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This story was first published on Feb. 4, 2001, in the Montreal Gazette.

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Rabbi Bernard M. Kaplan, M.A., has resigned his position as minister of the McGill College avenue synagogue, to accept, it is said, a call to one of the prominent Jewish churches in the western part of the United States.

Gazette, Tuesday, Feb. 4, 1902

Bernard Kaplan was never in Montreal long enough to make the impact on the Jewish community – and, indeed, the city at large – that might have been predicted from his undoubted gifts.

He had arrived five years before, having just graduated from the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. So highly did his mentors in New York esteem him – and so anxious was the Montreal congregation to have him – that the rabbinical authorities accompanied him to Montreal so he could be ordained as a rabbi and installed as the synagogue’s incumbent at the same time.

The synagogue was Shaar Hashomayim, which from 1885 to 1922 occupied a handsome building on McGill College Ave. until it moved to the much larger quarters it occupies in Westmount today. It was known as the German shul, distinguishing it from Montreal’s oldest synagogue, Shearith Israel (the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue), also known as the Spanish shul.