Yaacov Zipper - Jewish Peretz School

1925 - 1939
3620-3622 Rue de Bullion

Yaacov Zipper, Jewish educator, noted fiction writer and prolific journal keeper, was born in 1900 in the small Polish town of Shebreshin. Son of Rabbi Avrom Shtern, who was an author of Talmudic commentaries and a Hasidic shochet (ritual slaughterer), Zipper received his early education in Yiddish and Hebrew, and was exposed to biblical and Talmudic texts and traditional Hasidic stories that he later referred to in many of his adult writings.

As a young man Zipper became concerned with what he saw as a direct conflict between traditional shtetl values and invading forces from the modern world, and embraced Labour Zionism as the only hope for transcending the limitations of shtetl life while simultaneously retaining the unique features of the Jewish tradition. Unable to secure a visa to move to Palestine, Zipper came to Montreal in 1925; his new wife, Sorke, and her family followed soon after.

Zipper immediately gained work as a teacher at the Yiddish-oriented Peretz School, and became its principal in 1928, a position he held until his retirement in 1971. For Zipper, the Jewish community could only survive the perils of the modern world by clinging to the Yiddish language as something around which all Jews could associate.

Zipper maintained his commitment to Labour Zionist ideology through actively participating with the local chapter of the Poale Zion, and continued to refer to his fellow radicals as chaverim. (friends or comrades) until the end of his life. He also became involved with the Canadian Jewish Congress, the Jewish Public Library, and wrote regularly for the Keneder Adler.

When Zipper died in 1982, it was discovered that he had regularly recorded his thoughts and experiences in a journal starting in 1950. The Journals of Yaacov Zipper (published in 2004) affords the reader an incomparable view into the daily life of one of Montreal’s foremost intellectual figures and the schools he ran, as well as into the life of the community at large. It also tells the sad if remarkable story about the abrupt decline of the Yiddish language after World War II, and in what ways the Jewish community, in both Montreal and around the world, has suffered in the process.

Compiled by Richard Kreitner.

Links

Liens

"Jacob Zipper Collection" - Canadian Jewish Heritage Network
"The Work of a Worthy Diarist" - Forward

Sources

Anctil, Pierre and Mervin Butovsky and Ira Robinson. An Everyday Miracle: Yiddish Culture in Montreal. Montreal: Véhicule Press, 1990.

Butovsky, Mervin and Ode Garfinkle. The Journals of Yaacov Zipper. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004.

Margolis, Rebecca. “Negotiating Jewish Canadian Identity: Montreal Yiddish Literary Journals in the Interwar Period.” Shofar 27.4 (2009): 24-49.

*Images courtesy of the Jewish Public Library Archives.

Media

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