5787 Simchat Torah Honorees

 
 
My deep connection to the Congregation Shaar Hashomayim is rooted in endings and new beginnings. My dad, Léo Klag, of blessed memory, somehow found the Shaar in the late 1940s. This was around the same time that Rabbi Schuchat, of blessed memory, exactly the same age as my dad, joined the Shaar. My dad was in Montreal not by choice, but as a result of a little-known story of thousands of German Jewish refugees who were protected and interned in the U.K., then sent to Canada by boat in 1940 after the onset of World War II. Winston Churchill decided that their presence in the U.K. would no longer be safe for Great Britain or for the refugees. Whereas Canada was meant to offer them refuge, it instead interned them as prisoners of war in multiple internment camps across Canada, fearing that some might be spies. My dad, along with so many others, arrived in Quebec City, was stripped of his belongings, his identification papers and his rights, and was imprisoned at Île au Noix in St. Jean sur Richelieu. He was 20 years old.