KlezKanada


KlezKanada is a Canadian organization for the promotion of klezmer music and Yiddish culture. Its principal program is a week-long Jewish music festival founded in 1996 which takes place annually in August in the Laurentian Mountains north of Montreal. Between 1996 and 2022 it took place at Camp B'nai B'rith in Lantier, Quebec; more recently it takes place at Le P'tit Bonheur de Sablon in Lac-Supérieur. The organization also hosts workshops, concerts, and other educational programs in Montreal throughout the year.

History

KlezKanada was founded by a group of local cultural activists led by Hy and Sandy Goldman in 1996. In its first year its festival had roughly 300 participants. It was inspired by KlezKamp, a similar festival in New York State which had been founded a few years earlier. By the late 1990s KlezKanada had grown in size and began attracting many of the top musicians in the field, as well as offering a scholarship program for young musicians.
In an article on klezmer, Mike Anklewicz noted the development of the festival:
The camp is based around courses and lectures during the day and concerts at night.
In 2001, "of the 37 teaching and performance staff, 22 were New York-based." Since then, the festival faculty has become more diverse: in 2018, fewer than half of the teaching faculty were American, while over a third came from Canada, and the rest from other countries, including Germany, Poland, and Russia.

Past participants