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Chapter 2: An Interesting Wedding

In the glow of late summer, on September 2, 1926, Miss Annie Aitken Martin, draped in ivory taffeta and framed by the graceful high stone arches of the Knox College chapel, came down the centre aisle to meet her groom, in dark morning coat and white bow tie, the Rev. Morris Zeidman. Today, the chapel remains an inspired setting of hushed reverence near the centre of the University of Toronto campus. Sunlight pours down through tall latticed windows with a smoky yellow glaze. Dappled shadows from the trees lining King’s College Circle dance over long dark rows of pews. On that day, before the college opened for classes, the pews would have been filled with many dear friends and ministry colleagues.

Newspaper accounts of the event, quite common at the time, give us colourful details: the bride’s American beauty roses; the maid of honour and bridesmaid in pink and blue georgette with “old-fashioned nosegays.” But the Toronto Evening Star hinted at something else when it called the event “interesting.”¹

The bride’s mother had passed on a few years earlier, and her father, Mr. William Martin, was also absent. The papers said that he lived in Edinburgh, Scotland, but he’d been a long-time Toronto resident and moved back to Scotland only a few months before. In an era when cross-cultural marriages were frowned upon, it’s hardly surprising that he had strong objections to his daughter’s choice, described by the Telegram as a “Presbyterian missionary to Jews.” Annie had come down the aisle on the arm of Rev. John McNicol, the distinguished principal of Toronto Bible College.²

Details of Mr. Zeidman’s parents and family are also conspicuously missing from the newspaper copy. But a few inches of type could hardly explain how Morris, who had left an Orthodox Jewish home in Czarist Poland 14 years before, was now ordained and getting married in a Canadian Protestant seminary.

Another, less prominent, name in the newspapers draws our attention. The service was conducted by two clergy: Rev. Dr. J. G. Inkster of Knox Presbyterian Church, assisted by “the Rev. S.B. Rohold of Haifa, Palestine.” Rohold had been Morris’s mentor and predecessor at the Scott Institute, where the couple would begin ministry when they returned from their honeymoon. Rev. Rohold and his wife, Belle (later known as Bella), had literally travelled the world to be there. At the time, much of his work required him to traverse the length and breadth of Palestine (often by donkey) to assist the British in oversight of their new mandate in the region. The journey would have been a welcome respite for Belle (nee Petrie), whom he had met in Toronto. The event itself must have given them great satisfaction. After all, if anyone, apart from heaven, could lay claim to bringing the bride and groom together, it was Ben Rohold.

***

Only a decade before, Annie’s family was a quiet model of Edwardian reserve, not likely to be identified with an interesting public ministry. Each Sunday morning Annie joined her parents in the great auditorium of Bloor Street Presbyterian Church, where she and her father sang in the choir. The large congregation had recently appointed one of Canada’s finest preachers to its pulpit, the Rev. George Campbell Pidgeon.

Miss Martin was enjoying the busy life of a gifted pianist with her own students. She was also receiving the attentions of a certain young gentleman likely to be approved by her father. (He wasn’t the one she married.) Then, sometime during the hard years of World War I, Annie heard Rev. Rohold make an appeal for workers to help at the Jewish mission. Despite its location in a squalid district called “the Ward,” she volunteered.³

Annie began supervising a program once a week that taught English to young girls from poor Jewish families whose first language at home was Yiddish. She loved the girls and enjoyed the work. Still, every week, she had a continuing irritation; his name was Morris Zeidman. Dark, short and energetic, he led the boys’ club that met on the same night, perhaps in the same large room or an adjacent one. Morris would arrive early and round up all the equipment he needed, as if the boys had some priority. It seemed to Annie that he blatantly disregarded the needs of the girls. She’d arrive to find her class in need of chairs or teaching aids, thanks to Mr. Zeidman, whom she quickly decided was far too brash.

The offending young man’s self-assurance was particularly irritating. He’d fled Poland only four or five years earlier from the city of Czestochowa. His mother, Hannah (Haindel), was the second wife of Alexander (Ziskind) Zeidman, a widower, and she oversaw a combined family of eight children—Morris had a younger brother and six sisters, although the oldest sister was by this time married and in her own home. A pious Orthodox Jew, Ziskind owned a prosperous fruit and vegetable store. Morris was born on Shavuoth (known to Christians as Pentecost) in 1894 and attended a neighbourhood Hebrew school. Haindel was a woman of sturdy common sense, frequently managing the business while her husband attended to daily prayers in the synagogue.⁴ Charity—tzedaka—was very important. Whatever the family’s situation, every week, well before the eve of the Sabbath (Erev Shabbat), Morris helped his father put together a parcel of groceries that he’d deliver to a needy family.

