Overview

• Earlier this month, the Museum of Jewish Montreal reopened H. Fisher & Fils as a pop-up exhibit on St-Laurent Boulevard, transforming the former notions supply shop into a heritage space.
• The display retains original sewing machines, cash registers, handwritten order sheets and a century’s worth of fabric bolts and button samples.
• Booked tours invite visitors to handle cloth swatches, spools of thread and zipper samples to create a sensory learning experience.
• The shop represents Montreal’s early 20th-century “shmata” industry that provided jobs and security for Eastern European Jewish immigrants.
• Museum officials plan to expand the exhibit with oral histories and personal stories from those who knew the Fisher family.