Congregation Emanu-El — in its 161st year at Blanshard Street — is undertaking a $1.5-million restoration project as Canada’s oldest synagogue community sees an influx of new congregants.
Rabbi Harry Brechner said his congregation has been growing in recent months, partly as a result of the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack in southern Israel, where militants killed 1,200 people and abducted about 250 others.
The continued conflict, as well fears around rising antisemitism from the extreme right and the extreme left, have drawn the community closer together, he said.
“I think that there are a lot of Jews who are looking for community and a safe place. A lot of Jewish communities are feeling a bit pushed to the margin.”
Today, the synagogue will be marking its 160-plus years in Victoria with a celebration that will see federal, provincial and local politicians attending.
“We’re trying to embrace Victoria as we’ve always had,” Brechner said.
The event, which begins at 2 p.m., will feature a performance from Berlin-based opera soprano Tehila Nini Goldstein and will be held at the synagogue at 1461 Blanshard St.
Brechner said when the building was being built in 1863, many prominent civic organizations at the time, including the French and German benevolent societies, contributed funds.
The Jewish community was left out when the British government was handing out land grants for religious organizations as the Island was first being colonized, he said. “We’re not Christian. They didn’t see us as a faith community.”
But thanks to the generosity of other Victorians, the final result was a “pretty amazing collective project,” Brechner said.
The building is now a national historic site and cited as a rare surviving example of the 19th-century Romanesque Revival style synagogue architecture.
Emanu-El received substantial structural repairs in 2013 when the community celebrated the building’s 150th anniversary.
This latest round of renovations will be structural as well as aesthetic.
For just over a month, the building has been wrapped in scaffolding as workers with Victoria-based CBS Masonry Ltd. restore the building’s rock foundation and brick walls.
Site superintendent and project manager Josh Hunter said due to the age and character of the building, the company is using a type of heritage mortar that has a higher lime and sand composition compared to modern mortar to avoid putting undue stress on the bricks.
The congregation’s executive director, Susan Holtz, said Emanu-El is hoping to keep the cost of exterior repairs under $1 million.
A refresh of the interiors is expected to cost an additional $500,000, though fundraising for that has yet to commence, she said.
The exterior work is expected to be complete in November and interior work is to begin in December.
To date, Emanu-El has raised more than $900,000 in donations and grants, including $160,000 from Victoria City Heritage Trust and an undisclosed sum from the Vancouver-based Ronald S. Roadburg Foundation.
Holtz said today’s congregation of 250 families wouldn’t fit in the building all at once due to fire regulations, but at one point, Emanu-El struggled to keep the lights on.
Unable to pay the heat bills, congregants boarded up the windows, put in a false ceiling and installed a stove to keep the 30 or so families warm during Shabbat services starting some time in the 1950s, Holtz said.
“It’s hard to imagine, but this is within living memory of many of our congregants,” she said.
The stove and the false ceiling were removed — in addition to the white stucco covering that had been installed on the building’s exterior as a cost-saving measure — as part of a major restoration that wrapped up in 1982.
Holtz said while there have been security incidents — one of the synagogue’s main entrance windows was recently broken in what she suspects was a targeted attack — the synagogue, which predates the Holocaust, is a reassuring marker of how long the Jewish community has been welcomed in Victoria, she said.
“The increase of antisemitism is indicative of the world changing. I’m sure it’s had those fluctuations before — but there’s something reassuring about the stability of this place.”
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