Remembering the Christie Pits riot: DiManno
Posted on 10 August 2013
August 10, 2013
Joe Black’s father was a mild-mannered man who owned a small confectioner’s near Christie Pits. Unusual for the time, the store had a telephone.
On the evening of Aug. 16, 1933, the elder Black obligingly let a youth into his store who said he desperately needed to make a call. The fellow was carrying a long steel rod. As Mr. Black hovered nearby, he overhead the teenager trying to summon anti-Semitic reinforcements for the melee that had shockingly broken out across the street.
“My dad took the guy’s arm, pulled it up behind him until you could hear it crack, dislocated the arm completely,’’ recalls the son, now 87 years old, but with vivid recollections of that chaotic night.
“I have memories of everything.”
This was one time that Toronto’s Jewish community would not stand for the abuse, the Jew-baiting, which was quite prevalent in the city in those years just before World War II, when Adolf Hitler had just taken power in an economically flattened Germany and Nazism was ascendant.
This one time, Toronto’s Jews — the teen boys, at least — fought back, with help from Italian lads (the late Johnny Lombardi among them) who’d been equally resented and unwelcome as “foreigners’’ in what was an insular, xenophobic town sometimes called the Belfast of Canada because of its militantly Protestant character and the flamboyant annual Orange Parades.
Working-class youth of Scottish and British stock were just as socially and financially frozen out of the landed gentry privileges personified by the Eaton family — “they ran the city,” snorts call-me-Joe. (At Eaton’s, Jews were hired only for jobs where they wouldn’t deal with the public; a Jewish woman, for example, would not be considered for the elevator-operation position.)
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