A home for community, prayer, and connection
Our team is dedicated to strengthening our community through leadership, care, and commitment. From spiritual guidance to community programs and daily support, each member works to create a welcoming space where everyone can connect, grow, and celebrate Jewish life together.
Everyone here calls him Rabbi MG. The letters stand for Moshe Gershon — though for twenty years, to a good part of the Catskills, he was simply Gershi from the pizza store.
He was born and raised in Antwerp, learned in yeshiva in Jerusalem, and received semicha in Israel. He went to law school there too, took an LLB, and practised for a while in family law. It lasted long enough to teach him two things about himself: that he loved talking to people and was good at persuading them, and that arguing divorces was not what he wanted to do with his life.
He and his wife lived in Bnei Brak for more than twenty years, where she qualified as a CPA. For two decades he worked alongside his in-laws at their restaurant in Monticello, up in the Catskills — a hundred and fifty seats, forty parking spaces, and enough summer regulars that a great many people in New York still know him by his first name and not much else.
The turn came seven years ago. His father had spent his whole life in Belgium. Three weeks before he died the family brought him to Israel, and he passed away in their living room in Bnei Brak. In those last weeks he pressed his son, over and over, to do something for Klal Yisrael.
He started giving shiurim, working with Lev L'Achim and with Arachim, lecturing in English and in Hebrew. Languages were never the obstacle: Yiddish is his mother tongue, and he has Flemish, French, Hebrew and English besides.
Four years ago the family came to Toronto. He took a position as the rav of a shul north of the city, and in the course of that year noticed something that redirected him entirely — everywhere he went in Thornhill, he was hearing Hebrew. So he opened a Thursday night shiur and waited to see who came. Two men turned up. Within a few months, fifty and sixty people were coming.
The Israeli Centre grew out of that room. It started with about twenty-five people. Today more than a hundred come for Shabbos, there is a kiddush every week, a kollel that learns every night, and yom tov events that fill the building with two and three hundred. Over two hundred children pass through the youth programmes every month; on Motzei Shabbos the ovens turn out thirty pizzas.
He and his wife have seven children and two grandchildren. One son moved to Toronto four months ago to help run the place and gives the nightly shiur in the kollel; one of his daughters runs the girls’ programme. It is, in his own words, a happening place.
