Winkler’s beginnings were much humbler than its present city status and reputation as a bustling and thriving industrial, retail, and service centre. It became a fledgling village in 1892 when William Cornelius van Horne, the energetic head of the Canadian Pacific Railway, authorized the construction of a railway spur some seven miles east of Morden and eight miles west of Plum Coulee. The railway changed the economic prospects for Mennonite farmers who lived in the villages that dotted the territory between the railway tracks and the international boundary. Winkler became an immediate and formidable competitor to the primarily Anglo-Celtic town of Morden just down the track. Farmers, who lived in the most heavily populated townships just south of where Valentine Winkler’s village would spring up, now had a shorter distance to the elevator, the store, and the bank.

By the time Winkler was established the migration of Jews from eastern Europe was underway and soon Jewish merchants settled in the village. For a period of about forty years Jews and Mennonites would interact in Winkler as neighbours, business partners, customers, school mates, and competitors. Mennonite-Jewish relations were complex and shaped by the conflicting mentalities of the market-shy Mennonites of the rural villages, and of the more liberal and business-oriented Mennonites who put up stores alongside their Jewish competitors. The relationship would change over time as each community experienced its own internal developments. In the case of Mennonites, the outmigration of a large number of conservative Mennonites from the rural villages and the in-migration of new Mennonites to Winkler’s Main Street created a new dynamic. In the case of Winkler’s Jewish population, a loss of orthodoxy, the pull of the Jewish cultural and religious life offered by the much larger Jewish community in Winnipeg, and the emphasis on greater educational opportunities shaped relations with their Mennonite neighbours.¹

The Mennonite West Reserve was one of the most populated rural areas of Manitoba in the 1890s and the villages of Mennonites south of Winkler constituted the most densely settled area of the reserve. The people who had settled south of Winkler were also the most conservative of Mennonites, and they wanted to maintain their agricultural villages as the form of community in which their religion could be practiced most faithfully. The village system supported their desire to remain separate from railway towns and the “worldliness” that was garishly on display in them. This way of life presented a golden opportunity for an intermediary who could bring them needed goods in exchange for their surplus products.

The Jews who settled in Winkler were ideally positioned for this role. Although peddling was a difficult task, Orthodox Russian Jews, who began arriving in the 1880s, undertook this work. As Henry Trachtenberg points out, Orthodox Jews were relegated to peddling because of a history of restrictions in Russia and their religious sensibilities. According to their faith, they “could not work or handle money on the Jewish Sabbath, embracing sundown Friday evening to sundown Saturday evening, and on the myriad of Jewish holy days.” In addition, their “dietary laws, involving, for example, the consumption of only kosher food and the separation of meat and milk products and utensils, also prevented Jews from becoming apprenticed in non-Jewish households.”² Jewish immigrants who started off as peddlers often managed to become merchants, and a considerable number of them established stores in Winkler. These Jewish business owners often employed relatives and acquaintances from their home shtetls in eastern Europe as peddlers. Eastern European Ashkenazi Jews were also ideal intermediaries because their language, Yiddish, was close enough to Mennonite Low German that they could conduct business with Mennonite women on the village street without undue misunderstandings.

In 1893, Finkelstein & Co. and Herman Steinkopf were the first Jews to establish stores in Winkler. Finkelstein & Co. completed their store in September; however, by January 1894 a partnership change caused them to sell it. The change likely signalled the beginnings of Isaac Greenblat’s general store since he was listed as a peddler living with the general merchant Calman Finkelstein in the 1891 census.³ Greenblat’s business appeared to start a chain migration into Winkler of relatives and other acquaintances from the Old World whose first activity was peddling. By 1901, out of a total population of 371, Winkler’s Jewish population was twenty-seven, about equal to that of the British group in the village.⁴

A web of intermarriages and old-world connections tied together Winkler’s Jewish families. For instance, Isaac Greenblat’s wife Sarah and Aron Nitikman’s wife Etta were sisters. Their brother, Phillip Silver, was a peddler working for his brother-in-law, Isaac Greenblat. Chia, Aron and Joseph Nitikman’s sister, was married to Max Buchwald. Isaac Sirluck originated from the same village, Teofipol, in western Ukraine, as Aaron Cohen, and once in Winkler he married Joseph Nitikman’s oldest daughter, Ruchel. When Isaac Sirluck suffered an accident while peddling, he joined his father-in-law’s general store and the firm became Nitikman & Sirluck.⁵

