The Mile End Chavurah (the Chavurah)  is a diasporic Jewish community with a self-imposed mandate to amplify and enrich Jewish cultural and spiritual life in Montreal. We come together to celebrate Shabbat, holidays and rites of passage, and to delve into Jewish history, practice and culture.

As a Chavurah — and not a synagogue — our interest is to organize ourselves around practices of collective learning that are not dependent on the position of a single rabbi or governing organization. We do not identify with any single political ideology. This position extends to Zionism and the State of Israel.  We acknowledge that these are important issues to Jews (and to non-Jews) as individuals. But the Chavurah as a body does not represent any specific point of view and will never claim to speak on behalf of the community about Israel or any other political issue.

At the Chavurah, we aim to model a community that can hold complexity, difference and sustain disagreement. While we do not align with any political or activist organization, we see it as extremely important to nurture a community that can have difficult conversations without falling apart. We seek to provide spaces for people to wrestle with their differences; come together to learn what Jewish community can be; unlearn some aspects of what it has been; and open new spaces for what it might become.