The Hebrew lettering on the old stone arch is still visible, poking up above the orange panelling and metal and glass façade of the Collège Français. Walk to the back of the Fairmount St. school, and one can see the bricked-over stained glass window that once shone light into a large and beautiful synagogue once described as Montreal’s Carnegie Hall of Hazzanut, or sacred Jewish music.

Just a few blocks away on St-Laurent Blvd., most of the visitors to trendy tapas restaurant and concert hall La Sala Rossa have no idea that the space was once a community centre for Jewish socialists.

All around the Plateau and the Mile End, the buildings are marked by traces of Montreal’s Jewish history.

“You can’t understand Montreal without studying the Jewish fact,” says Zev Moses, executive director of the online-only Museum of Jewish Montreal. “It’s an intrinsic part of Montreal’s history.”

This summer for the first time, the museum is offering public walking tours of historic Jewish neighbourhoods, focusing on the Plateau and Mile End.

It represents an expansion for Moses’s museum, which began in 2010 as an online mapping project for Jewish landmarks. Today, the website contains a vast array of maps, stories and interactive exhibits, chronicling Jewish life in the city from 1760 to today.

Moses’s tours focus on the areas where the first large communities gathered following the period of greatest Jewish migration, between 1900 and 1914.

Despite poverty and hardship, the new immigrants quickly made their mark, creating institutions such as schools, synagogues and libraries. In the decades between the 1920s and the 1950s, writers and left-wing radicals held political meetings, and both Yiddish and Hasidic culture thrived in the Plateau and Mile End.

“Montreal has one of the most diverse Jewish communities in the world,” says Moses, 30. “We have Jews from Eastern Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, which makes it really unique. In a city where you face the tension between English and French, there was a space for a very rich Jewish culture to grow between the other two.”

But by the 1960s, the Jewish community had largely left the Plateau and Mile End, settling instead in the westward suburbs such as Côte-St-Luc, Côte-des-Neiges and Hampstead.

Today, many of the old institutions have been repurposed, with only a discreet Star of David or distinctive rounded windows giving away their history.

On the Mile End walking tour, summer research fellows Pascale Greenfield and Aaron Dishy take pedestrians past dance studios, row houses and daycares, all of which were once important Jewish institutions. Some of the buildings, such as the former Young Men’s Hebrew Association (now luxury condos), are impressive spaces. Others, such as the former synagogue of influential Hasidic rabbi David Flaum, are modest in size and quality of construction, and give no sign of the importance they once held.

To Moses, this is part of the point of the tour: to shed light on the historically and culturally significant places before they are forgotten or demolished.

“We want to bring awareness to the fact that there are a lot of structures around the city that mean something to Montreal’s Jewish history. We’re not acting as Heritage Montreal, but we want to broaden the scope of what is worth saving, or talking about saving,” he said.

He believes that his project’s appeal extends beyond just the Jewish population, and can help Montrealers understand more of their own immigrant history.

“The stories we’re telling are pretty universal. They’re about people looking for community, about trying to keep their culture alive and grow it, to deal with economic and political challenges, and to make a life for themselves, in Montreal, in Quebec and in Canada.”

For more information, visit the museum at imjm.ca