Who is Becca Shron?

I’m Becca Shron, I’m the co-op student/intern at the Orillia Museum of Art and History and I’m from the Georgian College Museums program.

Were you born in Orillia?

No, I was born in Toronto and we moved here when I was about five or six. My understanding of it was we kind of went for a Sunday drive and my dad, while driving, saw this town and was like, “I love it!” and he kind of just up and moved us here. As far as I know there was no set plan, we just fell in love with the town and we moved, and we’ve been here ever since.

Now your family is Jewish, so what was it like being a Jewish family
in Christian Orillia?

When we moved here, as far as we knew, we were the only Jewish family in Orillia. We ended up finding out that there was a synagogue in Barrie and it was only about a half hour away, so we went to synagogue there. But as far as Orillia goes, we were the only Jewish family here and a lot of people in Orillia didn’t know anything about Jews, which led to some issues sometimes, but you can always take us up to educate somebody on it instead of being offended by it.

We ended up having a few more Jewish families move here from our synagogue that moved here since then, but it’s kind of hard, you get kind of disconnected from your religion. My family took care of that by making sure I went to Jewish summer camp, and did Jewish activities during the year, which made sure we kept connected to it.