Are Canada’s Jews at a tipping point? Most are anxious, many are fearful, and some have moved away

The soaring brick façade and sparse windows of Congregation Machzikei Hadas are easily mistaken for a school or a prison, its faddish 1970s architecture masking the Ottawa synagogue’s century-old roots. Inside, Rabbi Idan Scher tends a congregation of about 350 Jewish families cycling through their religious calendar and life’s unstoppable milestones.

In the year since the October 7 attacks on Israel, along with marriages, bar mitzvahs, bat mitzvahs and funerals, Scher found himself vexed by something new.

“One thing that has really stood out,” Scher said, “is the number of times I’ve been asked, ‘When do we know?’” He paused before making sure the meaning of the question was clear.

“When you look back to the 1930s in Germany or Poland, you ask the question: When should the Jews of that area have realized this is not going to end well? When should they have left? And that’s a question that I, myself, have been asked so many times to weigh in on since Oct. 7.”

The question Scher is asked is not about a time past or another place, but about Canada, today.

“When do we know? Where is that tipping point?

“We don’t feel as safe as we used to, but how unsafe do we have to feel? How many more synagogues must be graffitied? How many more windows must be broken? How many more times do I need to be called an antisemitic slur on the street before we know, that, OK, this is no longer the place for us, that this is on a very dark trajectory that will not end well.

“When do we know? What is that moment?

“Where is that tipping point? It’s being asked a lot.”

It’s jarring to contemplate. Are Canada’s Jews at a tipping point?

A year of hard war since Oct. 7 has seen horror, chaos, fighting, and death in Israel and Gaza, and — as trouble in the Middle East seems uniquely capable of — it reverberates far beyond the region, spilling into everyday life in Canada’s neighbourhoods, often in dramatic ways. Protest, anger and grief blurs into hatred, violence and intimidation for a community acutely sensitive to the danger of shifting attitudes, for Jews have seen the darkness it can bring.

National Post spoke with 12 members of the Jewish community in cities across Canada about life after October 7, and how they responded to rising antisemitism. Most are anxious, many are fearful, some have moved — to new schools, new cities, and even fled Canada altogether.

– – – –

There was a careful calculus by Emily Rappaport and her husband before making an offer on a house they were eying in Ottawa. It was 2017 and the 36-year-old and her family were moving from New Jersey.

“We loved the Ottawa community. We were buying the house we’re going to raise our kids in. We made sure that it was in the right school district, it was near a great park, it was just perfect. I really liked the neighbourhood. I liked our neighbours. We bought our ‘forever home.’ Everything was perfect,” she said.

“And then October 7 happened.”

In the days and weeks after the attacks, Rappaport said she felt increasingly uncomfortable.

It started with anti-Israel stickers on street poles, then signs on neighbours’ lawns. There were rallies against Israel within earshot of her home. When she collected her older child at his public elementary school, where he was one of only a handful of Jewish students, other parents had donned keffiyehs to show support for Palestinians. Parents refused to talk to her, unless they were one of those who came to tell her Israel was committing genocide.

Someone sat in her local Jewish bagel shop wearing a hoodie with a logo of Hezbollah on it, she said. Her neighbourhood Facebook group started sharing “really horrible antisemitic things. And then we started to hear about a neighbour joining a pro-Hamas group,” Rappaport said. “We had an Israeli neighbour, she told her child to never say that he is Israeli at school, not tell anyone at all.”

Rappaport’s youngest child went to a Jewish preschool.

“Every day we had police cars outside. There were two times they had to be evacuated. They are just preschoolers, so they told them there was an animal in the building. They can’t tell them there’s a bomb threat. And then my preschooler comes home and he’s, like, ‘Mommy, Chase from Paw Patrol was at school today.’ ‘What do you mean?’ ‘The police dog was there today. Chase was around all day long.’ And it was super adorable that he could make that connection (to the cartoon character) — but my heart broke.”

Her treatment surprised her, given her politics.

She describes herself as liberal, open minded. She isn’t a flag waver. She didn’t go to Jewish day school growing up and she had friends from all over. “I love Israel, but I also want safety, and self-determination and dignity for Palestinians. I want peace. I want peace very badly. I am not a fan of Bibi Netanyahu. But no one wanted to hear that. No one asked. No one wanted to see what my feelings were.”

She knows when she reached her tipping point.

It was Canada Day, July 1, when she saw that someone had painted graffiti at her child’s preschool. Not just any graffiti, she said. “There was a giant inverted red triangle painted on the welcome sign. That is a known symbol for literally killing Jews, it means, ‘this is a target, kill Jews here.’ That was it for me. I was done.”

She and her husband decided to move. Their house searches this time had different criteria.

