Too many people don’t understand why small communities struggle so much to maintain themselves. They don’t understand the role demographics plays in keeping small Jewish communities alive and vibrant. When St. Catharines first started to grow as a community, many of the original founding families were very large. On this page, above, you see the Rachmiel Nadell family and they had six children in the early years. Below, you see the Abe Newman family and they had five children. In both bases, as the children grew up almost all of them left St. Catharines. In each case, one child stayed behind and began his own family. But there were families like the Caplans and the Katzmans and the Herzogs that came here as young adults and each married and began families of their own which had more than a couple of children. Over the next few weeks and months I’ll be posting pictures of those same children and the activities that brought them together as a community.
Today, however, things are very different. Young couples today, if we are lucky, have one or two children only, not the four or five or six of a generation ago. I said if we are lucky because all too often, statistically, we know that many couples don’t have any children at all. That’s because they don’t want to or they are more interested in their careers, or their marriages don’t last long enough. In the Niagara region there are also a lot of young people who are singles and stay that way. Papers are filled with stories of kids who live with their parents, or share housing with other aging singles, with no intention whatsoever of settling down and starting a family.
These sorts of trends have profound effects on the Jewish community. Oftentimes, the only reason people come together around a Jewish community is to ensure that their children are educated. It has always been a problem of middle-aged folks leaving synagogue membership behind once their kids are all finished with the bar and bat mitzvah phase and teenager meeting and matchmaking. They leave the bosom of the synagogue family and make their way on their own, uninterested in religion or social events of a community. We can look back at those families of a hundred years ago and wish we could turn the clock back.
