Wednesday, March 21, 2018
Hasidic buses in Outremont: ‘Our kids have to go to school’
The neighbourhood straddling Outremont and Mile End is home to several thousand members of Montreal's Hasidic community. In Mile End, hipsters live cheek-by-jowl with these ultra-Orthodox Jews who, in Outremont, make up one-quarter of the population. They have large families to fulfil the Biblical command to be fruitful and multiply, they speak Yiddish among themselves, and they dress in distinctive ways that have changed little since Hasidic Judaism began in 18th-century Ukraine.
Few Hasidic women drive — and, even if they did, carpooling or driving your kids to school is impractical in families in which six and eight children are the norm. And it makes no sense from an environmental viewpoint, as several people from the community observed in interviews in which they drew on the Société de Transport de Montréal slogan about one bus replacing 50 cars.
In Outremont, a small group of non-Jews has complained for years about being inconvenienced by the Jewish school bus transportation system, as well as by some of the community's practices around observances of the Sabbath and Jewish holidays. At a council meeting this month, one resident distributed yellow rectangles and said they signified her frustration with the presence of the buses: The action was roundly denounced for evoking comparisons with the yellow star the Nazis forced Jews to wear.
"We as a community, thank God, have large families and our kids have to go to school," said Menachem Feig, a Mile End father of eight who until recently lived in Outremont. "We have done things to minimize the effects on traffic. There are a lot of group stops of 15 or 20 to make for fewer stops, there are corner stops, and the older children walk to school and back. But if you have a one-year-old at home, you cannot wait at a street corner with your five-year-old or have the child walk to the group stop alone. But there is only so much you can do.
"This has to do with their intolerance to our community. They try to make it look like they are not targeting us because we are Jewish — but they are."
Hasidic men commonly wear long black jackets and long black or white socks, black hats on weekdays and, if they're married, fur headdresses on the Sabbath; women dress modestly, with long skirts and long sleeves; married women cover their heads with wigs and sometimes hats as well. It's one way to preserve their identity — and their apartness.
"They intentionally differentiate themselves," said Steven Lapidus, a lecturer in the department of religion at Concordia University who has considerable knowledge about the Hasidic community.
In Mile End, there have been no complaints and the presence of the school buses transporting Hasidic children is not a problem for citizens, said Richard Ryan, Projet Montréal councillor for the Plateau Mont-Royal borough's Mile End district.
"I, too, am inconvenienced by the school buses when I am stuck behind them," said Farkas, a mother of seven and grandmother of 18 who does drive. She teaches high school students with special needs at the Beth Rivkah Academy, a religious girls' school in Côte-des-Neiges. "But I am also inconvenienced when I'm stuck behind parents dropping off their kids at the non-Jewish schools in the neighbourhood. It's chaotic, with all the cars double-parking."
A school bus can accommodate 70 kids, Farkas explained. "But sometimes it makes more sense to have three buses of 45 kids than two of 70, so that each bus is on the road for 20 minutes, not 45 minutes. Even though it means the expense of extra buses and the monitors for each, having more buses makes the route shorter for each and minimizes the total time each bus is on the road."
Other efforts to reduce traffic congestion cited by Farkas include: staggered pickup and drop-off times to minimize congestion; monitors preparing children about to disembark so the stop is as short as possible; older children gathering at corner stops. "For the younger kids in the winter, we do door stops but, in the summer, when weather is nicer, we have just two or three stops on the block," she said. "We try to make it as convenient as possible — and there is always room for improvement."
Boys and girls in Hassidic communities attend separate schools and do not travel together on school buses. The buses are on the road 12 months a year, with about 3,000 Hasidic schoolchildren in several schools in Outremont and Mile End. And daycares and preschools operate year-round. Schoolchildren attend day-camp programs in summer and, for older boys, study programs are essentially school in the summer.
Outremont is "a very mixed neighbourhood and, for the most part, neighbours get along," said Mindy Pollak, a councillor for the borough of Outremont first elected in 2013.
"At council, when you only hear the small group and its bashing, you think they are representative. Over the past four years, I have tried to motivate the people who don't usually speak up to speak up and to let us know their concerns — so that we are not left with the impression that this small group is representative."
One Projet Montréal campaign proposal in Outremont was to work on dialogue and positive initiatives, she said. A planned round table with Hasidim and others "will be a wonderful vehicle for things to happen," Pollak said.
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