Yellow badges worn to denounce use of Hasidic community buses
MONTREAL — A Montreal woman who sparked outrage after she and other citizens wore yellow badges on their clothing at a borough council meeting to protest the Jewish community’s use of school buses in her neighbourhood says she’s the real victim.
Despite being told by residents the yellow square on her shirt evoked the Holocaust — when European Jews were forced to wear yellow stars under the Nazi regime — Ginette Chartre said in an interview Tuesday she wouldn’t stop wearing it.
“[The Jews] always bring up their painful past,” she said. “They do it to muzzle us. We’re wearing the yellow square because the school buses are yellow.
“We’ll march down the street wearing them, banging pots and pans if we have to,” Chartre said about the most recent flare-up between some residents of Outremont and its burgeoning Hasidic community.
Outremont’s Hasidic Jews use school buses to transport their children and members of the community to school and around the neighbourhood.
Chartre and a handful of other residents have been complaining for years the vehicles block the streets and are a nuisance because they run in the summer and during what she says are odd hours during the day and evening.
“On just one residential, oneway street, there are 14 buses in one hour!” she said. “That’s not reasonable.”
On Monday night, Chartre and about eight other people attended the Outremont council meeting wearing the yellow badges. They tried to distribute them to get other people to don them, too.
The incident at the meeting was the most recent in a longsimmering dispute between the borough’s ultra-Orthodox Jews and Chartre, as well as a handful of other citizens.
In November 2016, citizens voted against allowing Hasidic Jews to open more synagogues on a main street in Outremont, sparking accusations of antiSemitism.
“Should we just go away? Just vanish?” Alex Werzberger, a member of Outremont’s Hasidic community, said in an interview Tuesday.
Outremont Coun. Fanny Magini said she and her colleagues were shocked when a handful of people walked into the room wearing the badges.
“It’s a campaign that targets children — particularly Jewish children,” she said. “It’s totally unacceptable.”