The wearing of yellow badges at a Montreal borough council meeting to protest the use of school buses by Hasidic Jews has sparked outrage due to their similarity to the stars Jews were forced to wear under the Nazi occupation.
Monday night’s incident in the borough of Outremont is the most recent event in a long-simmering dispute between a few local residents and members of the growing Hasidic community.
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“Should we just go away? Just vanish?” Alex Werzberger, a member of Outremont’s Hasidic community, said in an interview.
He wasn’t at the council meeting but said he was told about what happened.
“The Jewish people for millennia have been exposed to this stuff, some worse, some better, and it’s almost part of our existence, part of our being,” he said.
A video of the council meeting that was uploaded online by the borough shows a woman, with a yellow rectangle pinned to her clothing, addressing the mayor and councillors.
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The woman in the video says the rectangle is a symbol of the yellow school buses used by the borough’s Jews and that she calls a nuisance.
“The buses run 12 months a year, they block streets,” the woman said.
“There is only certain citizens who have this privilege.”
She says the badge has nothing to do with the past.
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“If they are yellow it’s not to bring up anything in history,” she tells the mayor in the video.
“It’s to state that in order to have a symbol for a bus we can’t have a rose square, or black or beige. Buses are yellow. At a certain point you have to move beyond the past if you want to move forward.”
Jennifer Dorner, an Outremont resident who attended the meeting, said she was outraged by the eight or so people she said showed up wearing yellow rectangles pinned to their shirt.
She said the only buses that run year-long are used by the borough’s Jewish community to transport children around the area.
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“I live in Outremont and the buses are not a nuisance,” she said.
“I have a Hasidic friend and when she saw (the yellow rectangles) it triggered an intense wave of emotion for her and she cried. I don’t think they realize the impact they are having on the community.”
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Every so often tensions flare in the borough between a handful of citizens and its Hasidic Jews.
The most recent conflict occurred last November when citizens voted against allowing Hasidic Jews to open more synagogues on a main street in Outremont.
Werzberger said most people in Outremont have no problem with the Hasidic community.
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“This is a cadre of 100 or 200 people,” he said.
“I’ve been here since 1950, there is no real problem. We are a very peaceful community. What is the murder rate or the drunk rate in the Hasidic community? We are quiet, nice people.”
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