Toronto’s Ashkenaz Festival, the prominent Jewish cultural festival held every two years on Labour Day weekend at Harbourfront Centre, is going to look different this year. Organizers decided to move its signature klezmer parade uptown on the holiday Monday while keeping two of its usual three dates at the waterfront venue.
Ashkenaz Festival’s absence at Harbourfront’s lakeside arts and recreation campus on Labour Day is due in part to the high cost of increased security measures that festival organizers say the venue presented at a meeting over its public safety concerns for this year’s festival.
Discussions between Ashkenaz and Harbourfront Centre (HFC), a not-for-profit cultural organization, have focused mainly on preparing for security contingencies, with input from Toronto Police Services (TPS), in assessing public safety risks from demonstrations all the way up to a potential violent attack during the festival.
Ashkenaz and HFC were finalizing the security agreement and event contract following ongoing discussions as of The CJN’s press time.
The move for Labour Day cuts one of three days focused on Jewish arts in a key downtown Toronto attraction. The vibrant community parade will be held this year at the Sherman Campus of the Prosserman JCC, in the city’s north end, where it will join another Jewish event.
“This is the first time in at least the last 15 to 20 years that there is a contraction of our footprint at Harbourfront Centre,” Eric Stein, Ashkenaz’s artistic director, told The CJN in an interview.
The security conversations, which have been ongoing, contributed to slowdowns in Ashkenaz’s production schedule, leaving producers “in limbo” for weeks during the spring, according to Stein, who in late June said that organizers were at the point in festival production where the team would normally have been in mid-April.
“We’re building the plane while we’re flying it,” Stein says, calling it the most challenging production cycle he can remember. “Luckily we’ve built this plane 13 times before over the last 30 years.”
The new high cost of Jewish events
The festival’s struggles around security concerns and their accompanying increased costs illustrate the extra scrutiny, hassle, and double standards involved in presenting Jewish events post-Oct. 7, especially in public spaces.
Stein says it all amounted to a “perfect storm” of trying circumstances this year, along with visa issues that created delays in booking a few of the acts.
Such increased security concerns appear to be affecting mostly (if not exclusively) Jewish events—especially anything touching Israel.
This year’s lineup features more Israeli artists on the bill than in a number of years, Stein notes. He says Ashkenaz always tries to represent Israel’s “important context for Jews to create music.”
“Obviously, it felt a little more pertinent this year to try to represent Israeli artists… not as a political act, but as an act of pride… a celebration of the creativity and the quality of those artists.”
Performers include Aveva Dese, an Ethiopian singer who appeared on Israeli TV’s version of The Voice, and El Khat, a Berlin-based Yemeni band fusing modern and traditional sounds.
Stein emphasizes that the organization has always worked to remain politically neutral while focusing on Jewish artists, arts and culture. Ashkenaz aims to bring together diverse audiences, he says, including Jews from across the political and religious spectrum—or outside the religious spectrum altogether.
Stein calls it an inappropriate venue for political expression, including over Israel.
“We hope [that] people of all different communities and beliefs… come together in an environment where I believe we can discover more of what unites us than what might divide us” through music and inspiring performance, he says.
This year’s events run from Aug. 27 to Sept. 2, but Ashkenaz updates that trickled out in May and June had few details, raising questions about whether it was going on at all, or if it would remain at HFC. Meanwhile, Ashkenaz’s promotions highlighted the second year of its Summer Jam series of Monday double-bill concerts in Earl Bales Park, where a Jewish or world music performance is followed by a cover band. The August 26 show, spotlighting a seven-piece “Ethio-Groove” act from Brooklyn before a Bob Marley tribute, bridges into the week-long Ashkenaz Festival.
Building 2024’s plane while flying it led to Ashkenaz to focus on its core music programming, with stripped-down theatre, visual and literary arts, and film components. A single screening, the world premiere of Yiddish culture documentary Welcome To Yiddishland, features The Bashevis Singers, who are slated to appear (separately) in concert. The festival is also hosting a staged reading of Justice: A Holocaust Zombie Story, an original audio drama that will launch on The CJN Podcast Network.
