Worlds collide in Montreal
Amid conflict with area’s Hassidic population, residents connect online
MONTREAL— Cheskie Weiss discusses his blog at his dining room table. For the past year, he’s written about his family life and his thoughts on local politics.
Like many homes in the Montreal borough of Outremont, the walls of Weiss’s duplex are lined with photos of his family. But his children all wear striped shirts, and his china cabinet houses a menorah.
“People were surprised; they thought we didn’t use the Internet,” laughs Weiss, a Hassidic Jew with a long beard and curled forelocks.
He started the blog OutremontHassid.com to explain Hassidic life to his neighbours after feeling like his community had been seriously maligned.
“Something had to be done to fight the lies and intimidation,” he says.
From casual ambivalence to public hecklings, Outremont has grappled with relations between its historic francophone bourgeoisie and its growing but insular Hassidic population.
Hassidim immigrated to Outremont after the Second World War, buying up cheap property in the neighbourhood of Quebec’s ruling class. They now make up a fourth of the area, with their own shops and schools, and multiple synagogues. Many look downwards while crossing the road.
“I don’t think a lot of people understand our way of life,” says Weiss. “To some people, we look like people who just fell from the planet Mars.”
Hassidic Judaism was founded in Eastern Europe in the 1700s in response to secularism and anti-Semitic violence. Its followers adhere strictly to Jewish law and wear modest clothing from the movement’s founding period: large wool hats for men; long dresses and wigs for women.
With a high birth rate, the mostly English-speaking Hassidic community is expected to grow at a time when Montreal politicians are fretting over a decline in French speakers. In Outremont, tension surrounds bylaws, from bans on religious processions to time limitations for sukkahs: temporary wooden huts built each autumn.
“You don’t have anti-Semitic attacks in Outremont,” says Weiss. “You have bylaws targeting a specific group.”
Afew streets from Weiss’s house, Pierre Lacerte points out what he commonly sees: double-parking on narrow streets, trash piling up in alleyways, de facto synagogues operating in papered-up storefronts.
“It really affects the quality of life here,” he says.
Since 2007, the former journalist has been blogging bylaw violations by his Hassidic neighbours with punchy headlines and well-sourced documents. He doesn’t leave home without a camera.
“When I start something, I follow through,” he says. Lacerte estimates losing $250,000 in lawyer fees and potential communications clients after an ongoing libel suit with a local Hassidic businessman.
“They do whatever they want, whenever they want,” says Lacerte, who has targeted shops illegally operating in apartments and rooming houses that violate fire codes.
Lacerte lives on Hutchison St., a residential road on which three separate synagogues are nestled between row houses. He and borough councillor Céline Forget made province-wide headlines in June 2011 after successfully campaigning against one synagogue’s extension.
Congregants wanted to build a vestibule into a 60-year-old synagogue’s backyard, prompting Lacerte and Forget to start a flyer campaign. The two convinced voters to reject the zoning request, saying the neighbourhood had enough congestion.
“We were shocked,” says Mayer Feig, the synagogue’s rabbi. “Most of us have good neighbours, but a few are stirring the pot.”
Tensions rose nine months later during Purim festivities in March, when children go door-to-door exchanging gifts. Forget showed up to protest the use of shuttle buses, which a 2003 bylaw banned from residential streets.
At least 20 Hassidic men surrounded Forget, yelling in English and Yiddish. An online video shows the group at one point calling her “Hitler Forget.” Public security officers had to escort her out of the neighbourhood.
“There were still people who believed this false image driven by the Hassidic lobby: that of good, religious pacifists,” said Forget. “It’s high time this false perception was put against reality.”
The councillor says she’s suffered death threats, slashed tires and physical attacks from a segment of the Hassidic community. In 1997, she had a civil court shut down a noisy synagogue that was operating illegally in her apartment building, prompting a decade of harassment. Leila Marshy remembers seeing Forget campaign against the synagogue extension in 2011. She noticed the councillor dropped off pamphlets only to non-Jewish homes. Marshy, who is not Jewish, launched a pro-extension flyer campaign, taking a week off work to knock on all the doors in her neighbourhood. Hassidic neighbours told her they felt under siege. “I’d finish every single day in tears,” said Marshy, an educator who lives down the street from Lacerte. “It was emotionally intense.” A handful of Hassidic strangers called Marshy and asked to join her flyer campaign. When the extension was rejected, they launched the Facebook group Friends of Hutchison Street, which held an information booth at two street fairs. “Nobody ever saw a Hassidic and a non-Hassidic person hanging out,” she recalls. “It turned heads, it was so wild.” The group hosted a packed town hall discussion last May. Some came to learn about their Hassidic neighbours, while others criticized bylaw violations. Marshy admits that some Hassidic neighbours break numerous rules, and she’s no fan of large buses on her street. “There are issues. But if you want to solve issues in an urban environment, you have to do it together,” she says. “We literally live on top of each other here.” “We have a lot to work through,” says Weiss. “It takes a while.”