Historical Context: Athletics Clubs for Youth in Cities
In the late 19th century, the development of factories in towns and cities meant fewer families relied on children’s work to support family farms, shops, and household chores. Children of working-class families could, for the first time, enjoy leisure time. For kids in poor neighbourhoods, this free time meant playing in streets, alleys, and junk yards, running around scrap metal and other dangerous materials. People concerned about the safety and security of these children created the first playgrounds and youth sports clubs in cities.
The YM-YWHA: Building a Place for Community, Athletics, and Play
The YM-YWHA, the Young Men’s and Young Women’s Hebrew Athletic Club, was an organization that supported the recreational, social, and athletic life of young Jews in Toronto. “Hebrew” in those days was the word for Jews as a people, not the language they spoke. Most of the activities of these sports clubs would have taken place in Yiddish or English, the popular languages of the community.
The Toronto YM-YWHA was formed in 1919, when 21 different Jewish sports clubs came together under its first name: the Hebrew Association of Young Men’s and Young Women’s Clubs. Other communities across Ontario, such as the Kingston group pictured above, established their own athletic clubs and associations at different times. Each association helped its member clubs manage team schedules, rosters, and money, and gave them shared access to rental facilities, while letting them keep control over their own programming. The YMHA teams competed locally with teams from other organizations like the YMCA (Young Men’s Christian Association), but rarely competed with other YMHA teams at a provincial level.
Excluded from Other Athletic Organizations
In the early 20th century, many immigrants, including Jewish Canadians, had been welcomed into, and had even made significant donations and volunteer commitments to programs at their local YMCAs (Young Men’s Christian Associations) and other Christian recreation centres. These associations started as welcoming places for community members to grow, volunteer, and play sports.
However, in the 1910s and 1920s, a rising wave of anti-immigrant attitudes and racism in Canada increasingly targeted Chinese, Japanese, South-Asian, Black, some Germans, southern European and eastern European immigrants, including Jews. The anti-Jewish discrimination impacted these community centres: antisemitic acts and new rules introduced in 1918 were written to strictly limit the number of Jewish youth who could join the YMCA teams and other community associations, so the Jewish community created its own clubs and leagues. YMHA member Harvey Blackstein remembers:
When I was thirteen years of age, a friend of mine–we were both the same age–we went to the YMCA to join and they told us flat-out, “We have a quota for Jewish boys and it’s filled right now and we’re sorry. We may call you later if we have an opening.” I joined the Canadian Swimming Club and I swam competitively for them for several years. Then I joined the YMHA; I was around 18 or 19. I had just come out of the swim club, and I thought it was time to join a Jewish organization…. I thought if I were going to swim or play water polo, I should play for a Jewish team.
Ken Borden, another Toronto YMHA member, remembers his teenage years at the “Y”:
This was my life as a Jewish teenager growing up in Toronto in the late ’30s and early ’40s, the “War years….” In those times, anti-Semitism was big and very visible, too visible. We kept to our own little world where we felt safe. We had the benefit and protection of the YMHA at Brunswick Avenue and College Street, our home away from home, our shelter from the outside stormy blast of our adversaries. The Y gave us the athletic and social outlets that any generation requires. As well, the Y gave us club rooms, our very own “hideouts,” so to speak. They were ours–they really were. We decorated them with our own original crests and logos, furnished them with sofas and chairs, organized weekly meetings, just like the Canadian Parliament, with voting on what to do, when to do it and who to do it with, things like parties with girls or dates. After all, athletics weren’t everything!
By the mid-1920s, the YM-YWHA leadership expanded the mission and vision of the organization to include adult social and recreational groups. Over 70 Jewish Toronto sports clubs and social groups became affiliated with the YM-YWHA, and the “Y” for “young” was no longer the sole focus.
A Community to Grow In and Grow With
Even when the YMCAs changed their policy in the 1950s and allowed Jews back in, a lot of Jewish people chose to join Jewish athletic clubs instead. Jewish kids felt safe and secure at the YMHA, as part of a tight-knit youth movement that grew its own leadership and built life-long friendships, marriages, and brotherhood/sisterhood.
