Renaming sought for ‘Swastika Trail’

A major Jewish advocacy group in Canada has stepped up efforts to help some residents of an Ontario town convince local politicians to rename a street currently called Swastika Trail.

B’nai Brith Canada started an online petition Thursday calling on Puslinch Township, about 75 kilometres west of Toronto, to change the street name.

The group plans to present the petition to the township council when it discusses the issue of renaming the private road next month, Aidan Fishman, advocacy director for B’nai Brith Canada, said in an interview Friday.

“We first became aware of this in October when a group of local residents — some of whom actually live on Swastika Trail and are very upset about the name and want it changed — were encountering some local resistance and contacted us for advice,” Fishman said.

Swastika Trail was named in the 1920s before the rise of Adolf Hitler in Nazi Germany, local residents said.

Those in support of keeping the name have argued the symbol has a long history before the Second World War, but others argue the name is now associated with hate and genocide.

Fishman said the residents living on Swastika Trail who are embarrassed and offended by the street’s name should not be forced to use it on their driver’s licences or other government documents.

“We also think that maintaining this street name — nevermind for the people who live there — really demonstrates a sort of unwelcoming attitude, whether intentionally or unintentionally, towards people from the outside who may want to visit their own property there, towards Holocaust survivors and their descendants, towards Canadian veterans of the Second World War and their descendants,” Fishman said.

“Even though the swastika originally had a different meaning ... today in Canada if you mention swastika — or to virtually to anyone in the western world — it is a symbol of the horrors of Nazism, and the town and it’s residents can’t ignore that.”

Residents of the street advocating for the name change agree.

“Having the word swastika on my provincially issued driver’s licence and my federally issued mailing address associates me with bigotry, intolerance and anti-Semitism,” said Jennifer Horton.

“That’s not who I am and that’s not how I want to present myself.”

Audrey Guzar, another resident, said “you don’t realize how often you have to give out your address until you are embarrassed about your street.”

She said she is usually met with looks of “horror and disbelief,” often leaving her to explain that she is not a Nazi sympathizer.

The two women and their husbands contacted B’nai Brith Canada for help after other attempts to get action on the issue.

Horton said local residents on the street voted on the issue earlier this month among themselves, with a slight majority in favour of keeping the name.

Carolyn O’Neil, a local historian in Swastika, Ont., said the town was named in the early 1900s after a local gold mine that used the symbol as one signifying good luck.

“We can’t destroy our history,” she said, noting that the town has never had any association with Nazism.