History - Jewish Canadian service in the Second World War

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Service in the army

The Canadian Army was the largest branch of our country’s military during the Second World War and, not surprisingly, most Jewish Canadians who served in the conflict were among the approximately 700,000 men and women in its ranks. An estimated 10,250 Jewish soldiers served in a wide variety of roles and saw action in every major engagement in which Canadian troops participated.

Many Jewish men, like Murray Bleeman of Toronto, Jack Faibish of Markinch, Saskatchewan and Max Berger of Sarnia, Ontario—young and eager to do their part to help defeat the German regime—joined the rapidly expanding Canadian Army during the opening phases of the war. Some Jewish volunteers, including Torontonians Barney Danson and Ben Dunkelman, would soon find themselves among the Canadian troops stationed in the United Kingdom to help defend the island nation against invasion—a very real threat in 1940 after much of Western Europe had been conquered by the German armies.

In the fall of 1941, Canada sent almost 2,000 soldiers to Hong Kong to help defend the British colony in East Asia. It would prove to be one of our country’s darkest chapters of the entire Second World War. Japanese troops invaded on December 8, 1941, and Jewish soldiers, like William Allister of Montréal, Hymie Greenberg of Spedden, Alberta, and David Golden of Winnipeg, were among the Canadians who bravely held out for two-and-a-half weeks against a much larger, battle-hardened enemy before finally being forced to surrender on December 25. Some 290 Canadians, including Greenberg, were killed in the fighting there and the remainder, including Allister and Golden, would spend more than three-and-a-half years in harsh Japanese prisoner-of-war camps—an ordeal that cost another 260 Canadian lives before the war finally came to an end and they were liberated.

The Canadian Army’s next big operation would also prove to have a devastating outcome. On August 19, 1942, almost 5,000 Canadians came ashore in occupied France on beaches around the French seaside town of Dieppe. Jewish soldiers, like David Hart of Montréal, Maxwell London of Toronto and Maurice Waldman of Assiniboia, Saskatchewan, would be part of the action. Planned to be a raid to test German defences, gain experience in mounting amphibious landings and gather intelligence on enemy communications, it ended in disaster as the German defenders took a devastating toll on the Allied troops as they came ashore. In the end, 916 Canadians would lose their lives in the Dieppe Raid and some 1,950 more, including London and Waldman, would be captured and spend the rest of the war in German prisoner-of-war camps.

The Canadian Army would learn valuable lessons from these early setbacks, and this hard-won experience would begin to pay dividends when our soldiers swung into action for the first time in a large-scale campaign in Europe. In July 1943, our troops were among the Allied invasion force that came ashore on the island of Sicily in the Mediterranean Sea. It was the opening move of what would prove to be 20 months of Canadian efforts in the Italian Campaign. Jewish soldiers, like Sam Sheps of Winnipeg, Carl Fried of Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, and David Devor of Toronto, faced off against skilled German defenders in a challenging environment that ranged from hot and dusty plains to snowy, rugged mountains crisscrossed by river valleys that made advancing a constant, deadly struggle.

The contributions of Jewish servicemen in Italy could be dramatic. Mitch Sterlin of Montréal led a heroic Canadian stand near Ortona and has a building named after him there called Sterlin Castle. A painting of him and the “castle” he helped defend is at the Canadian War Museum. Sam Boroditsky of Winnipeg was a medic with the elite joint Canadian-American commando team called the First Special Service Force—better known as the “Devil’s Brigade.” He took part in one of the most dramatic episodes of the war when his unit captured Monte la Difensa, a key German mountaintop defensive position southeast of Rome, during heavy fighting in December 1943.

One of the most famous chapters of the Second World War took place on June 6, 1944—a date that would become known as D-Day. Some 14,000 Canadian soldiers came ashore at Juno Beach in France, including Fred “Guts” Harris of Toronto who was the first one out of his landing craft at Bernières-sur-Mer and was immediately cut down by German fire. D-Day would only be the opening blow of the hard-fought Battle of Normandy, which pitted the Allied attackers trying to expand their beachhead in occupied France against the determined German defenders who sought to hurl the Allied forces back into the sea.

Joe Gertel of Montréal, Jack Marshall of Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, and Abram "Moe" Arbour of Narcisse, Manitoba, were among the Canadian soldiers who saw action in the liberation of France that raged in the late spring and summer of 1944. Dick Steele of Toronto (born Moishe Kosowatsky in Montréal) was a union leader who volunteered to become a member of a Canadian tank crew, which saw heavy fighting in closing the Falaise Gap in August 1944 during the final phases of the fighting in Normandy. The Allies would triumph in the liberation of France, but Steele would not live to see this victory; he was killed when his tank was hit by German fire on August 17, 1944.

The Battle of the Scheldt would be the next major action for the Canadian Army in Northwest Europe. This bloody struggle, one of the most bitter of the entire war, would rage in Belgium and the Netherlands in the fall of 1944. The major Belgian port of Antwerp had been captured intact by Allied forces and was sorely needed as a shipping facility to unload the many supplies the Allies would require to defeat the German forces. The challenge was that the enemy still controlled the banks of the Scheldt estuary, which lay between Antwerp and the open sea. Our troops, including Jewish soldiers like Samuel Moses "Moe" Hurwitz of Lachine, Quebec (an elite hockey player back home), were tasked with pushing German forces from the Scheldt. It would take weeks of hard fighting in a flat landscape crisscrossed by canals, dikes and flooded lowlands for our troops to successfully carry out this important mission. Sergeant Hurwitz was shot and killed after getting out of his damaged tank in the Scheldt in late October 1944.

The Netherlands and Germany would be the scene of Canadian soldiers’ final wartime battles on European soil in the winter and spring of 1945. The Battle of the Rhineland saw Canadian forces push into western Germany in a series of operations beginning in late February, and the liberation campaign in the Netherlands went into full swing in April. It was the climax of the conflict for Canadian forces as our troops freed Dutch town after Dutch town in the long-suffering country that had been occupied by German forces for almost five years. While the war took a hard toll on our soldiers until the bitter end, Jewish Veterans, like Gerald Levenston of Toronto, spoke of the relief and satisfaction that accompanied the German surrender. Lieutenant Colonel Levenston was assigned the task of being a Canadian representative at a surrender ceremony on May 5, 1945. He also had the opportunity to curtly instruct the defeated German troops in his area on “what they could and could not do.”

Did you know?

Jews would play a wide variety of roles in the Canadian Army, some of them not what you might expect for a soldier in uniform. Johnny Wayne and Frank Shuster, two young Jewish comedians from Toronto, enlisted in 1941 and entertained the troops both in the “Canadian Army Radio Show” broadcast from Montréal, and in live variety shows around Canada and the United Kingdom. After the Allies landed in Normandy in 1944, they were soon sent to tour in Northwest Europe with their aptly named “Invasion Review” where they entertained weary troops looking for a break from the stresses of the front line.