Harsh and imposing, the Arctic is a challenge to residents and visitors alike. And for the few Jewish residents of Iqaluit, maintaining their cultural identity is an additional daunting challenge.
IN HIS 1990 NOVEL "SOLOMON Gursky Was Here," Mordecai Richler chronicled the exploits of a quasi-fictional Canadian Jewish patriarch who, after landing in the Arctic in 1846, unintentionally inspires an entire Inuit camp to convert to Judaism. Alas, in Richler's mordant imagination, the High Arctic proves tragically inimical to the proper observance of the Jewish High Holy Days. Instructed to fast on Yom Kippur from dawn to dusk, the Inuit starve to death in a land that, for large parts of the year, experiences neither.
Last January, eager to conduct a more current survey of a Jewish presence in the Far North, I assembled a kit consisting of triple-layer snowboots, Israeli army-issue longjohns, various fleece and wool under-and-over-garments, my old one-piece IDF snowsuit, thermal gloves and mitts, a face mask and a snow cap. Then I caught a Northwest Air 737 out of Yellowknife, capital of Canada's massive Northwest Territories, and flew four hours northeast to the southern tip of Baffin Island.
Richler once observed that Calgary, in oil-rich Alberta, could be a nice town if they bothered to uncrate it. The town of Iqaluit, facing Frobisher Bay on the site of an old Inuit fishing camp, looks like where Calgary might have dumped its crates. Twelve hundred miles north of Montreal and a stone's throw from Danish Greenland, this former U.S. airbase, with its prefabricated bungalows, corrugated boxcars, igloo-shaped huts and the carcasses of every defunct appliance known to man, is one of the ugliest towns I've ever seen.
The temperature upon my arrival is a brisk minus 37 C (minus 34 F). A two-hour stroll from my hotel, near the airport, to the city center atop a nearby ridge results in sharp chest pains, waxy cheeks and steadily blackening eye sockets. As I thaw out that night over a Friday-night dinner of "country food" - bite-sized chunks of semi-frozen raw seal, beluga whale, narwhal skin, caribou and musk-ox washed down with high-test Canadian beer - an Inuk (singular of Inuit) companion tells me that I shouldn't complain about arriving in winter. When the snow thaws during the hideously brief summer, it leaves bare the decomposing detritus of a full winter of excreta, dumped caribou scraps and fish heads.
There's another good reason for visiting Iqaluit now. In April 1999, the Eastern Arctic - home to some 18,000 Inuit (out of a total of some 22,000 nationwide) spread over a fifth of Canada's land mass - is slated to break off from the Northwest Territories. As the new territory of Nunavut - or "Our Land" in the Inuit language of Inuktitut - the Eastern Arctic will take its place within Canada as an autonomous territory (rather than a full-fledged prov- ince). Residents, excited by the new political realities, hope the new status will contribute to the cultural and political survival of an otherwise dangerously depleted and fragmented aboriginal "First Nation," as original groups in Canada are known.
Iqaluit, with a population of 4,150, will be the capital of the Inuit territory. It is, I discover, home to a handful of Jews who face equally daunting challenges to their cultural survival. They aren't the classic Jews found in the globe's far corners: no merchants dealing in diamonds or furs; no "Northern Exposure" or Peace Corps-style doctors. And these are people who, for the most part, seldom wasted a thought about their ethnicity before venturing North. But the Arctic, vast, harsh and imposing, has a way of forcing people to grapple with who they are.
Although they'll never reach the critical mass to establish a genuine community here, these Jews have found themselves compelled to forge bonds with each other, looking to observe holidays together and connecting, via E-mail, with other Jews down south.
LORNE LEVY, THE 45-YEAR-OLD assistant director of the Iqaluit school board, admits he never gave much thought to his Jewishness when he and his wife, Sheila, a guidance counselor, left Toronto in 1978 to take up a series of teaching positions in the Arctic communities of Pangnirtung, Gjoa Haven, Cambridge Bay and, most recently, Iqaluit.
"It was more of a move away from something than toward something," he told The Jerusalem Report over a Sunday brunch replete with freshly flown-in Toronto bagels and locally produced smoked trout. "We didn't know what we were getting into. It just sounded like a neat thing to do."
The impetus for Lorne to reassess his feelings about being Jewish may have come from Sheila. An Anglican when she married, she was exposed through Lorne's sister to an offshoot of Secular Humanism called Humanistic Judaism. Although she hasn't formally converted, she regards herself as a Jewish humanist. Launched in Detroit in 1963, Humanistic Judaism caters to Jews seeking to maintain their Jewish identity in a non-theistic manner.
"When I moved up here," says Lorne, "my Jewishness wasn't a large issue for me. Living here has caused me to think about what I really believe in."
One way in which the Levys expressed their identity was conducting a bar- and bat-mitzvah ceremony for their twins, Jonathan and Megan (the Levys also have a 17-year-old daughter), at the local Rotary Club. They believe this may have been the first ever conducted in Iqaluit. They have since participated in other religious festivities, including Rosh Hashanah dinners and Passover Seders held in the company of Stacey and Dave Berman (a psychologist and economist respectively, who were returning to their native Toronto the weekend of my arrival) and one or two others. They hope, as well, to send their children to Israel next summer with a Zionist summer camp they attend in Ontario.