The region’s painful history of Russian anti-Semitic persecution had bred resistance against Czarist rule. Some of Morris’s contemporaries recalled his involvement in a small local socialist organization; then he was arrested for being in the street during a demonstration. The police station was in such a furor when Hannah arrived with two of his stepsisters that no one noticed when his mother left, ushering out three girls through the front door. No disguise, though, could help Morris after a second arrest and appearance before the local magistrate. While there’s no specific explanation for Morris leaving Poland, the family memory was that he’d already been fortunate. One more arrest and he’d have been deported to Siberia. Life at home was increasingly uncomfortable; none of this had his father’s approval.

Morris’s passport, still a fond family keepsake, is stamped with the year of his arrival in the port of Montreal, 1912. After providing for the long journey and ocean passage, the family had little more to offer and only a few parting gifts. These included his grandfather’s sacred phylacteries or tefillin (special bindings and boxes with Scriptures enclosed that are used in daily prayers) “so that he should not forget” the faith of Israel. With no English and few friends, Morris made his way to Toronto, where there was a growing community from his hometown in Poland. He was trying to find work as a manual labourer and often passed the time walking alone through the city.

Fellow Jewish immigrants would have warned him about the imposing three-storey brick building at the corner of Elm and Elizabeth Streets—the Jewish mission. Nothing was more contemptible for Jewish people than a meshummad, literally a “traitor,” one who converted to the religion of the Gentiles. The local missionary may have been tolerated; getting too familiar with him would be suspicious.

But one Sunday afternoon, Morris, who’d been walking the deserted streets and brooding over a way to learn English for free, caught sight of the sign in a window. It said in Hebrew “The House of the Good News of Messiah for the Children of Israel.” Morris, no stranger to controversy, discarded a lifetime of training to be wary of the goyim and found his way inside. Soon afterwards, he was enrolled in English classes and able to find employment in a machine shop, working 10 hours a day. He also received that forbidden book known in English as the New Testament. At first he may have tried to hide his copy from the Jewish family with whom he was boarding. When they found him reading it and talking like the missionary, they sent him packing.

***

Why did the Presbyterians have a mission to Jews in the centre of Edwardian Toronto? This proudly multicultural city has long since lost touch with the less tolerant society of the early 1900s. It was rife with anti-Semitism, and its growing number of Jewish immigrants was generally welcomed with disdain and mistrust. The newcomers often lived as peddlers, dealers in cast-off goods and second-hand clothes. Some found work in the needle trades or turned their homes into little storefronts in the city’s poorest district.

In Toronto, that location was “the Ward” (properly called St. John’s Ward), in the very heart of the city, bordered by College Street on the north, Yonge Street to the east and University Avenue to the west and extending south to Queen Street. Currently, it’s a district that boasts major office towers and some of the city’s leading hospitals. Back then it was a maze of narrow alleyways lined with dilapidated housing, some dating back to the 1840s. The drafty stucco frame homes were rented out by absentee landlords; many lacked indoor plumbing and had dirt floors. New immigrants kept the cheap housing in demand, and city officials ignored complaints from public health officials. Here, as in New York’s Lower East Side and cities across North America, one of the poorest districts in Toronto became the hub of a thriving Jewish community.

According to the 1901 census, Toronto had 15,000 Jewish residents out of a total population of 208,000, but they quickly became one of the largest, most visible, immigrant groups. The vast majority of recent arrivals had fled Russia and its satellites: Poland, the Ukraine, Slavic and Baltic states. Their numbers grew even more dramatically from 1903 to 1906 when the Czarist government allowed indiscriminate attacks on the Jewish populace. Their homes and businesses were looted; families ran for their lives, while the Russian authorities did nothing. The Americans, also inundated by refugees, compelled the Czarist government to bring the worst excesses to a halt, though the immigrants kept coming.

A growing Jewish presence in the heart of Toronto was of special interest to local Presbyterian church leaders. All through the 19th century, Protestant Jewish missions were expanding. In England and North America, they would provide Jewish immigrants with English lessons, life skills education and family-friendly programs while their founders, a rising number of Jewish followers of Jesus, spread the gospel.

