Knowing how to put a thimble on his finger helped Binem Russak and his family escape life in a displaced persons’ camp in Austria for a new home in Canada.

That was the task the Jewish Holocaust survivor was asked to perform under the “garment workers scheme,” an immigration program following the Second World War in which Canadian officials, led by Torontonian Max Enkin, visited displacement camps across Europe looking for recruits to fill a tailor shortage.

“We had no papers, nowhere to go. We were all stateless,” said Russak’s daughter Shirley Hanick. “Then somebody came to the camp to do the test. That was the only way out for us.”

Hanick was 6 months old when she, her Polish parents and older brother arrived in Quebec City on Oct. 10, 1948 after an 11-day voyage from Germany. Her father was not a tailor at all, but rather a salesperson.

“My father always said it’s all because he knew how to put a thimble on his finger. That’s what got us into Canada.”





In 1945, when Canada’s door was largely closed to Jewish immigration, Canada’s Jewish community came up with a way to rescue Jews from displacement camps: Filling labour shortages in postwar Canada became the pretext to sneak them in.

Inspired by a federal government program aimed at attracting loggers to British Columbia, Enkin, who was a garment factory owner, and others in the clothing sector pitched Ottawa on the idea of recruiting tailors from displacement camps. Not all recruits were actually tailors or had the necessary skills, but they were all set up to work in garment factories for at least a year after arrival.

Seven decades after Canada ushered in 2,000 people, more than half of them Jews, under the garment workers scheme, Hanick connected with Enkin’s son Larry through The Tailor Project, a research initiative to trace the whereabouts of those Jewish “tailors” and document their stories through artifacts and images.

Larry Enkin, now 89, said he was 18 when his father, a Russian Jew, worked day and night with the local Jewish community for ways to resettle displaced Jews in Canada. Enkin always wondered what happened to the tailors his father helped bring to Canada.

So earlier this year, with his friend, Paul Klein, the CEO and founder of Impakt, an agency that drives social change through innovative solutions, Enkin made a call-out in Jewish media to find the descendants of these tailors. The two contacted the Ontario Jewish Archives in Toronto and the Alex Dworkin Canadian Jewish Archives in Montreal and found the names of the ships that brought these people to Canada. Using the ship manifests, the project has so far identified more than 30 families who came to Canada in 1948 under the program.

“It’s an important piece of Canadian history that’s largely unknown and this is the first time it has been explored in a significant way,” said Klein, who noted that tailors and their families were given a $25 loan, plus train tickets to Toronto, Montreal or Winnipeg, where pre-arranged garment factory jobs awaited them.

Hanick said her parents left Poland for the Soviet Union in 1940 and were separated for more than two years while in forced labour — with her mother in Moscow and father in Siberia — before they were reunited by the Red Cross.

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After the war, the couple, who by then had an infant son, Calel, returned to Poland to look for their families only to discover everyone had perished under the Nazis. In Nov. 1946, they moved to a displaced persons camp in Salzburg, where they stayed until Sept. 1948 when they boarded the RMS Scythia to Canada.

The family was sent from Quebec City to Toronto, where they were provided temporary shelter at 38 Cecil St. before moving into a rental home at 381 Markham St. Russak fulfilled his one-year employment commitment at Tip Top Tailors before moving on to make pants at another garment factory. In 1958, the family bought a dry cleaning business on Mount Pleasant Rd.

Hanick, a retired dental hygienist, said she was thrilled when she saw the call-out for The Tailor Project in a Jewish newspaper article last March. She immediately thought of a green metal box she inherited from her late mother, Szyfra. The box was given to her family by a South African aid group while they were living in the displacement camp. Inside the box, Hanick’s mother had kept the family’s camp IDs, their UN displacement papers, old photos and a certificate from the labour ministry that released her father from his job at Tip Top Tailors.

“We were fortunate to have been able to come to Canada as displaced persons. Somehow they found a way to open the door for us,” said Hanick. “This is the story of all immigrants.”