents — in Argentina, Brazil, the United States, and Canada. The families who would become the Saskatchewan settlers were among those who received his support. They were given passage and the prospect of land. They took it.
They arrived at Halifax — then as now the first port of entry on Canada's Atlantic coast — and boarded trains heading west. Their destination was what was then known as the Territory of Assiniboia, the vast and largely unsettled prairie that would become the province of Saskatchewan. Three Jewish agricultural settlements were established in the region. One was named Hirsch, in honor of the Baron. A second was called Edenbridge — originally Judenbrücke, the German and Yiddish for Jews' Bridge — anglicized for the Canadian ear. The third, where Rabbi Tuffs's family settled among approximately 150 other families, was called Lipton, located further north than the others, deeper into the prairie.
Sod Dwellings
They arrived in early summer. The Hudson Bay Company — the great general merchandise enterprise that served as the commercial backbone of the Canadian frontier — was supposed to deliver lumber so that the settlers could build houses before winter. The lumber never came.
Rabbi Tuffs learned what happened next from his grandmother directly. He asked her how they survived. You cannot be homeless on the Saskatchewan prairie; the winter is not survivable in the open. She told him: they dug into the ground. They lifted the sod — the dense mat of roots and soil that forms the surface of the prairie — and built downward. Sod dwellings: earth shelters, half buried, insulated by the very ground they had come to farm.
It is an image worth sitting with. These families had come from Romanian towns and villages, from the cramped but human scale of shtetl life, from a world organized around the synagogue and the market and the street. They had crossed the Atlantic, crossed a continent, and arrived in a landscape without precedent in their experience — flat, immense, treeless in many parts, with a sky that offered no shelter and a winter that would kill without warning. And they dug into the ground and survived.
A quarter century after hearing his grandmother's account, Rabbi Tuffs returned to the site. The University of Saskatchewan was conducting a modest archaeological survey of the settlement. A young researcher from the university walked him through what had been found and what had been recorded. And it was there, in the graveyard that serves every human community eventually, that he found her — the young woman buried near the fence.
Cabin Fever and the Cost of Isolation
The phrase cabin fever is a Canadian expression. It describes what happens to people confined indoors through a long winter — the psychological deterioration that sets in when cold and darkness eliminate the ordinary textures of social life for months at a time. In a country that knows winter, the expression carries real weight. It is not a metaphor for mild restlessness. It describes a genuine descent.
Now consider what this woman was facing. Her husband had returned to Romania for a family emergency — the old world calling back across the ocean, as it did. She was alone in a one or two room cabin, with her children and no adult company, through a Saskatchewan winter that could drop to temperatures that freeze exposed skin in minutes. The nearest neighbors were not close. She had no one to knock on the door. No one to say: we haven't seen you, how are you, let me watch the children for an hour, come have tea.
Rabbi Tuffs pauses on this detail. He wonders — and the wondering is itself significant — whether this family had made a particular calculation. The Canadian government, intent on settling the prairie as rapidly as possible, offered settlers an incentive to disperse: an extra ten acres of land if you moved further from the community, further from the cluster of Jewish families who had naturally gravitated toward each other. Ten acres was not a small thing. Land was the entire point of the enterprise. Ten acres meant more to farm, more security, more future.
The Government's Design and the Community's Need
The tension at the heart of this story is not simply personal or even tragic. It is structural. It reflects a genuine conflict between what the Jewish settlers wanted and what the Canadian state needed.
What the settlers wanted was something close to what we would now call a cooperative community — a moshav, to use the Israeli term that Rabbi Tuffs reaches for. They wanted to share land, share equipment, build a small town, maintain proximity and mutual support. They wanted, in other words, to reconstruct on the Canadian prairie something of the communal texture that had sustained Jewish life in Europe, however difficult that life had been. The synagogue. The neighbors. The social density that makes checking on someone a natural act rather than a special effort.
What the Canadian government wanted was the rapid settlement of land — specifically, the displacement of Indigenous peoples from territory the state intended to claim and cultivate. The policy instrument for this was individual land grants, distributed at intervals designed to prevent clustering. Spread out. Take your acreage. Build your farm. The collective was not the government's concern. The individual plot was.
The incentive of extra land was the mechanism through which the government's design overrode the community's instinct. And in at least one case — possibly in others that left no comparable record — that override had a body and a name and a grave near the fence.
The Talmud's Warning
Rabbi Tuffs closes with a line from the Talmud. It is a direct instruction: do not separate yourself from the community. The tradition knew what it was saying. It had been accumulating the evidence for centuries. He adds his own corollary, quietly: even for an extra ten acres of land.
The documentary does not moralize beyond that point. It does not need to. The story has already said what needed saying — through the grandmother's memory of sod dwellings, through the young researcher's patient excavation of a settlement that no longer exists above ground, through the grave near the fence and the question of what calculation preceded it.
The Jews of Saskatchewan came to start over. They dug into the earth and survived the first winter. They planted crops and built synagogues and raised children who would raise other children, one of whom is Rabbi Tuffs, telling the story to Montes-Bradley a century later, still carrying the full weight of what his family crossed an ocean to find and nearly lost in the transaction.
Community is not a sentiment. It is a survival mechanism. And the price of abandoning it — even for ten acres, even for a rational calculation, even with the best intentions — can be irreversible.
Saskatchewan Jews | Rabbi Tuffs is a Heritage Film Project production directed by Eduardo Montes-Bradley.
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