The rise of Jewish missionary efforts helped to spark a growing fascination in the fulfillment of Bible prophecies during the 19th century. Popular interpretations of prophetic Scriptures pointed to specific prophecies, both in the Jewish Bible and the New Testament, that “in the last days” Jewish people would experience a spiritual revival, be drawn to their Messiah and resettle in the Holy Land. With the impending close of the second millennium, visionary Christian leaders were preaching the Lord’s soon return. Others recognized that centuries of Christian persecution had hardened Jewish people against the gospel. The emerging leadership among the Jewish believers in Jesus—Hebrew Christians of various denominations—began to form sizable missionary organizations and strongly influenced the Christian approach to Jewish people.

As early as 1838, the Church of Scotland was excited by this vision of Israel receiving the message of Jesus as Messiah and being restored to the Holy Land. During the 1840s, a fervent young Scot, Rev. Robert Murray McCheyne, travelled with a church commission to Palestine, seeking new avenues to bring the gospel to Jewish people. Returning to his parish in poor health, he passed away during a typhoid epidemic. McCheyne was only 29, but his diaries and sermons, published posthumously, became Christian bestsellers. His zeal for Jewish missions, combined with the rising interest in fulfillments of prophetic Scriptures, helped to sustain the popular wave of support to Presbyterians across the British Empire.

By the 1860s, Canadian Presbyterians were sponsoring their own Jewish missionary in the Middle East, the Rev. Dr. Ephraim Menachem Epstein.⁵ When several Presbyterian denominations became a single national church in 1875—the Presbyterian Church in Canada—they looked for new Jewish ministries to support. While considering ministry opportunities in Canada, the Ward caught their attention. During the 1907 general assembly in Montreal, a motion was carried “to commence a mission to the Hebrew people in Toronto, with the privilege of extending the work elsewhere in Canada as the circumstances may warrant.”⁶ A special committee was formed under Rev. John McPherson Scott of St. John’s Church, Riverdale, in Toronto’s east end. He was charged with setting up an outreach to the growing Jewish community in Toronto.

Scott was a tall, beloved great-hearted leader with a reputation for getting things done. (A local Jewish mission had already started with his help.) With typical efficiency, he took leadership of the committee in September 1907, and by the end of December he was able to recommend a promising missionary candidate: Mr. Sabati Benjamin (Ben) Rohold, then employed by a similar ministry in Glasgow.

Numerous photos of the period show Ben Rohold as a studious-looking figure with round wire-rimmed glasses.⁷ His contemporaries respected his diligent, unpretentious and genuinely spiritual character and admired his intellectual gifts. (He grew up speaking Hebrew to his father, Spanish to his mother, Arabic to the children on his street, German to his tutor in secular studies, fluent English as a Christian minister and Yiddish for preaching and personal ministry.)⁸ In April 1915, the first international conference to form an international alliance of Hebrew Christians in North America was held in Toronto, and out of all the dignitaries he was elected president.⁹ He became the first editor of that organization’s quarterly journal, was a writer and editor of books and wrote for numerous other leading missionary publications. Whenever Morris and Annie spoke of him to their children it was with sincere reverence.¹⁰

Born and raised in Jerusalem, the son and grandson of distinguished rabbis, Rohold had a thoroughly traditional Jewish education, including rabbinical training and extensive Talmudic studies. An encounter with a Christian missionary on the Mount of Olives (according to his personal account they began their discussion in the Garden of Gethsemane) led Rohold to the firm belief that Jesus of Nazareth is the Jewish Messiah. After weighing the costs of his decision over a period of years, he made an irreversible break from his parents and left for Great Britain; Rohold was only 21. A few years later, after graduating from Glasgow Bible College, he began to work in the local Jewish mission. Rohold had been there seven years when the Canadians offered him the position of mission superintendent, ordination, an annual salary of $1,200 and full provision for moving expenses (which largely meant shipping his books). By March 1908 he had arrived in Toronto.¹¹

Rohold’s storefront mission opened on Monday, April 6, 1908, in the centre of the Ward at 156 Teraulay Street (now Bay Street) at Elm. A number of the city’s leading Presbyterians were there for encouragement, but there were other visitors more openly doubtful of the enterprise. In his book Missions to the Jews (1918), Rohold describes listening to their comments. “Some gave us a lease of life of three months, six months and the most generous ‘one year.’ But the good Lord was pleased to put the seal of Divine approval on the work.”¹²

Scott and his committee were willing to be patient. Jewish ministries were expected to make slow progress. The Eastern European immigrants were isolated by the Yiddish language, a hybrid form of Hebrew and low German. They saw no difference between the Presbyterians and churches that had been persecuting them for the past millennia. A few of the young Jewish leaders had prepared their own welcome for the Mission; they set up a lookout to write down the names of anyone going in or out of the storefront. So when success came relatively quickly, it far exceeded the expectations of Rohold’s superiors. Within five years there was not only a regular flow of traffic through the Mission doors but even a small, vibrant Hebrew Christian Presbyterian congregation.

