The streets of Kensington Market have been filled with Toronto middle school students this month.

May is Jewish Heritage Month and the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) is partnering with UJA Federation's Ontario Jewish Archives Blankenstein Family Heritage Centre to offer daily walking tours for students, called "Stories of Spadina."

The goal of the cultural project is to develop an awareness and empathy for the Jewish people and their experiences, and to make connections with Toronto's present-day immigrant population.

About 3,000 Grade 7 and Grade 8 students from Scarborough to Etobicoke have walked through the market.

Students from Galloway Road public school were surprised with performance by an actor portraying a Jewish immigrant from the 1931. He taught the teens a Yiddish song and gave them a taste of how Jewish people worked and lived in the market during this time.

The students also learned how Kensington Market became a Jewish community, partly due to anti-Semitism in many neighbourhoods in the city.

Grade 7 student Kieshawna Brown said she knew very little about the Jewish community prior to participating in the tour.

"This is an eye opener because you get to look around and see where people actually used to live,” she said.

“Toronto is so diverse, it is a bit of cultural lesson and a history lesson," said Grade 7 student Nayab Ahmed.

Between the 1920’s and 1940’s, Kensington Market was a bustling place where close to 45,000 Jewish people lived and worked. Over time, the faces of the market have changed, but the overall spirit has stayed the same.

Nowadays, the market is referred to as a hub for immigrants. Participants described Kensington as "a place where brothers and sisters of the world come together to eat, shop, and live." As part of the tour, the groups have a chance to visit the Kiever Synagogue, one of Toronto’s most historic Jewish buildings. It was built in 1927 by Jewish immigrants from Ukraine.

Lara Donsky with the TDSB told CTV News Toronto that many of her students are from immigrant families themselves and have no awareness about the market's cultural significance.

"They notice now that this community is multi-cultural -- that it even mirrors their own lives,” Donsky said.

The tours are delivered by the TDSB 's Toronto Urban Studies Centre.