Out of necessity, Jewish peddlers developed a keen sense of the needs and preferences of their female Mennonite customers. They also had a strong knowledge of the market for the products they took in exchange. Using the stores in Winkler as a base, Jewish peddlers loaded up their modified democrat wagons on a Sunday evening to begin a route of Mennonite villages early on Monday morning. Jimmy Greenblat, the son of Isaac and Sara Greenblat, remembered how his peddler relatives “were sent out every Monday morning in box-like covered wagons filled with dress goods and household items, for which they accepted butter and eggs as pay.” Fridays were not such a pleasant memory for the young boy. As he recalled, “Because Saturday was a Jewish holiday, observed in its entirety, those days, the peddlers always returned Friday afternoon, and we youngsters had to unpack into cases the eggs they had stored under the big box they sat on as they drove. I hated the stooping for hours.”⁶

The arrival of the peddler was an important occasion in the Mennonite village, especially for women. The peddler made his way down the street bartering with the village women who needed cloth, thread and buttons, replacement cutlery or kitchen utensils, and spices. These goods would be exchanged for chickens, eggs, and produce from the Mennonite housewife’s large garden. Haggling was an accepted part of the process, and after the peddler left, Mennonite women compared notes to check whether they had received the “market price.” It was also customary for the peddler to exchange some thread or other household goods for a meal or a night’s accommodation, provided he could trust the Mennonite housewife to observe his religious dietary rules. With the peddler coming to their door the more conservative Mennonite households could avoid the railway towns and still have access to goods.

Interactions between Mennonites and Jews in the villages south of Winkler were almost exclusively about business. The conservative Mennonites of the villages only wanted to interact with their Jewish peddlers to gain access to the market. Mennonites knew little of the Jewish peddler’s life when he left their village and went home to his family. They had no aspirations of proselytizing. Centuries of agreements with European rulers not to foment religious conflict by striving to convert others to their form of Christianity had made them inward-looking. These Mennonites were not mission oriented; their aim was to conserve the faith of their community and its descendants. And the peddler was perfectly happy with this arrangement. While he needed to be an astute observer of Mennonite sensibilities as they related to the goods he offered for sale – would the shawl be too colourful or the wrong print? – he did not desire any more knowledge of his Mennonite clientele. Both groups respected each other’s desire to be separate from the host society and from each other.

The interaction between Jewish merchant families and their Mennonite neighbours in Winkler had a different character. While in the rural areas the Jewish peddler fulfilled the role of intermediary, which suited the market-shy Mennonites, in Winkler the Jewish merchant was a formidable competitor for his Mennonite counterpart. Valentine Winkler purchased the land for the future site of the village that would share his name for two reasons: pressure from his Mennonite clientele for a closer grain delivery point, and significant interest from Mennonites who wanted to become merchants.

Just before the establishment of the village of Winkler, religious reform ideas had swept through the Mennonite West Reserve. These ideas contributed to the formation of two new groups, the Mennonite Brethren and the Bergthaler. Both groups adopted North American religious innovations such as Sunday schools. Bernard Loewen, who would become the first storeowner in the new village of Winkler in 1892, belonged to the Bergthaler group and was an avid supporter of Sunday schools.⁷ Loewen was a part of the more liberal-oriented Mennonites. These Mennonites were much more inclined to live in railway towns, to adopt new innovations such as electricity and public schools, and to participate in civic affairs. Initially, Main Street featured a rich mixture of Mennonite, Jewish, German, and Anglo-Celtic merchants. By the early 1900s, the Nitikman, Sirluck, Buchwald, Cohen, and other Jewish families had displaced many of the German and Anglo-Celtic merchants and were engaged in stiff competition with Mennonite merchants for the market of Mennonites living south of Winkler.

