Chaldeans in Canada

By Adhid Miri, PhD

The steady immigration of Chaldeans from northern Iraq to the United States and Canada started at the beginning of the last century. The early pioneers left their villages and took unchartered voyages to distant countries, ports and seas armed with little more than courage and faith. Few official documents are available to support their stories and much of what we know comes from family members and elders.

The first Chaldean pioneers came from the village of Tel-Keppe, what was then part of Ottoman Turkey, reaching the New World around the beginning of the last century. We have documentation for Akko Qarana (Brazil), Jajjo Hajji (South America), Petto Goryoka (Mexico), Makhola Qashat (Mexico), and Yousif Shammam (North America - Canada). 

Yousif Shammam left Iraq for Egypt, ending up in Fort William, Canada in 1899. Shammam is considered by many to be the first pioneer. A handful of years later, in July 1905, a United States government ‘declaration of intention’ document shows that George Binno, born in Tel-Keppe in 1878, arrived in New York via Havre, France.

 Many Chaldeans came to Canada and the Detroit area from Tel-Keppe, establishing themselves and sending for their families. This type of ‘chain immigration’ also occurred between Canada and Michigan. Hanna Sarraya went first to Fort William, Canada in 1913, moving to Detroit in 1920 with a priest named Father Faranso Dabbish.

Between 1910 and 1912, a few adventurous immigrants (we count 23) traveled to Detroit and Canada but returned after a short stay. By 1913-1914 there were 41 documented Chaldeans living in Canada. Some were from the village of Tel-Keppe, such as Jameel Qashat (1914), some were from Mosul and one man (name unknown) from Baqofa.

Born in 1883, Jameel Qashat is the hero of a dramatic pioneering story. He became an officer of the Ottoman Army at age 20, witnessing Turkish calamities against Christians and Armenians. Soon after his army discharge, he decided to leave Iraq and join his maternal uncle, Yousif Shammam, who was living in Fort-William, Canada.

In 1914, Qashat started his journey on foot from Mosul, Nineveh to Beirut, Lebanon. He traveled with a 2,000-person caravan, all seeking to escape Ottoman persecution. This first step of the journey took 3 months. In Beirut, Qashat met up with a British sailing ship that carried him to the port of Marseille, France. There he caught a sail on a French vessel traveling to Canada.

The Canadian passport of Jameel Qashat

The French commercial ship was in the Mid-Atlantic when World War I erupted on August 28, 1914. It was vulnerable and defenseless and worse yet, orders were received from the French government to sink the commercial ship in the event of a German attack. Luckily, the ship escaped that fate and Qashat landed safely in Canada just before Christmas in 1914. 

During his first year, he stayed and worked with his uncle, Yousif Shammam, selling goods, portables, clothes and accessories. Qashat worked hard and saved his money, one foot planted in his new land but one foot still in Mesopotamia, “the land between two rivers.” 

News of Turkish massacres in Qashat’s homeland and letters from his family members prompted him to travel back to the land of his birth. His return journey in 1921 was more dramatic: crossing two oceans, landing in Beirut, through the Suez Canal, Egypt, along the Red Sea, around the Arabian Peninsula, the Indian Ocean, to the port of Basra, Iraq. 

Qashat settled in Baghdad, got married and worked for the British in their new camps. In another pioneering move, he was among the first to open a hotel in Baghdad’s famous Al-Rasheed Street. He named it Qasr Al-Sham (Syria Palace). With the church as his second home, the new world became a distant third and Qashat never returned to Canada or the USA, despite his desire to travel back. He died on November 27, 1967 in Baghdad.

After World War II, religious persecution, the rise of nationalism, the 1958 Iraqi coup, the rise of fundamentalism, and the fall of the Soviet Union all combined to trigger an emigration of Eastern Christians from Iraq.

There were fewer than 9,000 Canadian Chaldeans in 2006. By the time Pope Benedict XVI formed the Mar Addai Catholic Eparchy for Canada in 2011 there were over 13,000. As of 2013, the eparchy serves 18,886 Catholics. Seven priests and 40 permanent deacons preside over eight parishes, which are located in the provinces of Ontario and Quebec. In the 2016 census over 46,000 people identified themselves as Chaldean or Assyrian.

The Chaldean Catholic Eparchy of Mar Addai of Toronto is the sole eparchy (Eastern Catholic diocese) of the Chaldean Catholic Church (Syro-Oriental Rite) in Canada. It depends directly on the Chaldean Catholic Patriarch of Babylon, without being part of any ecclesiastical province. Its cathedral is the Cathedral of the Good Shepherd, in North York, near Toronto, in Ontario.

The Most Reverend Bawai Soro was installed as the third Eparchial Bishop of the Chaldeans in Canada at Good Shepherd Chaldean Cathedral, North York, Ontario, on 29 November 2017. His Beatitude Mar Louis Raphaël I Sako, Chaldean Patriarch of Babylon, presided. 

According to Bishop Soro, 60-80% of Chaldeans now live outside their historical territories. “We are already a Western Church. We really don’t know what we are now.” Since the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 about one million Iraqi Christians, most of them Chaldean, have left Iraq. 

As the new bishop to a Canadian Church which has grown in recent years because of the Christian refugees fleeing ISIS in Iraq and Syria, the connections Soro hopes to make are complex spiritually, culturally and politically.

It’s a task the 63-year-old Iraqi-born priest is ready to tackle as he takes charge of the Chaldean Eparchy of Mar Addai of Toronto. Established in 2011, it is the only Chaldean diocese in Canada, serving an estimated 40,000 Chaldean Catholics.

On the run from misguided attempts by ISIS to return to the age of empires, the Chaldeans must now embrace a whole new perspective on life in Canada. St. Peter’s Chaldean Catholic Church pastor Fr. Niaz Toma in Oakville appreciates the challenge his new boss faces bridging the gaps between generations, between new arrivals and established Chaldean-Canadians, between the families that have adjusted well and those that still struggle.

Many of the conservatives are to be found right here in Canada in the established immigrant Church. The innovators are either in Iraq or among the new arrivals — people who have witnessed not just war but enormous cultural upheaval. They demand a liturgy and a Christianity that responds to their reality.

That’s not so easy for older immigrants who have sacrificed so much to start over in Canada. They begin growing in a new environment, totally alien to them. What’s the only thing, however, that they continue to hold? It’s their liturgy. They cling to it. Bishops are there to care for the people whose passions and problems, whose families and traditions, are engaged in the liturgy. 

“We have started to have second and third-generation Chaldeans in Canada, where they are Chaldean, but they seem to be very different from the Chaldeans who are just arriving in Canada,” says Bishop Soro. 

Certainly, Soro is aware of their pride and heritage. But he also wants Canada’s Chaldeans to be anything but frozen in time. “We are engaged in preparing a new generation of clergy who understand the rising mentality, who understand Canada, who are native to the English expression and tongue,” he said. “The Chaldean Church in Canada needs people who are native to this culture, to this language, so they can properly serve it.”