Rohold envisioned a mission caring for a wide array of needs, reaching “the whole Jewish family.” Comfortable reading rooms were stocked with newspapers in Yiddish from Europe and New York. Free services included night schools that taught English to separate classes of men and women, Sabbath schools, boys and girls clubs, recreation activities and a summer camp. A man of inexhaustible energy, Rohold visited widely in the community, distributing tracts and holding open-air services. On the Sabbath, he preached from the back of a wagon at Elizabeth and Agnes (Dundas St.), where Jewish families strolled after synagogue. (The practice wasn’t endearing to local Jewry or the press, although typical of missions at the time.)

The eventual key to success wasn’t in Rohold’s original plans. When he began visiting local residents, many were despairing and depressed by the shabby housing and unsanitary conditions. Frequently he heard “No one cares for us.” While sharing the remarks with his volunteers, one of the women suggested he seek the aid of a retired druggist, Mr. T. C. Wilmott, who in turn enlisted the assistance of a physician, Dr. A. C. McClennan. Their services attracted an unusual level of attention, and after a free dispensary opened on May 1, 1908, and then a free medical clinic, the Mission never looked back.

Success didn’t simply rely on the missionary’s rigorous personal schedule. Here we see the authentic qualities that Rohold demanded of himself:

In order to reach the Jewish people with the message of love, we must show them the reality of our message…The character, devotedness and spiritual power of the missionaries is really what a mission represents. The message that has entered their own life and soul is now entrusted to them, and this they must proclaim and exhibit in their life.¹³

These are the selfless values of faith that Morris and Annie chose to adopt and placed at the centre of their ministry.

From the beginning, the Mission gave meticulous reports to the presbytery. In Rohold’s first year, the clinic treated 3,142 cases, 43 babies were vaccinated, 242 home visits were made to the sick, and 41 of those were maternity cases. Eventually a women’s clinic was opened. By 1911, six doctors and a nurse were donating time to the Mission. Some practical assistance was offered, including rent subsidies and coal supplies.

In the fall of 1908, Rohold was ordained at Knox Church on Spadina Avenue. Meanwhile, demand for services on Teraulay Street was expanding far beyond the capacity of a storefront. An unfortunate incident in June 1911 would only briefly hamper Rohold’s best efforts, although it would remain a memorable chapter for the Jewish community.¹⁴ After another local missionary had made anti-Semitic comments that received wide circulation, Rohold’s regular Sunday afternoon open-air service incited a violent riot. The front page of The Toronto Daily Star’s late edition on Monday, June 19, featured a photo of the Presbyterian missionary in tabs and collar. The opening paragraph led with this statement:

“I come from Jerusalem, the home of the prophets who were stoned, and I shall preach as long as breath is in me. Preach I must and preach I will.”

This was the declaration made to The Star this morning by the Rev. S. B. Rohold, the Presbyterian missionary who was preaching when the riot began in the Ward last night. Mr. Rohold looked perfectly fresh this morning…He is a gentleman under middle age with short dark hair and flashing eyes. He is full of fire and enthusiasm.¹⁵

He promised “to be on the same spot, Saturday and Sunday, preaching the word.” Rohold denied that either his preaching or his work was an attack on the Jewish religion. “I simply preach Christianity,” he said. He also spoke of the ministry plans to erect a new building that would allow the work to go on with “renewed vigor.”

Scott’s committee had secured land on the southeast corner of Elm and Elizabeth Streets and began construction on an impressive three-storey brick building to be called the Christian Synagogue at 165 Elizabeth Street. It’s interesting that Rev. Rohold, in his interview, could already provide the final cost, which was $35,000 including the property.

The site boasted all the facilities needed to fulfill the missionary’s vision: specialized rooms for the clinic and dispensary, activity space, reading rooms and a good-sized meeting hall for the Hebrew Christian congregation formed in 1913. It became one of the leading mission sites in North America. Doors were open from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. every day but Monday (the workers’ rest day). Rohold’s 1918 book includes a series of excellent black and white prints of the building. A candid photo of congregants in their meeting room shows the words, “To the Jew first” (Romans 1:16) on the front wall.¹⁶ Unfortunately, the impressive brick building is now gone, and the site has been absorbed into the campus of the Hospital for Sick Children, but this is where Annie and Morris first crossed paths—and swords.