Competition between Mennonite and Jewish merchants was keen. In the early days, to curry favour with their Mennonite clientele some Jewish peddlers claimed to be associated with the Mennonite storekeeper Bernard Loewen. Loewen felt obliged to place a notice in the German- language newspaper, Der Nordwesten, assuring his Mennonite clientele in the villages that he did not have peddlers representing his store.⁸ But Loewen was unable to maintain his avoidance of peddling. He was forced to employ his own peddlers to stay ahead of his Jewish competitors. Mennonite merchants tried to capitalize on the vulnerability of their orthodox Jewish competitors by organizing sales when they knew they would be celebrating high holy days. When Jewish merchants were forced by necessity to adapt to Saturday shopping, they maintained Sabbath observance by employing Mennonite or German store clerks who could weigh the goods and make the financial exchange while they stood beside. The competition between Jewish and Mennonite merchants was tempered by their common desire to boost the community in the face of competition from other railway towns and mail-order catalogues. Sometimes that meant supporting competitors when they suffered losses. When one Mennonite merchant ran afoul of his church and was boycotted by other Mennonites, Jewish and German merchants tried to support his business by shopping at his store.⁹

Jewish merchants had an advantage over Mennonite businesses since Mennonite customers viewed them as more suitable creditors. For Mennonites it provided an opportunity to be in debt to someone who did not sit next to you on the church pew and who would keep your financial affairs to himself. Since remaining in debt to a Jewish merchant did not carry the same stigma as being in arrears to a fellow Mennonite, Jewish merchants sometimes struggled to collect these debts. At times they received help from visiting preachers. In the 1930s, the revival preacher I. G. Friesen visited Winkler. After a series of well-attended meetings in the village, Mennonites began appearing at Isacc Sirluck’s store to settle up old debts and in some cases even to pay for goods that they had “borrowed.” The Jewish businessowner was motivated to attend one of these meetings to see for himself how the speaker could effect such a change among his clientele. Sirluck is rumoured to have commented that Friesen could do things even the police and the courts could not achieve.¹⁰

The religious fervor of Mennonites, however, could also cause problems with their Jewish neighbours. The Bergthaler and Mennonite Brethren churches were inclined to challenge others in the community to accept their forms of Christian belief. This meant that Jews were sometimes the object of their proselytizing efforts. Although the motives are unclear on both sides, it seems some Jewish children attended the Sunday school held in the local train station by the stationmaster’s wife.¹¹ In 1920, the Mennonite Brethren church invited Hugo Spitzer, a missionary to the Jews, to speak in the community.¹² While such direct attempts to stimulate Jewish conversion were rare, for children who interacted in the village’s schools there was a sharp sense of difference. For example, Ernest Sirluck had unpleasant memories of being labeled as a “Christ killer” by taunting Mennonite classmates.¹³

On the whole, however, Jews and Mennonites lived in separate social, cultural, and religious worlds. To support their religious life, Jews built a synagogue on Sixth Street in the 1920s and for a time the community could support a shochet (butcher) and a chazan (cantor), who also acted as melamed (teacher). For most of their stay in Winkler, the Jewish community worked hard to maintain social connections to Jews elsewhere. Over time they increasingly looked forward to visits with family and friends in the growing Jewish community in Winnipeg. There was almost no social contact between Mennonite and Jewish adults, although some Mennonite and German young people would light the fires in Jewish homes on the Sabbath or became servants in the homes of the upwardly mobile Jewish merchant families. Most other social contact was on the level of participation in the local literary society, where people could interact without religious implications.¹⁴ Marriage between Jews and Mennonites was unthinkable, and parents from both groups wanted to keep it that way. As the Jewish community gradually lost its orthodox orientation, Jewish merchants began participating more actively in the community’s civic life. Here too, however, the division of civic duties fell along ethnic lines. Invariably it was the Jewish village councillor who was charged with approaching a reticent Jewish taxpayer or challenging his fellow Jews to organize the care of a Jewish woman suffering from mental illness. It was the Mennonite councillors who had to approach the local Mennonite church to share in the cost of relief for a needy member the church employed as a janitor.¹⁵

By the 1930s Winkler’s Jewish community was in decline. This era opened up new possibilities for Mennonite-Jewish interaction. Many Jewish merchants converted their trusted long-term Mennonite staff into business partners when they moved to Winnipeg. Nitikman & Sirluck eventually became Sirluck & Janzen and then Janzen’s Department Store. The land that Isaac Sirluck had acquired when some of the most conservative Mennonites moved to Mexico in the 1920s was rented to Mennonite farmers and gradually most of it returned to Mennonite ownership.

