Martin Wolff – Residence

Martin Wolff (1881-1948) was an engineer, journalist, and an early community historian of Canada’s Jews. Born on December 16, 1881, in Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany, Wolff was the son of Julius, an observant Jewish wine merchant, and Sarah, an English Jew of Sephardic background. Wolff was raised and educated as an engineer in England, briefly interrupting his college education when he volunteered for the British army as an electrical engineer in South Africa during the Boer War (1899-1902).

Four years later, Wolff immigrated to Montreal and then St-Casimir, Québec, gaining employment in railway surveys and construction. He worked for various railways, including the Canadian Northern Railway and the National Transcontinental Railway. At the outbreak of war in 1914, he was a member of the Officers’ Training Corps in Quebec. He was then attached to the Department of Militia and Defence and to the Imperial Ministry of Munitions. After the war, Wolff was appointed assistant engineer in the Department of Economics of the Canadian National Railway. He eventually joined the engineering department of the City of Westmount. His daughter, Annette, recalled that “civil engineering meant doing a job to completion and then finding another – no steady security. This condition dogged his whole life.”

In 1909, Wolff married Irene Joseph, a direct descendent of Aaron Hart, and the two established themselves in Montreal in the early 1920s. Wolff served as treasurer of the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue beginning in the 1920s, and as chairman of the Canadian Jewish Congress Archives Committee from 1934 until his death. In addition to numerous contributions to periodicals, Wolff authored The Jews of Canada in 1925 for the American Jewish Committee, one of the first histories of Canada’s Jewish community. He also wrote a history of the Canadian National Railways, at the request of S.W. Jacobs.

In 1940, Wolff’s life was terribly shaken when he lost his wife Irene to cancer and then one of his daughters shortly after. During the Second World War, Wolff sponsored Alfred Bader’s release from internment at Camp I, housing the young Jewish refugee who would go on to become a celebrated chemist. Bader recalls that Wolff “became the first father figure in my life.” Wolff died on March 8, 1948, while on vacation in Barbados.

Sources

442 Argyle, Westmount