Marking history of Mennonites in Canada

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This article was published 01/07/2022 (865 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Just before he died in 2014, Ingrid Riesen Moehlmann’s father made a request to her: Find a way to celebrate the arrival in Canada of Mennonites who fled Russia in the 1920s.

“Those were his last words to me,” said Riesen Moehlmann, a language consultant for the River East Transcona School Division. “He asked me to organize an event to commemorate the Mennonite migration to Canada from Russia. That story was an all-consuming passion for him. He was afraid it was being lost and forgotten.”

She is fulfilling his dying wish through the “Memories of Migration: Russlaender (Russian Mennonite) Tour 100” to mark the 100th anniversary of Mennonites coming to Canada from Russia.

The cross-Canada train tour, which will re-enact the historic migration of 21,000 Mennonites from Russia to Canada between 1923 and 1930, will take place from July 6 to 25, 2023.

The tour, which is being organized under the auspices of the Mennonite Historical Society of Canada, together with Tourmagination of Waterloo, Ont., will celebrate the faith of the Mennonites, memorialize the challenges they faced as settlers in Canada, and acknowledge their impact on Indigenous people, especially on the Prairies.

For Riesen Moehlmann’s father, David Riesen, the subject was personal.

He was the grandson of David Toews, who played a key role in persuading then-prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King to let the Mennonites into Canada. He also helped negotiate with the Canadian Pacific Railway to advance $2 million in credit to the immigrants to transport them to their new homes in this country.

For the rest of his life, Toews collected the travel debt, or reiseschuld, which each family promised to pay. It was finally repaid in full in 1946, six months before he died.

“To say that this story had an impact on our family is an understatement,” Riesen Moehlmann said.

Due to the important role played by the CPR, the tour is using Via Rail, departing from Quebec City and arriving in Abbotsford, B.C.

The tour is broken into three parts; from Quebec City to Kitchener, Ont.; from Toronto to Saskatoon; and from Saskatoon to Abbotsford, B.C. Participants can take only one portion, or the entire tour. Sixty people have signed up so far; Riesen Moehlmann is hoping for 100.

While in Manitoba, tour participants will be able to visit the local Mennonite archives, the Mennonite Heritage Museum in Steinbach, see a commissioned play by the Winnipeg Mennonite Theatre Company, attend an academic conference on Mennonite migration and join locals at a saengerfest, a free choral concert, at the Centennial Concert Hall on July 15. All proceeds collected at the event will go to the Mennonite Central Committee for its refugee work.

“My dad wanted people who traced their history to those Russian Mennonites to remember that history,” she said, adding her mother’s entire family came to Canada at that time, escaping “civil war, anarchists and starvation and the horrors of Stalinist Russia which were still to come.”

Through the tour, Riesen Moehlmann, a member of Winnipeg’s First Mennonite Church, hopes Canadian Mennonites who trace their roots to that migration will “remember who we are and where we come from, and what that means today.”

For information about the tour, visit http://wfp.to/ozn.

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