The 1930s would also prove to be the most difficult for Mennonite-Jewish relations. Mennonites who emigrated from Russia in the 1920s tended to associate communism with Judaism. They also were pro-German, and with the rise of Hitler, some were attracted to fascism. William Whittaker created the fascist Canadian Nationalist Party, which was based in Winnipeg, and whose newspaper was printed by the Mennonitische Rundschau printing house owned by a Mennonite, Herman H. Neufeld.¹⁶ P. H. Neufeld from Winkler wrote to the Rundschau suggesting that “here in our little town a movement is becoming noticeable. Hitler is known as a striving, Christian young man, and we hope that the same qualities are present in the local organization of the Canadian Nationalists.”¹⁷ Whittaker drew a crowd of 350 at a meeting in Winkler on December 3, 1933, and for a time Winkler had a local branch of the party.¹⁸ Ernest Sirluck recalls that Nazi newspapers appeared in Winkler’s public spaces and a broad cross-section of the community flirted with fascist ideas. When confronted with the implications of joining Whitaker’s party, Jack Funk assured Ernest Sirluck that there was “nothing personal in it.”¹⁹ This confrontation shows that many Mennonites distinguished “their” Jews from the ones that were the object of fascist scorn. The attraction of Nazi ideas, however, would die out quickly and when the war broke out most Mennonites retreated from these views.

The interaction of Jews and Mennonites in this region occurred in a specific moment of each group’s history. They both sought to follow strong cultural imperatives by staying isolated from other groups. Religious reasons were paramount for this separateness. Orthodox Jews wanted to maintain dietary restrictions and avoid intermarriage, while the more conservative Mennonites viewed the railway town as representing a secular world that would encroach on their religious life. As Jews and some Mennonites lost their desire for absolute isolation, participation in each other’s lives increased, particularly in the village of Winkler. In Winkler, civic, school, and to some extent non-religious social life provided venues for interaction outside of the commercial sphere. These interactions were mainly congenial, although circumscribed. During the 1930s, new challenges in the relationship between these groups emerged as some Mennonites flirted with Nazi ideas. By 1946 the census recorded no Jews in Winkler, although the Jewish merchant Max Gladstone continued to spend at least some time in the town for a few more years, and the Gladstone Mall would bear his name long after Mennonites had assumed control of the business.

1. Portions of this article were published as “More Than Just Business: An Historical Overview of Jewish-Mennonite Relations in Winkler,” in Jewish Life and Times: A Collection of Essays, ed. Daniel Stone and Annalee Greenberg, vol. 9 (Winnipeg: Jewish Historical Society of Western Canada, 2009), 19–35, and in Chapter Two of Hans Werner, Living Between Worlds: A History of Winkler (Winkler: Winkler Historical Society, 2006). ↩︎
2. Henry Trachtenberg, “Peddling, Politics, and Winnipeg’s Jews, 1891–1895: The Political Acculturation of an Urban Immigrant Community,” Histoire sociale/Social History 29, no. 57 (1996): 164. ↩︎
3. Census of Canada, 1891, Library and Archives Canada, Item #181183; Der Nordwesten, September 15, 1893, and May 24, 1894. ↩︎
4. Census of Canada, 1901. ↩︎
5. Ernest Sirluck, First Generation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 5–6; Harold Buchwald, “Observations,” in Stone and Greenberg, 35. ↩︎
6. Jim Greenblat, “My Autobiography – From Jimmy to Jim,” http://www.permeable.com/geneology/jimmy.html, accessed February 18, 2002. Since moved to www.ancestry.com. ↩︎
7. Loewen was part of a more liberal group of Mennonites that had migrated from the East Reserve to the less well-drained eastern portion of the West Reserve. ↩︎
8. Der Nordwesten, May 28, 1896. ↩︎
9. Frank Brown, A History of Winkler (Winkler: by the author, 1974), 129. ↩︎
10. Brown, History of Winkler, 36–37. ↩︎
11. Werner, Living Between Worlds, 44. ↩︎
12. The Morden Times, November 4, 1920. ↩︎
13. Sirluck, First Generation, 8. ↩︎
14. Werner, Living Between Worlds, 45. ↩︎
15. “Town of Winkler Minutes,” May 5, 1936. ↩︎
16. See for instance the documentary Paper Nazis, written and directed by Andrew Wall, Farpoint Films, 2011. ↩︎
17. Quoted in Benjamin Wall Redekop, “The German Identity of Mennonite Brethren Immigrants in Canada, 1930–1960” (Master’s thesis, University of British Columbia, 1990), 31. See also Werner, Living Between Worlds, 76. ↩︎
18. Morden Times, December 6, 1933, and December 13, 1933. ↩︎
19. Sirluck, First Generation, 22. ↩︎