A new initiative is asking Canadian Jews to make history by writing essays about their childhoods that will be stored in Canada’s largest Jewish archive.
The Canadian Jewish Life Writing Project is meant to empower Jews to write first-person accounts about the diversity and undocumented realities of Jewish life in Canada. The Association for Canadian Jewish Studies (ACJS), which runs conferences, lectures and an academic journal for Canadian Jewish scholars, launched a call for submissions at the end of April 2026.
ACJS executive director Joshua Tapper says the project was inspired by a Polish writing contest from the 1930s that collected more than 600 autobiographical stories from Polish Jewish youth. Members of YIVO, an organization that has preserved Jewish cultural heritage since 1925, created what Tapper calls “an incredibly rich resource for scholars today” by “going to the people” for their stories.
“We are tapping into this same impulse,” Tapper says. “We have the tools to create these kinds of sources in a way that didn’t exist a hundred years ago.”
Tapper says stories about Canadian Jews exist in various memoirs, but “there has never been a sustained effort, at least in the past 75 years, to record narratives of everyday Canadian Jewish life in an organized and systematic way.”
For the project’s inaugural year, ACJS wants professional and hobbyist writers alike to submit essays about growing up as Jewish children or young adults in Canada. Tapper says they chose this theme to let people write about many different experiences: summer camp, teenage romance, holidays with family, work for jobs or school, or anything else the writer finds relevant.
“One of the things that’s important for us with this project is that the parameters remain as wide as possible,” he says.
The project is part of an “existential pivot to broaden (the) reach” of ACJS beyond academia and into engaging initiatives for the public. Tapper says events in the United States and Israel are causing Canadian Jews to ask themselves questions about what it means to be Zionists in Canada, or how to create a national Canadian identity.
“You put those two things together, then that’s the sweet spot where our organization as a whole and this particular project lives,” he says, adding that the project will help Jews reflect on their questions in new ways.
The project’s advisory board includes seven archivists, academics, and leaders in the field of Canadian Jewish studies. These advisors will choose three submissions to feature on ACJS’s website in April 2027. Tapper says publishing the essays online will help give the writers and material in the archives “a bit more of a platform.”
“Accessing an archive, whether it’s in person or online, can be a scary endeavour for some people, or at least an unfamiliar one,” he says. “We feel like it’s a service to the reading public.”
Advisory board member Janice Rosen is the archives director at the Alex Dworkin Canadian Jewish Archives in Montreal, where all submissions will be stored starting next April. She says many historical documents in the archive’s collections are from institutions rather than individuals. The first-person accounts that do exist often tell fragments of the writers’ stories.
Because of this, Rosen says the stories submitted to the project could eventually help Canadian Jews uncover more about their family history, or serve as an historian’s primary document during future research.
“If the only perspective you have is the institutional one, like the organizations who run the show and deal with people on a group basis, then you don’t get the perspective of the individuals and how that experience felt to them,” she says. “I’ve always been interested in personal biographies and diaries, and the individual’s perspective on history. It makes it more real to me.”
Rosen says many of the archive’s personal stories talk about growing up in other countries before immigrating to Canada. This includes narratives about the Holocaust and fleeing Europe in the 20th century.
Researchers looking into how Jews adapt to Canadian life often find that information in the last few pages of documents. The project could help expand that repertoire according to Rosen.
Getting permission to use archived documents that have revealing personal information can also be tough for researchers, Rosen adds.
“Sometimes you get things in an archive where you’re not really sure the person meant anybody else to see it. That could be awkward. You have to make sure that they’ve died a long time ago, that their children aren’t going to be upset that this is going to be shown to a researcher,” Rosen says.
When someone cites a Canadian Jewish Life Writing Project submission in the future, “the lines will be drawn clearly” around copyright and other legal rights, Rosen says, since writers have to sign release forms.
Advisory board members are also promoting the project through their networks. Karen Kollins is the executive director of the Shalom Hartman Institute of Canada, a centre for Jewish research and education. She’s reached out to everyone from summer camp directors and leaders of rabbinic organizations to community Facebook groups and Jews she knows in Saskatchewan through her husband.
Kollins believes that people who discuss “North American Jewry” are usually referring to Jews in the U.S. rather than those in Canada. By accepting a diverse range of stories, the project could help increase worldwide awareness of what makes Canadian Jews distinct.
To do this, Kollins says the project “would have to get into the hands and minds of Jews outside of Canada. But if we start with Jews in Canada, I think that’s great.”
She adds that many of her educator colleagues at the Shalom Hartman Institute have American or Israeli backgrounds, so they’re always looking for texts that will help them teach Judaism in Canada.
“I actually think this project could be very helpful for my work moving forward in that way, because we do use contemporary sources,” Kollins says.
Tylor Bergman is a doctoral candidate at York University who has taught political science courses in Canada and Eastern Europe. Bergman is considering writing an essay about how Holocaust survivor Julia Frankel saved his life as a teenager and helped him understand his “Jewishness,” and how he helped her learn about modern life in turn.
He hopes his essay will help bridge the gaps between older and younger generations.
“She taught me the old ways, and I feel like a lot of young people today could really benefit from a dialogue, a relationship, or a connection with somebody who went through that,” he says.
Bergman says it’s “brilliant” that ACJS is storing the essays because “the dissemination of knowledge is easy—it’s storing it and having access to it that’s really important.”
“I think that’s one of the reasons for a lot of Holocaust denialism, is that we have all of this knowledge, but young people aren’t actually exposed to it,” he says. “Because my story is so entwined with that of a Holocaust survivor… being in the archive grants recognition to the relevance that her Jewish story had (to) mine.”
He’s also happy some of the essays will be published online rather than staying buried in an archive.
“One can’t go without the other,” he says. “What’s the point of disseminating it and then deleting it? Which is why it’s going in the archives. But then what’s the point of just storing it to be digitally dusty in the archives?”
Tapper suggests that writers aim for 4,000 to 6,000 words, because that range is “achievable” before the deadline. He says ACJS won’t turn away longer or shorter essays.
Submissions must have not been published previously. Writers can submit their essays through a Google Form until Oct. 30, 2026.
Zenith Wolfe is an Ottawa-based reporter who specializes in arts reporting and compassionate, person-first storytelling. He’s also written for the Globe and Mail, CBC, Cottage Life magazine, and La Converse. His website is zenithwolfe.com.