Bomb-sniffing dogs, metal detectors among ‘almost a million dollars’ in recommended security
Stein says Ashkenaz consistently told HFC that the festival was going ahead following the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas on Israel that sparked the ongoing war in Gaza.
“We’re doing the normal things that we normally do when we plan the festival,” Stein told HFC. The venue didn’t raise concerns about security until a teleconference meeting in March.
HFC expressed concerns related to potential protests, attacks, or other scenarios that could impact public safety, Stein says, including contingencies for violent escalations.
“It’s obvious that we’re in a very volatile environment at the moment,” he says.
“They gave us this risk assessment presentation that concluded with a series of recommendations that added up to almost a million dollars in terms of measures and expenditures that would be required to secure the site in the way they envisioned,” says Stein of the initial meetings.
“[HFC had said] we would have to fence the entire site, have one single point of access, have metal detectors and bomb-sniffing dogs.”
A single point of entry at the boardwalk-adjacent venue would restrict the flow of foot traffic that makes the location an ideal festival venue.
“They wanted us to have 40 uniformed police officers, paid duty, on-site, all the time during the festival,” Stein says.
Puzzled by that initial presentation, Stein and his team spoke to politicians, event organizers, and the TPS Jewish community liaison officer before telling HFC in subsequent conversations that the security assessment was not realistic.
“We came back to them [saying] … the police that we’ve spoken to have not said that these kind of measures are necessary,” says Stein.
“Eventually we kind of negotiated down,” he explains. They dialed back HFC’s security recommendations, revisiting some of the measures and reducing the number of events at the venue.
Discussions with HFC left Ashkenaz with questions about how to move ahead, says Stein. The Ashkenaz parade, a Klezmer-jam affair that ambles around the site, has been a Labour Day attraction at HFC’s downtown waterfront campus during Ashkenaz for well over a decade.
The 10-acre property—surrounded by public walkways, boardwalks and piers—draws tourists, locals and passersby and is known for hosting a range of summer cultural festivals and free concerts.
Stein says the team discussed how to hold the festival safely “knowing there’s a good chance that there are people that may want to target what we’re doing as an opportunity for them to protest, to express their position vis-a-vis the conflict in the Middle East.… Logistically, we’re going to have to address that as a matter of public safety, and as a matter of the experience for the people coming to our festival.”
Ashkenaz’s biggest question has been how to go forward with the festival in a way that feels safe, Stein says, pointing to broader questions about challenges the Jewish community has faced since Oct. 7. While Ashkenaz is working through safety measures with the other venues it’s booked into, Stein says working with HFC this year has been complicated, and in turn, frustrating.
“None of the other venues working have had this kind of conversation” around security, Stein says. “Nobody else turned it into an existential crisis for us.”
Ashkenaz Festival was planning to return to its “usual scope and shape” this year, he said, after years of COVID disruption since its last “normal” festival, in 2018. The 2020 festival comprised archived concerts shared online, while 2022’s edition was a hybrid live and virtual format.
HFC calls initial proposed costs ‘preliminary‘
The CJN requested an interview with Harbourfront Centre, however HFC management offered written answers to questions in lieu of a phone interview.
In an email, HFC told The CJN the security assessments and prior estimates were preliminary, and that the actual security cost was being developed, together with Ashkenaz, to be consistent with costs for HFC’s other partner festivals (those hosted and supported by the venue, as opposed to events and festivals produced in-house.)
“We do not know where the $1 million figure you cite comes from,” HFC wrote. “It is important to differentiate typical due diligence from an actual cost estimate for activities like security.”
The organization says it is collaborating with Ashkenaz and Toronto police to ensure public safety.
“Many factors impact security costs, including number of days, the size of the footprint on campus, whether it falls on a statutory holiday, hours of operation per day and more. This will be worked on in collaboration with Ashkenaz.”
