Commemorative plaque acknowledges anti-Semitic riot of 1933

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Good cities recognize both their praiseworthy history and their shame.

By acknowledging a dark slice of its history vis-a-vis a commemorative plaque marking the Christie Pits anti-Semitic race riot 75 years ago, Toronto is demonstrating it has come a long way.

So said Peter Ortved, chair of Heritage Toronto, as he spoke to about 100 residents gathered on Aug. 17 at the southeast corner of Christie Pits Park to remember the brutal melee between British Protestants and Jewish, Italian and black immigrants that unfolded at the conclusion of a baseball game in the park on the same date in 1933.

It's tough to imagine a pre-Second World War Toronto when unemployment was high and hunger commonplace. The Jews represented the largest minority in 1933 Toronto and were a xenophobic target of non-Jewish residents. Moreover, Adolf Hitler's anti-Jewish rhetoric was ramping up in Nazi Germany and its ugly tentacles had managed to reach other regions of the world including Toronto.

"Our mission is to tell Toronto's stories and this is an awkward event for us as most Heritage Toronto plaques celebrate events, people or places that have shaped the city we love and this one clearly does not," Ortved said. "We're commemorating a riot today, not celebrating it. ... The riot that occurred here 75 years ago should be remembered for precisely what it was: One of the worst ethnic riots in this city's history."

In the early 1930s, Bloor Street West was the dividing line between Toronto's British Protestants to the north and the city's poorer Jewish, Italian and black neighbourhoods to the south.

Christie Pits Park was a communal bone of contention; a hotly contested public space between the Anglo-Canadian Pit Gang (also called the Swastika Club) and the predominantly Jewish Spadina Avenue Gang.

Whereas other public parks across the city had signs erected that flatly stated "Gentiles Only" - such as in High Park and in the Beach area - Christie Pits Park remained fair game for newcomers. However, the sight of "No Jews Allowed Here" signs in shop windows and Nazi swastika flags displayed along some of the city's main streets must have been unnerving to Toronto's early Jewish residents.

"Toronto has come a long way. Though we still have a way to go yet, the riot of 75 years ago reminds us of what we never want to happen again," Ortved said.

At the conclusion of that 1933 double-header ball game in Christie Pits, the supporters of the St. Peter's Church ball club and their players, which had been taunting the Jewish ballplayers on the rival Harbord Playground team and their supporters, took it a step too far. When some of the young Brits watching the game on the hill unfurled a large white flag with the black swastika emblazoned on it, all hell broke loose.

"Remembering the worst times of our past helps us better understand the impacts of those events on our community and on those around us," said Fredelle Brief, chair of the community relations committee, Canadian Jewish Congress. "As Canadians, it's our duty to remember the Christie Pits riot and hopefully to learn from difficult moments in our country's and our city's history like this one."

As the six-hour battle in the park raged, word spread quickly. Soon scores of young black and Italian men raced to the scene to fight alongside their immigrant Jewish brothers while nearby British residents emerged from their homes with broomsticks and baseball bats.

Amazingly, no one was killed.

Cyril Levitt, a McMaster University sociology professor and author of The Riot at Christie Pits (1987, Lester and Orpen Dennys), painted a picture of a different Toronto from the one we know today.

"Toronto was a British city, a Protestant city and this was reflected in its leading social and political institutions. The great divide that accompanied early Ontario history between Protestant and Catholic produced enormous tensions. Membership in the Orange Order and the Masonic Lodge was der rigeur for employment in the city's civil service," he said. "Toronto's Italian and Jewish communities ... were outsiders; the Italians as Catholics and foreigners; the Jews as foreigners and a perennial target of Christian anti-Semitism as old as Christianity itself, which did not change markedly until the horrors of the Holocaust had made a powerful impact after the Second World War."

Ward 21 (St. Paul's) Councillor Joe Mihevc attended the ceremony on behalf of the vacationing Deputy Mayor and Ward 19 (Trinity-Spadina) Councillor Joe Pantalone; Mihevic told the crowd the riot at Christie Pits is a sobering reminder of how cities can go in the wrong direction.

"It's important to note that anti-Semitism was not only a Nazi German obsession-pathology. The Christie Pits riot lineup with a host of other things (including) the refusal of Canadians to accept German-Jewish refugees escaping Europe," he said. "The Christie Pits riot was an expression of western anti-Semitism. It's important to recognize this because good cities and communities recognize and acknowledge their history and their shame."

The plaque will be permanently mounted in the southeast corner of Christie Pits Park within a week's time.