Innisfil Gets Its First Year-Round Jewish Home
by Leibel Kahan – Lubavitch.com
For decades, Jewish families from Toronto have spent their summers on the shores of Lake Simcoe. “This is the Canadian Catskills,” said David Turk, a Toronto businessman who moved to Innisfil two years ago. A seasonal synagogue opened in the village of Belle Ewart in the 1940s; kosher groceries arrived weekly from the city.
But every September, the synagogues closed, the cottages emptied, and Jewish life in Innisfil went dark until the following summer.
That changed in 2021, when Rabbi Zevi and Mussy Kaplan moved to town to establish a year-round Chabad presence. On July 26 of this year, the community marked its latest milestone — hundreds of residents, summer visitors, and dignitaries gathered for the grand opening of the Chabad Innisfil Jewish Community Centre, the area’s first permanent Jewish home.
An hour north of Toronto, on the western shore of Lake Simcoe, Innisfil was once known mainly for its beaches and summer cottages. The town’s population has roughly doubled in the last 20 years as many people, priced out of the Toronto market, moved north. And with that population boom comes, as Turk said, “a lot of young Jewish families” — families who are looking for Jewish connection. Rabbi Kaplan estimates some 350 Jewish families now live in Innisfil year-round, a number that keeps growing.
When the Kaplans arrived, programs ran out of their home, and a Hebrew school was launched in a borrowed daycare space on Sundays.
Before the 2023 High Holidays, Mario Cortellucci, an Italian-Canadian developer and head of the Cortel Group, offered the Kaplans free use of a vacant commercial building he owned — a former sales office for a nearby subdivision. The arrangement became permanent: eventually, renovations began, stalled through months of permit delays, and finally reached completion earlier this year. Cortellucci, who is not Jewish, was instrumental in making the center a reality; he and his son Peter cut the ribbon at the grand opening.
The renovated building now houses a synagogue, classrooms, a library, and a preschool. A kosher café is set to open soon, and a mikvah — the first within an hour’s drive — is next.
The grand opening drew Innisfil Mayor Lynn Dollin, Member of Provincial Parliament Andrea Khanjin, and a representative from the local federal MP’s office. Rabbi Zalman Grossbaum, director of Chabad activities in Ontario and Rabbi Kaplan’s grandfather, addressed the crowd.
Turk, who dedicated the ladies’ sanctuary in memory of his late wife, watched a twenty-something-year-old rabbi accomplish something he never expected. “The grand opening was just magical,” he said. “What the Kaplans have done here is remarkable — this is the first full-time synagogue we have.”
