Mixed Marriages by Canadian Jews Reported Exceeding 16 Percent

Mixed marriages by Canadian Jews are on the rise, having increased from 4,7 per cent in 1921 to 16,4 per cent in 1962, according to figures compiled by Louis Rosenberg, research director for the Canadian Jewish Congress, Among Jewish men, he reported, intermarriage had reached 12.1 per cent in 1962, compared with 3.1 per cent in 1921. Among Jewish women, intermarriage had grown from 1,4 per cent in 1921 to 5. 7 per cent in 1961.

The statistics showed that the number of marriages in Canada in which both the groom and bride were Jewish had reached a peak of 2,199 in 1942, decreasing to 1,266 in 1962. But mixed marriages among Canadian Jews, he said, had increased from 50 in 1922 to 226 in 1942, and to 251 in 1962.

In the latter year, 77 of the mixed marriages were between Jews and Roman Catholics; 58 with members of the United Church; 40 with Anglicans; 16 with Presbyterians; and six or less with Greek Orthodox, Unitarians, Free Methodists and members of the Reformed Church. There were two Jewish marriages with Buddhists or with Confucians, and one each with members of Jehovah’s Witnesses or the Salvation Army.

The highest intermarriage rates, said the CJC report, occurred in the Atlantic Provinces, where the Jewish populations of this country are the smallest, numbering only about 3,000 of this Dominion’s 250,000 Jews, Eighty per cent of Canada’s Jews live in the Provinces of Ontario and Quebec, where intermarriage is lowest.

A breakdown of the data, all of it derived from official Government census figures, shows that 50per cent of the Jewish marriages in the Provinces of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick were “mixed” in 1962; 38 per cent in Saskatchewan; 31 per cent in British Columbia, In Ontario and Quebec provinces, where much of the Jewish population is concentrated, the “mixed” marriage rates for 1962 were, respectively, 21 per cent and nine per cent.