“We can’t send our kids to Jewish day school, which is quite expensive, for the rest of their lives. We were going to have to find a public school where there’s lots of Jewish students. I never thought that I would think like this, ever — wondering, is this a Jewish enough area? That doesn’t feel like who I am.”

At the end of August, they moved to a predominantly Jewish neighbourhood in Montreal.

“Now I feel there needs to be a buffer, and that’s what I feel here. There’s enough of a Jewish community. There’s tons of threats, there’s tons of antisemitism out there, but the community is here. I know I can just stay in my little zone. And that’s sad, but that’s what it’s going to be now.”

– – – –

Sol Nayman was four years old when he fled Poland with his family ahead of the Nazi invasion in 1939. Escaping to the Soviet Union, he spent the remainder of the war in a labour camp near the Arctic Circle. He knew nothing about the unfolding Holocaust, Hitler’s Final Solution and the destruction of European Jewry.

His knowledge of Judaism, too, was shallow.

“The only religion was communism, and the only god was Stalin,” Nayman said of his childhood. “There was no seder, there was no Pesach, there was no Rosh Hashanah. It was just what was dictated by the Soviet Union, primarily by Stalin. We had not a single trace of religiosity.”

After Germany’s defeat, Nayman and his family found their way to a displaced persons camp and eventually to Canada, capitalizing on an exception prioritizing tailors. “So my father became a tailor,” Nayman said. “He didn’t know one end of the needle from the other.”

They arrived at Pier 21 in Halifax in 1948 before taking a train westward, settling in Montreal.

Adjusting to life in Canada was difficult. The family relied on the charity of Jewish organizations. He barely spoke English. His teeth were terrible. “The first item that I got was a pair of Harris Tweed pants, and Harris Tweed is very itchy. It was a horrible thing for me to wear.”

Nayman, 88, said his early years in Canada were occasionally punctuated by antisemitism: a neighbour calling him “dirty Jew,” transferring out of McGill University because final exams fell on the Jewish high holidays, stray comments during his career in the clothing business.

After hearing Frankie Laine’s song “I’m Gonna Live Till I Die,” Nayman said he resolved he was going to make the most of his opportunity in Canada. “I felt that I had lost my childhood, but I was not going to lose my teen years or the rest of my life.” He didn’t want his world to be defined by the depravity of the Holocaust.

Nayman made a name for himself in the fashion industry and became the executive vice-president of Club Monaco, a large clothing retailer.

Around his seventy-fifth birthday, his twin granddaughters went on March of the Living, a Holocaust education trip with stops in Poland and Israel. Their interest opened the floodgates for Nayman. He wrote a memoir. He participated in similar trips. He’s done seven so far.

He said he is proud to be a Canadian Jew, although antisemitism here since October 7 has shaken his confidence in the country’s social fabric. A month after the Hamas attacks, Nayman was rattled by the firebombing of Beth Tikvah synagogue in the Montreal suburb of Dollard-des-Ormeaux, a congregation he once belonged to.

During demonstrations at McGill and Concordia, both universities he once attended, he said students celebrated the Hamas atrocities, praised the Yemen-based Houthi rebel group, and ran a “youth summer program” promoted by a poster of a fighter holding an AK-47.

For Nayman, it conjured the disturbing hatred of a past he thought was behind him.

“That was something that I found so hurtful, to think that here in Canada, Jews in various non-Jewish entities, be it business or school or whatever, would have to face the hatred of so many people on the heels of 10/7. That, to me, was one of the greatest disappointments.”

Nayman, now living in Toronto, said the past year has normalized antisemitic rhetoric. There is a difference, he said, in what is now acceptable: “The most toxic levels of antisemitism or Jew-hatred imaginable, in areas that one would never, ever, think there’d be.”

Nayman said it has unravelled Canada’s progress fighting antisemitism. It has become “much, much worse and much, much more overt.”

As strange as it might sound, the Holocaust survivor believes the former bloodlands of World War II might now be safer for Jews.

“I keep saying you’re safer wearing a kippah in Poland than you are certainly in Marseille or Paris or Malmö, Sweden,” he said of the traditional Jewish cap. That feeling hit close to home for Nayman, who lives near Yonge and York Mills, when protests rippled across Toronto after the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust. “That’s the reality. I wouldn’t like to cross the Avenue Road bridge when it was occupied.”

Still, Nayman is cautious drawing parallels to prewar Europe.

“I think many have left the country. Am I going to leave the country? No. I’ll be 89 in about five weeks. This is not a time for me to leave what I’ve loved and enjoyed.

