We knew practically nothing about Canada when we arrived. Ontario was emphatically Anglo-Saxon and Protestant. Although Canada did not want to admit many immigrants and least of all Jews, the population was friendly, mostly in a superficial way, and few people had the slightest notion of why we had come. How anti-Semitic Canada was at that time and how few Jews had succeeded in immigrating there is documented in the book, None Is too Many by Harold Troper and Irving Abella. The title is the literal answer that the Canadian director of immigration F. C. Blair gave to the question as to how many Jews should be admitted.
The first question we were generally asked was, “How do you like this country?” and the second was, “What church do you go to?” Before the outbreak of the war in 1939, more of our people came to Canada, many with my fathers help. Many denied more or less emphatically that they were Jews. Some pretended to be Catholic, not realizing that in Ontario Catholics were not very popular. At that time I had little tolerance for these efforts to “pass ” Now I understand that they knew little or nothing about Jewish religion and history, and wanted to spare their children the experience of anti-Semitic prejudices. Those who remained Jewish attended, at first occasionally and then more and more regularly, the Hamilton Reform synagogue.
Source: Wilma and Georg Iggers, Two Lives in Uncertain Times, New York: Berghahn Books, 2006, p. 18