History of the Jews in Vancouver

Vancouver has the third-largest Jewish community in Canada, after Toronto and Montreal. As of 2021, there are 20,125 Jews in the city, with British Columbia home to the fastest-growing Jewish population in the nation.

The history of the Jews in Vancouver (also: Greater Vancouver and Metro Vancouver) in British Columbia, Canada has been noted since the mid-19th century.

Early Jewish settlers were isolated from established Jewish institutions and communities in eastern Canada and the United States. They were also often isolated from each other, scattered across the Greater Vancouver area. As the local cities developed, the Jewish community also grew and expanded beyond the original business districts to spread throughout the area. While some early Jewish settlers ran farms, poultry operations, and sawmills, most tended to work in merchant industries. Many started as street peddlers and worked their way up to running small stores, a few of which grew into retail empires.

Most of the early Jewish immigrants came from the United States and Britain. By the end of World War I immigrants from Eastern Europe formed the majority of the Vancouver-area Jewish community due to discrimination in their homelands, notably the pogroms in Russia, and changes in Canadian immigration policy.