TORONTO — As the Bathurst Jewish Community Centre closes its doors for the last time Sept. 27 before it is torn down and replaced, a new, adjacent building is filling many of the roles the 48-year-old BJCC has played in recent years, along with a couple of new ones.
Leslie Gales and Barry Sherman
The Donald Gales Family Pavilion, a four-floor, approximately 40,000-square-foot, $10-million building, hosted an opening celebration last week, with formalities that included speeches by Toronto mayor David Miller and Vaughan MPP Greg Sorbara.
The completion of the pavilion, which has been in partial use since June, marks the end of the first phase of redevelopment of what’s now known as the Sherman Campus. The 27.5-acre spread on Bathurst Street, north of Sheppard Avenue, houses the Lipa Green Building and the Leah Posluns Theatre, which will also be rebuilt.
Phase 1 also included renovation of the Lipa Green Building, which houses community offices, the Ontario Jewish Archives and the Holocaust Centre of Toronto. The building is connected to the new pavilion by an elevated, glassed-in bridge.
The Gales Pavilion houses administrative offices and programs of the Prosserman JCC (the entity that includes the building replacing the BJCC), as well as the Koffler Centre of the Arts and the David & Esther Freiman Early Childhood Education Centre, a nine-classroom facility that has been in use since Sept. 1.
As well, an 8,000-square-foot aerobics studio, with aerobic and weight machines, can accommodate about 45 people at a time, plus an additional 20 in its spinning classes. It will open Oct. 5. Also, fitness classes will be held in multi-purpose rooms in the building.
Of the BJCC’s 1,200-plus fitness members, more than 700 had signed up for the Prosserman JCC as of last week, according to Bryan Keshen, its executive director. The Gales Pavilion can handle between 800 and 1,000 fitness members a day, he said.
However, members who are regular swimmers and want to continue swimming will have to go elsewhere until the new facility is built. Also, the Gales Pavilion does not include a gymnasium for basketball players, and members who play racquet sports such as handball or squash will not have those options at all on the Sherman campus.
“In terms of what we think will serve the community best, we’re not able to provide enough support or space for a proper racquet club experience,” Keshen told The CJN. “You have to build it for success, and not just put in a couple of courts. We’re going to focus on what we’re great at – things that support social networking and large group activities. We just don’t have the space or the skills to build a centre of excellence for racquet sports.”
The pavilion was designed so that as much of the space as possible would be multi-purpose, according to Gary Siepser, UJA Federation of Greater Toronto’s senior vice-president of strategic community planning, who led one of the post-launch facility tours. However, specialty spaces include a media studio equipped with 19 computers, a ceramics studio, and a culinary arts studio with a large demonstration island and overhead mirror for cooking classes and workshops.
There is also space available for community and life-cycle events such as weddings, federation president David Koschitzky noted at the launch.
Phase 2 will include a 70,000-square-foot athletic facility, the National Centre for Jewish Heritage (which will include the Sarah and Chaim Neuberger Holocaust Education Centre, Committee for Yiddish offices, and the Ontario Jewish Archives, all of which are currently housed in the Lipa Green Building) and a new Leah Posluns Theatre.
Construction will begin in 2011 at the earliest, because “it takes about a year to decommission the [current] building,” federation spokesperson Howard English told The CJN.
Phase 2 is expected to take approximately three years to finish, he added.
Peter Cohen, chair of the Sherman Campus development committee, said in a speech that, “if we were going to do something to attract the young people, we had to do something excellent.”
“We wanted a stronger and more vibrant Jewish community,” said Leslie Gales, who served as the overall project’s first campaign co-chair with Barry Sherman.
The renovations are part of the federation’s $400-million “Tomorrow Campaign,” a three-pronged effort that began about a decade ago. It includes the 50-acre Joseph and Wolf Lebovic Jewish Community Campus in Vaughan, and the Miles Nadal Jewish Community Centre and Wolfond Centre for Jewish Campus Life in downtown Toronto.
In a video taken a week before the opening when Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty visited the Sherman Campus, McGuinty praised the project, which received a $15-million grant from his government, for creating 200 jobs at a time when they were “most needed.” As well, he said it fosters a better quality of life through its seniors’ programs, as well as its daycare, early childhood education, and fitness facilities.
Miller called the BJCC “a remarkable place… not just on behalf of the Jewish community but for all Torontonians,” and lauded the federation for raising money to help the less fortunate.