Even though they started out in a humble and small space, the YM-YWHA produced several championship teams in basketball, swimming, boxing, weightlifting, and wrestling. Some of the athletes went on to have long careers in sports, while many others went on to non-athletic careers, taking with them the teamwork and leadership skills they learned through sports and coaching.
The association produced heroes, like boxer Sammy Luftspring and track-and-field legend Fanny “Bobbie” Rosenfeld, who started out in basketball at the YWHA and went on to a gold-medal Olympic track career in 1928. Although Sammy Luftspring would sacrifice his own chance for gold and boycott the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, Germany, both Fanny “Bobbie” Rosenfeld and Sammy Luftspring would make significant contributions to Canadian sports and go on to be inducted into the Canada Sports Hall of Fame.
Conclusion
Sports taught people about Canadian social expectations; they built cross-cultural relationships through teamwork; they helped Jewish youth learn about and contribute to Canadian popular culture; and they instilled a deep sense of Jewish identity and pride in their members. Over more than a century, the YM-YWHA–now called the Jewish Community Centre (JCC)–has helped people acculturate to Canadian life; helped them find love and deep friendships; supported people’s health and wellness through many stages of life; and developed community leaders, professional athletes, and internationally-renowned arts talent. The organization keeps evolving, continuing in these strong traditions and strengthening the Jewish community and its neighbours.
Sammy Luftspring
In 1936, at only 19 years old, Sammy Luftspring was a gold medal hopeful representing Canada’s boxing team at the Olympics. Back home, he joked that he was in the newspaper more often than the mayor: he was in the boxing ring every night or two, boxing 105 matches in four years and winning all but five of his bouts. By 1933, he was the Ontario amateur lightweight champion and one of the most popular figures in Toronto’s boxing scene.
Born and raised in a poor Jewish neighbourhood in Toronto, Luftspring began his boxing career only four years earlier, in 1932 close to home, at the Young Men’s Hebrew Athletic Club, the YMHA. When he got into the ring in the 1930s, wearing a Star of David on his shorts, he was a symbol of pride, strength and determination for the whole Jewish community.
But that year, the Olympics were in Berlin, Germany. The government in power, the Nazi party, had turned on its Jewish, Black and Romani citizens, as well as anyone who was gay or had a disability. Olympic hopefuls like Luftspring had a decision to make: compete, or take a stand and boycott the games.
Fanny “Bobbie” Rosenfeld
Fanny “Bobbie” Rosenfeld was a stenographer in a Toronto chocolate factory, but on evenings and weekends she was the ‘world’s best girl athlete.’ She was an award-winning softball champ, who also broke national and international track records and led both an ice hockey and basketball team to a league championship. As one reporter noted, “The most efficient way to summarize Bobbie Rosenfeld’s career… is to say that she was not good at swimming.” Trained at the YM-YWHA, Rosenfeld represented Canada at the Amsterdam Olympics in 1928, where she won gold in Relay 4x100m and silver in the Women’s 100 Metre race, the very first time women were allowed to compete in Track and Field at the Olympics.
Connections
- Where do you go to connect with others in your community? What makes these places important to you?
- What role do athletic and community centres play in the lives of people in your community? What might make them important for people?
- Why did Jewish communities form athletic and social clubs? How did these support individuals, the Jewish community, and the larger community in the early days? How did they grow and change over time?
Additional Resources
Canadian Race Relations Foundation, “Celebrating Jewish Canadian History: The Story of Sammy Luftspring.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XJUTWnfliA
Dublin, Anne. Bobbie Rosenfeld: The Olympian Who Could Do Everything. Toronto: Second Story Press, 2004.
Jewish Women’s Archive, “Bobbie Rosenfeld.” https://jwa.org/womenofvalor/images/Rosenfled/Bobbie
Luftspring, Sammy and Brian Swarbrick. Call Me Sammy. Toronto: Prentice-Hall, 1975. [Out of print]
Ontario Jewish Archives. “Sammy Luftspring.” https://ontariojewisharchives.org/Explore/Themed-Topics/Sammy-Luftspring
Ontario Jewish Archives. “The History of Toronto’s Y.M.H.A.” Virtual exhibition. https://ontariojewisharchives.org/Exhibitions/Online/The-History-of-Torontos-YMHA