HFC said its standard procedures for partner festivals applied to Ashkenaz, including the security assessment that was to be agreed upon in a contract, and developed together with partners.
HFC told The CJN in early July the assessment was underway. When asked if the security discussions had been ongoing since March, HFC offered “some context on the process.”
“When discussions began earlier this year with the festival partner and other stakeholders including the Toronto Police, everyone was able to share their concerns with a shared goal of safety and enjoyment for attendees,” HFC said.
“A number of ideas were raised, including a larger number of paid duty police officers. These were just ideas.”
TPS provided cost estimates “for additional security so that we all had information to understand costs and benefits,” HFC wrote.
HFC confirmed the security plan was being finalized “and is in line with typical partner festivals at Harbourfront Centre.”
“For Ashkenaz, the campus remains fully open with numerous points of entry. This is consistent with other partner festivals,” HFC wrote, acknowledging the change from the initial conversation about security.
HFC said promotional materials will appear on their website soon, and had been left off certain marketing materials by request of the festival.
Ashkenaz’s website now shows complete festival listings, and HFC says its website, social media and on-site signage will soon reflect Ashkenaz at HFC in those updates.
“Typically, promotion of festivals happens four weeks ahead once programming is finalized. We expect to begin this amplification once Ashkenaz finalizes their marketing around programming,” HFC wrote, adding that it hopes to continue hosting Ashkenaz “for many years to come.”
‘The political climate has made being an openly Jewish artist problematic‘
DJ, vocalist and showman Josh Dolgin—a music producer, freestyle rapper and Yiddish culture mashup innovator who performs as Socalled—is a past and present Ashkenaz Festival artist, and says the Israel-Hamas war is impacting Jewish artists, festivals and cultural events, whether or not they identify with Israel.
“It’s very telling and very shocking and sad that a festival that really has nothing to do with the politics of today, and these global conflicts about a nation state called Israel, are lumped in with the whole.… All Jews are sort of vulnerable right now, even a festival that’s celebrating a part of the culture that is totally not about Israel,” Dolgin, who is based in Montreal, told The CJN.
Dolgin last played Ashkenaz in 2022 with a cabaret project called Gephilte. This year, he takes the stage for a concert with Socalled Big Band, a 19-piece jazz orchestra.
“But I don’t even blame [an organization like] Harbourfront—you just have to blame the whole situation. And it’s a complicated situation… they’re just covering their asses from… a massive misunderstanding, of most people, about what Jews are, and what Israel is, and what Zionism means to some Jews, or not to some Jews.”
Dolgin says his passion for Yiddish culture developed partly to show different ways artists could be and present as Jewish.
“The political climate has made being an openly Jewish artist problematic. It’s just not a sexy world music and culture to be doing right now,” he says. “Even if people love the music, they’re a little worried… just because you are also Jewish, which is connected to this global conflict.”
He points to a cancelled May gig, in a Canadian city Dolgin asked not to name, as one example of how it’s affected his work engagements.
“They were like, ‘Actually, we see it’s on this thing called Yom Hazikaron (Israel Remembrance Day). Can we move it?’”
The city that had booked Dolgin almost cancelled, before the parties managed to reschedule.
“But [it was] because of this political situation, and it was very inconvenient. I had to find different people… and it’s just because of this… hysteria,” says Dolgin.
“It is a form of hysteria… [and] it’s a tragic, horrible situation going on over in Israel. But Canada isn’t Israel… people harassing Jews, Jewish places of worship… bombs going off and guns being shot at synagogues. I think it’s insane that that’s happening in Canada.”
Meanwhile, Eric Stein says despite the “financial and existential challenges that highlight the negative tone out there,” Ashkenaz Festival won’t be derailed.
“We won’t be cowed.… As challenging as it is under current circumstances, it’s not an option to hide. We are proud of what we have to share with the world as a community, in our city. Unfortunately, we have to incur extra costs and stresses related to that,” says Stein.
“It won’t keep us from doing what we do best: to share the artistry of our people, our community and our traditions.”