The kids, for their part, know they have no future in Iqaluit. For all the progress it has made since its formative years as a shantytown satellite of the World War II airbase and Cold War Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line outpost, the opportunities the young Levys seek just aren't there. "After high school, I'm going to California to study film," says 13-year-old Megan.
Although the Levys say that they occasionally encounter fatuous remarks about their Jewishness, they attribute these to ignorance rather than malice. The Inuit of Iqaluit are - apart from a Catholic minority - second- and third-generation Anglicans who have syncretized devout Christianity and the animism of their nomadic ancestors. They tend to be less than familiar with the Old Testament, or with the theological status accorded Jews and Judaism.
Kalman Strauss, a 37-year-old former Montrealer who married an Inuk legal student he met in Yellowknife, ran head-on into this theological narrowness when he and his wife took their newborn, Levi, for dinner at a local restaurant. "The owner was taken by Levi, and asked if she could attend the baptism. I told her that he wasn't going to be baptized, at which point she started screeching. I explained that I was Jewish, and that Levi had been circumcised, and would be raised as a Jew. How can you do that?' the woman hollered. You'll both rot in hell!'"
Oddly, I also run into a crack about my Jewishness, when I politely declined an invitation to dance from an obviously inebriated Dene Indian woman at a Yellowknife saloon. "You probably look down your nose at Indians," she said to me. "In fact, you have a big nose like a Jew. Where are you from?" "Jewland," I say, deeply affronted and, overlooking the ubiquity of cable TV and southern pop culture throughout the North, perplexed at how a Dene woman might be so aware of stereotypes.
"Oh," she says, suddenly smiling. "Jewish men are so handsome. I've always wanted to marry one."
JEWS AND INUIT WITH WHOM I spoke during two weeks of travel in the Arctic tended to comment on perceived affinities between the two peoples.
They aren't the first. In 1922, social anthropologist Sir James G. Frazer observed that "the ancient Semites appear to have passed through a course of moral evolution not unlike that which we can still detect in process among the Esquimos of Baffin Island. Some of the old laws of Israel are clearly savage taboos of a familiar type thinly disguised as commands of a deity. This disguise is a good deal more perfect in Palestine than in Baffin Island, but in substance it is the same."
The Inuit, indeed, maintain their own brand of religious dietary laws. These prohibit the serving or cooking together of different types of meat. Mixing seal and caribou, for instance, would cause affront to these animals, making it harder, or impossible, to hunt either in future.
Kalman Strauss married his wife, Susan (whom he had followed to Iqaluit from Yellowknife) on Yom Kippur. It wasn't an anti-religious gesture. Strauss is a self-declared Yiddishist who feels sufficient affinity for Judaism to keep a menorah (consisting of cute little polar animals) in the house, and to have provided his son Levi with a skullcap with his name inscribed in Hebrew. "But I always knew I probably wasn't going to marry a Jewish woman," says Strauss. "In Montreal, Jewish women want more from a man than I, as someone who never attended college and has never sought wealth, could offer.
"We married on Yom Kippur because Susan's father (from Kangirtugaapik, or Clyde River, on the east coast of Baffin Island, far to the north) had to be in Iqaluit that day, had never attended any of his daughters' weddings, and couldn't afford the $ 1,000 plane fare on his own."
SUSAN'S FATHER WAS A DEVOUT Anglican, and Strauss worried about his reception into her family. He says he shouldn't have - although his father-in-law had scant sense of Jews or Judaism, he valued the addition of new blood to a perilously small community. Though Susan didn't convert because Kalman felt the gesture was unnecessary, he says that "I was astounded when her father told Susan she could convert if she wished to. It's the same God,' he told me."
Strauss is far more worried, though, about his acceptance when the Inuit New Jerusalem of Nunavut is achieved in two years. He is not worried as a Jew, per se, but as someone who is perceived as a "Kadluna," or white Euro-Canadian.
Over the years, the Inuit have secured affirmative action commitments guaranteeing them educational and employment opportunities hitherto denied by the "Kadlunaat," or white authority. There is little doubt that these will be intensified once the Inuit achieve autonomy.
Although Strauss thinks the Inuit may be acting precipitously in establishing Nunavut, he feels this is entirely warranted. But he wonders if he will be able to continue to hold down his job as a flight agent at the local airport after 1999. "I dislike being thought of as just another white person," he says. "So when people tell me that I'm aggressive, or verbal, or wear my heart on my sleeve, I say, Yes, that's exactly right - I'm coming from a totally different place as a Jew, with a totally different education, upbringing and set of ideas than most of the other white people here.'"
Ironically, Strauss says that he has encountered the greatest intolerance from fellow Jews who cannot fathom how a Jew might wish to live in the Arctic. When he told a Lubavitcher friend of his plans to live in Iqaluit, his friend told him he was outright crazy. "How can you even keep Shabbat there?" he asked. "You tell me," Strauss said. "No," he said, "you don't understand. You don't keep. Jews don't go there."