Ida Lewis Siegel Dead at 97

Ida Lewis Siegel, the grand old lady of Toronto Jewry, has died here at the age of 97. Because of her many achievements in community pioneering and in philanthropic innovation, her keen and persistent interest in education and the young, and her total involvement in the Jewish and general community, she became a legend in her own time.

Bora in Pittsburgh, Pa., on Valentine’s Day in 1885 of parents from the Kovno area, she came to Toronto with her parents eight years later. In 1899, two years after the first Zionist Congress was held in Basle, Switzerland, at the age of 14 Siegel organized the Herzl Girls Club and later the Daughters of Zion. Some years later she was a co-founded of Hadassah in Toronto.

She organized the first Zionist Sunday school in the city, a sewing school for Jewish girls, helped organize a rest home for mothers and babies which was later taken on by the Jewish community, a medical dispensary which developed into Mount Sinai hospital, and the Sisterhood of the Goel Tzedec Synagogue which is now part of Beth Tzedec Synagogue.

Siegel was dedicated to the peace movement during World War 1 at a time when it was unpopular to be identified with the movement. In 1915 she was an active member of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. At the time of her death she was the only surviving original member of the Optario Home and School Association and was recently honored by that organization.

ACTIVE IN JEWISH COMMUNITY

In 1930 she was elected to the Toronto Board of Education, the first Jewish woman in Canada to hold such a post, and continued to be actively involved in education until she was 95. She helped organize the National Council of Jewish Women in Canada and travelled across the country on its behalf. In 1977 the Canadian Jewish Congress awarded her the Samuel Bronfman Medal.

Siegel played a pioneer role and was active in every major Jewish communal, fund-raising, philanthropic, educational, and Zionist institution in the city. She continued as a volunteer teacher at Holy Blossom Temple and Beth Tzedec Synogogue into her old age.

After the age of 90 she taught once a week immigrant children of all races in the city’s downtown area, duplicating her own experience as a child when her father taught Hebrew and her mother was involved in charitable work when immigrants were crowding Toronto’s downtown Jewish quarter.

In her younger days she was involved in combatting missionary activities then rampant on the streets and in gospel halls and in public schools where over-zealous evangelizing teachers sought to convert Jewish children. This was a motive impelling her to seek a seat on the Board of Education and to conduct educational work among the young.