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Rosengart church
Mennonites lived in Prussia/Poland for more than 400 years, but our understanding of the Mennonite experience in this area requires further study. This is the former Mennonite church at Rosengart (now Rozgart), near Elbing (now Elblag). Peter Klassen (1930-2019) has worked hard at shedding light on the Mennonite experience in Prussia. He was born in…
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Event explores Jews, Mennonites and the Holocaust
About 80 years ago, Jews and Mennonites lived peacefully together in the Ukrainian city of Khortitsa. Then the Nazis came, and everything changed. In 1941, before the invasion, Khortitsa had about 2,000 Mennonites and 402 Jews out of a population of about 14,000. A year or so later, the Jews were all gone, killed by…
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Speed sprayer
Readers raised on fruit farms—including this archivist—may remember the high-pitched whine of an orchard pesticide sprayer in action. Pictured, Peter J. Sawatzky of Ruthven, Ont., is operating a “speed-sprayer” in his apple orchard. This photo accompanied an article in The Canadian Mennonite from September 1959 about the costs of transporting apples to market. The newspaper…
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Bethel Bible Institute
Can you help identify these three men at Bethel Bible Institute (BBI)? Is John Poettcker in the centre? The formation of Bethel in Abbotsford, B.C., was proposed in 1937 at the ministers conference of the Conference of United Mennonite Churches of B.C. with the hope it would be “the guardian of traditional Mennonite faith.” Its…
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Aylmer community store
The Aylmer (Ont.) Mennonite Community Store and Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) Aylmer Resource Centre are pictured after 1989. Both represent the response of the local community, Low German Mennonites and MCC Ontario to the increase in immigration of Low German Mennonites from Latin America into southwestern Ontario, beginning in the 1970s. Both organizations have become…
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Peter Regier
In 1894, Anna Enss (1855-1914), left, and Peter Regier (1851-1925) moved their family from Prussia (now Poland) to Tiefengrund, Sask., where Regier was the founding leader of the Rosenorter Gemeinde and the Conference of Mennonites in Canada. His sermon collection includes “odd” names for sermons such as “Sexagesima.” Upon further research, we learn that this…
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Petitcodiac Mennonite Church
The Petitcodiac (N.B.) Mennonite Church Council is pictured during a meeting in 1996. Whether around a kitchen table or a purposely built boardroom, church councils are the administrative hub of most mainstream Mennonite congregations. But it was not always so. The rise of the church council as a lay decision-making body was achieved only in…
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Centennial celebration
New Canadian initiatives around multiculturalism in the 1970s—celebrating anniversaries like Canada’s centennial in 1967, Manitoba’s in 1970, and the arrival of Mennonites in Manitoba in 1974—created a new energy and appreciation for history in Canada. During these years, the Mennonite Heritage Centre and the Archives of Ontario hired permanent staff. Energy was put into founding…
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Cayuga church
From halfway across the world, a loyal MAID watcher noticed an error. This was not the Rainham church in 1965, as originally labelled by the photographer, but South Cayuga Mennonite Church, Dunnville, Ont. Comparing it to another photo of South Cayuga, he urged us to “look at the west end of this meetinghouse. Exact same…
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GAMEO to maintain its emphasis on the global church
GOSHEN, IND.—Reaffirming a clear commitment to a focus on groups outside of Europe and North America, the Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online (GAMEO) management board concluded its annual meeting on May 7. “We are pleased that GAMEO now includes more than 16,500 articles and receives 1,300 visitors each day,” said John D. Roth, GAMEO’s general…
