“If you build it, he will come.”
You may recognize that line from the 1989 hit movie Field of Dreams. The central character, played by Kevin Costner, hears a voice instructing him to build a baseball field in the middle of an Iowa cornfield. If he did, the disgraced ballplayer Shoeless Joe Jackson, would magically appear. And he did.
In the 1950s, a similar impulse drove some pioneers of Toronto’s Jewish community. They believed if they built a synagogue in the middle of a Downsview farmer’s field, a Jewish community would magically appear. And it did, at least for awhile.
By the mid-1950s, Toronto’s Jewish community numbered about 75,000 people. It had already begun its northern migration, out of the downtown core, up to Forest Hill and Cedervale, all the way into North York.