On Sunday, July 26, Rabbi Zevi and Mussy Kaplan looked on as families moved steadily through the doors of the newly completed Chabad-Lubavitch Jewish Center on 6th Line in Innisfil, Ontario, about an hour north of Toronto. Some stayed for the day. Others toured the building or caught up with neighbors before making room for the next wave of arrivals.
Judging by the amount of food the caterer had prepared, likely upward of 500 people passed through the new Chabad center that day.
“Seeing the number of people who came to join us and celebrate together with us was very special,” says the rabbi.
The gathering marked the opening of a permanent Jewish community center built inside a former real estate sales center, gutted and rebuilt from the inside out. It now houses a synagogue, classrooms, a full-time Jewish preschool, and a kosher café, with a mikvah planned for the future.
A Community Without an Address
For more than a century, Jewish Torontonians have spent their summers in cottages scattered around Innisfil and Lake Simcoe. Organized Jewish life followed the same seasonal rhythm.
“There were two shuls here that functioned in July and August,” Kaplan explains. “Outside the summer, there was basically nothing.”
Residents looking for regular services or programming the rest of the year generally had to head to Barrie, about 20 kilometers north, or more likely make the trek south all the way to Toronto.
That pattern has begun to shift. New subdivisions have drawn young families and former Torontonians to settle in Innisfil year-round, and the Kaplans estimate that at least 350 Jewish families now call the town home year-round. The seasonal synagogues remain, but the new center marks something Innisfil hasn’t had before: a Jewish address that stays open after Labour Day.
The Kaplans arrived in Innisfil to establish Chabad there at the end of 2021 with no synagogue or fixed meeting place waiting for them. Their first public program, a Chanukah celebration that December, was held in a rented room at the local library. A Purim party months later needed another borrowed space. For a year, their Hebrew school met in a preschool that sat empty on Sundays, while Shabbat prayers and regular classes filled the Kaplans’ living room. High Holiday services required renting a hall each fall.
At Innisfil’s first public menorah lighting, a reporter asked Kaplan whether the young community had a synagogue of its own. “Not yet,” he recalls responding. “We’re just starting out... but soon!”
Looking back, Kaplan says even he was surprised by how quickly that promise came true.
“I did not think it was going to happen so fast,” he said. “Right away, we began to experience a lot of interest. People were really excited, and we were growing faster than we could have anticipated.”
From Sales Office to Sanctuary
The building that now houses Innisfil’s Chabad center began as a sales office for the surrounding residential development, built with an eye toward eventually becoming part of a commercial plaza. A mutual contact introduced Kaplan to the developer who owned it, who agreed to let Chabad use the space, free of charge, for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.
After the High Holiday season ended, Kaplan went back to him.
“I told him, ‘We want to stay right here,’” Kaplan recalls. The developer agreed, and encouraged the Kaplans to make their vision a reality.
A fundraising and renovation effort followed, with longtime Toronto-area families who had summered in Innisfil for generations playing a central role.
The center is already in use. The Bat Mitzvah Club that met over the past year will hold its graduation celebration there. Residents attend challah baking programs, meals and social gatherings, study in the on-site library, and attend prayer services and Torah classes under the same roof where their children go to preschool.
For some families, the center has come to represent something beyond convenience. In a video played at the grand opening, one community member described how the aftermath of the Oct. 7 attacks changed the family's relationship to Jewish life.
“After October 7th, we started coming to shul every Shabbat, and it’s become part of our family tradition,” the community member said.
Kaplan says he’s watched several local Jews begin putting on tefillin daily, others start attending services regularly, and families enroll their children in Hebrew school.
“The primary change is that we now have a full-time preschool,” he says. “We have the space for children to receive kosher meals and learn about Yiddishkeit every single day.”
Innisfil Mayor Lynn Dollin called the opening “a huge step forward from being a summer community to a year-round home and place to raise a family.” Andrea Khanjin, the local member of provincial parliament for Barrie–Innisfil, described the center as “a vibrant Jewish community hub, a place that brings generations together, and a second home for so many members of our community,” while Deputy Mayor Kenneth Fowler called it “a place for many to gather, practice their faith and grow as a people.”
For Kaplan, the building itself isn’t the point.
“We feel like now we can really focus on the real job of making sure that every single Jew feels welcome here,” he says. “Our vision is that nobody should have to leave Innifil for anything related to Yiddishkeit. It should all be here and accessible.”
If I understand correctly, he's a third generation Ontario Rabbi. Vey cool!