Arnold Mintzberg, 26, centre in that photo above, was the chief of the local Jewish Defence League, which met in a four-room office over a Decarie Ave. butcher shop.
He conceded that there was little antisemitism in Montreal at the time but worried it was growing, which inspired him to lead the movement.
Among their activities that year was a sit-in at the Aeroflot offices on de Maisonneuve on June 30, to protest the Soviet refusal to allow Russian Jews to leave. Seven were arrested.
On March 12 about five dozen took part in a counter-protest opposing a Palestinian rally outside of the Israel and US consulates on McGregor that never materialized. And in July they claimed to have roughed up a guy who had attacked a Rabbi. They claimed to have guys with radios patrolling supposed hotbeds of antisemitism, like Jeanne Mance St. and Fairmount.
Don't know what happened to Arnold Mintzberg, who would be about 67 now, but other Montrealers with that same last name in Montreal have done well, including Henry, an academic and Marc and Sheldon, both entrepreneurs.
The JDL had been formed just two years earlier in New York by Meir Kahane and Mintzberg claimed that seven of his members had attended training camp in New York.
Of course, the local Jewish community then - as now - is not a political monolith and some local Jews didn't support the aims of the JDL at all, including gadfly prof Stanley Grey.
Eventually, the Montreal-born Irv Rubin would take over the JDL but he wasn't in Montreal at the time or even involved in the JDL in 1970.
Rubin moved from Montreal to Los Angeles with his family in 1961 at age 15, and got into the movement down there in a big way in 1971.
According to one biography, Rubin learned to fight back against antisemitism while growing up in Montreal, "where some hotel owners and other business people hung signs reading `No Dogs or Jews Allowed' on their doors and where French Canadian schoolchildren taunted him because he was Jewish."
He once recalled that his mother told him to go out and fight a kid who had called him a "dirty Jew."
Rubin sought to reopen a JDL chapter in Monreal in 1994 as an "insurance program" to protect the Jewish community and that raised publicity but eventually it fizzled out. He died in a Los Angeles prison, falling off a 20 foot balcony, in 2002. The JDL was deemed a terrorist group by the US government in 2001.