The Kiever Synagogue: The Wave That Stayed

The Kiever Synagogue stands at 25 Bellevue Avenue, on the west side of the street, one block south of College. Twin domes. Round-arched windows. Yellow brick. Style: Byzantine revival, an architectural choice the congregation made on purpose. The Kiever Synagogue is the only surviving market synagogue in continuous use, the first Jewish-significance building designated under the Ontario Heritage Act, and the architectural evidence that the Jewish wave through Kensington never fully left.

Most tourists who walk through Kensington Market do not stop here. The building is not part of the market's commercial face. Friday nights, the door is open, the cantor sings, and the market closes around it.

The congregation arrived from Kiev

The First Russian Congregation of Rodfei Sholom Anshe Kiev (its full name) was founded in 1912 by Jewish immigrants who had arrived in Toronto after the pogroms of the 1880s and 1890s in what was then the Russian Empire. The name Kiev points to the home most members had left. The early congregation rented prayer halls on Centre Avenue in the Ward, the old Jewish quarter that ran along what is now Bay Street between Queen and College. By the late 1910s, the community was moving west, following the wave that built Kensington Avenue as a Jewish street market in the years after the First World War.

The lot at 25 Bellevue was purchased in 1917. Fundraising for a building of their own took most of a decade. Construction ran from 1924 to 1927. The architect was Benjamin Swartz, a Toronto practitioner who specialized in synagogues and commercial buildings for the Jewish community in this period. Swartz's choice of Byzantine revival was deliberate. The style read as Eastern, as ancient, as Jewish in a way that the Romanesque revival favoured by Toronto's mainline Protestant churches did not. The twin domes are the legible signal. They were meant to be read from the corner of College and Bellevue, against a streetscape of Edwardian houses and Anglican parishes, and to say something different.

The wave that left

Most synagogues that operated in and around Kensington in the 1920s and 1930s do not survive in use. The peak Jewish population of the market and its surrounds was reached in the late 1930s, with more than thirty congregations operating between Spadina and Bathurst, College and Dundas. After the Second World War, the wave moved. Forest Hill, North York, the Bathurst corridor above Eglinton. The suburbs that opened up with the postwar construction boom and the cars to reach them. The synagogues followed the people. Most of the small congregations dissolved or merged or built new sanctuaries in the suburbs and left the Kensington buildings to be sold off, converted, or demolished.

The Kiever did not move. Neither did the Anshei Minsk Synagogue, six blocks south at 10 Saint Andrew Street. The Anshei Minsk burned in 2002 and the community rebuilt it by subscription. Both buildings carry the same lesson: a congregation that decides not to leave is the only mechanism by which a building of this kind survives the wave moving past it.

The 1979 designation

On the east wall of the Kiever, a black plaque under the Ontario Heritage Trust mark records the building's designation under the Ontario Heritage Act in 1979. The designating instrument is Toronto Bylaw 538-79. The Kiever was the first Jewish-significance building so designated in the Province of Ontario.

That superlative carries more weight than it sounds. The Ontario Heritage Act had been passed in 1975. By 1979, the heritage register was being populated with the canonical Anglo-civic and ecclesiastical buildings the early heritage movement understood as the architectural record of the province. Old City Hall (designated 1974 under the predecessor regime). The St. James Cathedral. The legislative buildings at Queen's Park. The Kiever was the building that broke the pattern. A purpose-built immigrant synagogue, designed by a Jewish architect for a refugee congregation, on a Kensington side street, was put on the same statutory list as the Anglican cathedral. The heritage register began to recognize a different Toronto with that designation, and the Kiever was where the recognition started.

Why the building's survival is not an accident

The Kiever has been operating continuously since 1927. That is a hundred years next year. No other purpose-built synagogue in the market neighbourhood has matched that. The reason is not architectural quality, though Swartz's building is well built. The reason is the congregation's decision, repeated across three generations, not to follow the wave to the suburbs.

That decision had a cost. The membership base shrank from the market's peak. The building required active maintenance through decades when the surrounding neighbourhood was being remade by Portuguese immigration, then Caribbean and Latin American settlement, then the long Bohemianism of the market in the 1980s and 1990s, then the gentrification pressure of the 2000s and 2010s. The Kiever held on through all of it. Friday-night services continued. Bar mitzvahs continued. The High Holidays continued.

In 2008 the congregation completed a significant restoration of the interior. Original 1920s stencilled wall paintings, which had been overpainted in mid-century renovations, were uncovered and conserved. Light fixtures from the original installation were rebuilt. The exterior brickwork was repointed. The work was funded by a combination of the congregation, the City of Toronto heritage grant program, and Ontario heritage funds. The restoration completed the loop the 1979 designation began. The building was saved by a community that refused to leave, and then preserved by the statutory framework that community had helped pry open.

What to look for

Stand on the east sidewalk of Bellevue Avenue, directly across from the building. The full facade reads from here: twin domes, central round-arched window with a Star of David in the upper light, smaller arched windows flanking, the yellow brick stretching from the ground line to the cornice. The brick is local. The mortar is consistent. The dome covering is copper, weathered to a green that catches the late-afternoon sun when the light comes off Bellevue Square Park to the east.

Look at the east wall, on the south side, where the door used by the congregation is. The heritage plaque is mounted there, under the Ontario Heritage Trust mark. The plaque names the architect, the year, the congregation, the designation. It does not record the names of the founding members, who arrived from Kiev between the 1880s and the 1910s. The Ontario Jewish Archives at the Sherman Campus on Bathurst holds the membership rolls and the original photographs.

The Kensington walk passes the Kiever as one of seven or eight stops. Most visitors do not slow at the door. The door does not advertise itself. On a Friday before sundown in any month of the year, you would see members of the congregation arriving for the evening service. They walk past the falafel shop, past the vintage clothing stalls, past the cheese counter, past the lineup at the bakery. The market does not stop. Neither does the building.

The Kiever is the architectural form of a community that did not follow the wave out. The wave moved north. The building stayed. The plaque on the east wall is the only sign on the street that says so.