Why I miss the Bathurst Jewish Community Centre

Every weekday morning, as I drive my boys to  middle school, I pass an empty lot in Toronto’s West Don River Valley that used to be home to the Bathurst Jewish Community Centre.

Parkland has a soothing effect on most people, myself included, but this grassy expanse annoys me.

As a teenager,  I marvelled at the JCC’s three full-sized gyms – two of which included running tracks – as well as its indoor and outdoor swimming pools, daycare centre, indoor squash and racquetball courts, aerobics studios, 444-seat multipurpose Leah Posluns Theatre – which, along with the JCC’s Koffler Centre of the Arts, had only been added to the site in the late 1970s – not to mention its myriad of other facilities and services.

I would have loved to have belonged to the JCC during my teen years, but my parents simply couldn’t afford it. I know, because I asked them many times if we could join. They were raising four kids on a social worker’s salary and sending them all to Jewish day school, which wasn’t, and still isn’t, inexpensive. A membership to the the BJCC, while costing less than most comparable facilities or health clubs, was out of the question.

The BJCC was closed in 2009 and demolished in 2010. It was only about 50 years old, with construction having started on it in 1958.

Demolishing the BJCC was part of a $300-million-plus redevelopment plan that including the now-complete refurbishment of the downtown Miles Nadal JCC and the erection of a new JCC in Vaughan.

However, as The Canadian Jewish News reported in December 2010, the BJCC was torn down before UJA Federation of Greater Toronto, the organization overseeing the plan, had raised the required $150 million to complete the entire project.

As a result, so far, an administrative building has been renovated and only the first phase of the new JCC has been built. The first JCC building to be erected houses a daycare, as well as fitness rooms, limited health facilities and the new Koffler Centre, but the main, $110-million building – containing gyms and a new swimming pool, and sometimes referred to by planners as “phase 2” –  has yet to be started.

The demolition of the BJCC occurred despite apparent assurances to a federation board member in 2007 that the BJCC be would only be taken down “once the funding of phase 2 is confirmed.” Yet a spokesperson said last year that the federation needed to raise $40 million more “before it could responsibly break ground” on the new centre.

The projected opening date for the new centre is still 2014, but it seems like an optimistic target.

Naturally, from the beginning, the idea of tearing down and rebuilding the BJCC, as opposed to renovating it and fundraising for other priorities, such as community funding to offset the high cost of Jewish day school tuition, was opposed by many in the Jewish community.
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Indeed, in 2005, reflecting sentiments expressed to me by many of my contemporaries,  I wrote a piece for The CJN bemoaning the lunacy of a fundraising campaign to raise hundreds of millions of dollars for a building campaign while middle-class parents struggled with Jewish day school tuition fees, and as other Jewish federations elsewhere had started fundraising to do something about the tuition problem.

This past summer, Rabbi Erwin Schild, rabbi emeritus of Adath Israel Congregation, Toronto’s second-largest synagogue, also wrote a piece for The CJN in which he quoted from a 2007 letter to his fellow rabbis, saying that he considered the plan to redevelop the BJCC site to be “ill-advised and harmful, and an irresponsible use of communal financial resources.”

He added: “Some of my objections are related to the recent rejection of public funding for Jewish and other faith-based schools in Ontario. Though I expect that efforts in this cause will eventually succeed, right now our community has to find ways to relieve the burden of impossibly high tuition fees. Three hundred million dollars would go a long way toward providing for Jewish education as a communal responsibility…  How could we plead for public support of our day schools on the basis of financial hardship for parents?

“Does it make sense and is it morally and halachically defensible to destroy a serviceable, handsome and adequate building, merely 50 years old, that could be repaired and renovated if necessary at a fraction of the cost of erecting a new one?”

Alas, he wrote: “I failed to move my colleagues. The funds for the new centre, they claimed, were destined for this particular purpose and could not have been redirected to education or to any other worthy purpose. It was a done deal. Why protest in vain?”

So today, as my middle-school-aged boys become more independent and are able to travel to more and more by themselves on public transit, we would love to buy a family membership to the JCC. My older boy, a young teenager, likes to swim. My younger boy is wild about basketball  – he plays on a now-homeless JCC rep team that rents time at local Catholic high school gyms, and he made his school team as one of only three Grade 6 players on a squad with mostly kids in grades 7 and 8. Alas, there is nowhere for my boys to go in the Jewish community along the Bathurst Street corridor inside northern Toronto. At precisely the time when our family could really make use of  a facility like the JCC, it doesn’t exist anymore.

What’s more, while we would gladly send our kids to the local Jewish high school, the Anne and Max Tanenbaum Community Hebrew Academy of Toronto (also known as CHAT), we’ve decided that we simply can’t manage it. With tuition this year exceeding $21,000, we would be forced to ask for a federation-funded subsidy every year in order to afford it. The subsidy process involves doing a humiliating and time-consuming financial striptease every year to prove that we still require a subsidy, and the process is set up so that any increase in income we accrue as a family would necessarily (and rightly) go toward tuition fees and would lower our subsidy.

As a graduate of CHAT, I’m not sure it’s worth $21,000 more than the “free” public high schools in our area, nor is it worth the humiliation and stress of going through the subsidy process every year.

But just think: if federation had put its efforts years ago into raising money for an endowment fund that would have lowered day school tuition fees across the board, the cost of CHAT might have been more affordable for all families by now. Instead, the community has focused its efforts on futile attempts to get public financing for faith-based schools. But such financing  is now the third-rail of provincial politics, having ruined the career of then-Progressive Conservative party leader John Tory in 2007, when he made the idea the centrepiece of his 2007 campaign for premier. He ended up being flayed for it by Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty, who derided the idea as he portrayed himself as the defender of public schools.

We’ll still make sure our boys get a Jewish education by sending them to some form of supplementary Jewish education during their high school years, as well as to a Jewish overnight camp. But we wish the community had made our family’s concerns a bit more of a priority, and a bit sooner.

Now it’s truly too late.

So you can understand why I get upset every time I drive by the the empty, grassy field where the BJCC used to be.