“For me, Canada with all its warts, our government with all its warts, is still the best we can do today,” he said. “I’ve given as much as I think I possibly could have to Canada in terms of being a good Canadian citizen; contributed to the country in ways that I felt I could.

“As the final word, or two words, or three: learn to love.

“My mission is to teach about the Holocaust education to Jews and non-Jews, to try to emphasize how important it is to understand other people, understand other colours, understand other relationships. That’s my mission in life.”

– – – –

Laura, who is a lawyer, was living in Ottawa with her husband and their two young children when news came of the October 7 attacks. She said it “shook” her, but the biggest “shock” came after.

“We started seeing things happening in Canada. We understand demonstrations. We thought, OK, free speech. Totally get it. But then they started getting more aggressive. We were witnessing a lot of things in our community,” she said. Laura asked that her last name not be made public because she worried her business might be targeted.

“I go to Costco and I buy dates from Israel and grapefruits from Israel. And I found stickers, ‘This product supports genocide,’ on the grapefruits and the dates.” A store manager she complained to had them removed, she said. “I went to Walmart, there was a multicultural section where they had products from Israel, India, other countries, and I noticed again, stickers — ‘This product supports genocide’ — all over any product made in Israel.”

Larger worries piled up.

Feeling her children weren’t safe in their English public school, she moved them to a French Catholic school. A man was walking around their neighbourhood with a swastika tattoo. A rock was thrown at a Jewish-owned business. A mom’s Facebook group became toxic. A neighbour made gross antisemitic slurs as their family drove past, she said.

“I was shopping at Farm Boy with my kid in my arm and I was putting away my groceries and a woman comes up to me and starts cursing at me in Arabic and then spat on the ground next to my foot.”

Halloween came three weeks after the Hamas attacks. When Laura posted photos of her house decorated for trick-or-treaters, the reaction from many Jewish friends was fear that her display didn’t cover her mezuzah, a ritual decoration Jews often affixed to their doorpost. “They were like, ‘No, no, we covered ours.’ Someone covered hers with a ghost, another took it off completely.

“I said, I’m in Canada, I’m not removing my mezuzah. That’s next level. I was in shock. I thought, we are not in a good place right now as Canadians. I was thinking holy moly are we there? Are we there?” she said of her breaking point. “Jews in Canada are moving the mezuzah off their door, hiring extra security at our daycare. When I went to synagogue, we’re not that observant, but when we would go there was security.”

A tipping point did come for her family.

It arrived with news of an event in Montreal. A controversial imam, Adil Charkaoui, gave a speech at a demonstration that was decried by politicians as an incitement to violence against Jews. She told her family she was sure Canada wouldn’t do anything about it. She was right. Officials announced Charkaoui would not be prosecuted for hate speech.

“I understand the legality of free speech and I thought, you know, this is crossing the line into hate speech. And then, soon after, there was a shooting at a school in Montreal, where I have friends whose children attend.

“There were all these things and I just said, ‘I don’t know that I want to live like this.’ I don’t see any end in sight, I don’t see any relief coming. This isn’t just an Israel thing, this is antisemitism, specifically in Canada, that is lurking around the corner and not so far from me.

“And I thought how much more of this can we take? How much worse is it going to get? We need to try something else.”

Over March break, Laura and her family vacationed in Panama. “We felt extremely comfortable,” she said. They decided to move there. They put their house in Ottawa up for rent — “in case it didn’t work out” — and moved to Panama in August.

“We have no family here. We have no ties here. We scouted out the community, the Jewish community here, and it was a thriving, very proud, very safe community.”

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Hateful comments were trickling into Ella Green’s phone in the hours after the October 7 attacks, but she didn’t know it. As an observant Jew, the 16-year-old high school student didn’t open her phone during Simchat Torah, a holiday celebrating the culmination of the annual Torah reading cycle.

The second she logged on after the holiday she found her phone buzzing with “disgusting comments” from fellow students in Ottawa, she said.

“The thing is, at this point, I hadn’t even put out that I’d support Israel,” she said. “They just made the link that I was Jewish.”

Green said some people wrote to her calling her “a dirty Zionist” and imploring her to “go back to the gas chambers.” She shared with National Post dozens of screenshots showing that life at her high school has been overrun by the conflict.

Within weeks of the Hamas atrocities hundreds of fellow students at Canterbury High School participated in a walkout protesting Israel. Rallies featured now-familiar cries: “Intifada! Intifada!” and “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” She said demands to stop the “genocide” were heard, although Israel hadn’t even invaded Gaza yet.

Green said she was accosted by several students for not supporting the march.

“People were threatening me and following me around all day until I hid in the bathroom.” The principal, she said, told her, “The best I can do for you right now is let you go to guidance and skip your class.”

Green said her public messages supported Israel’s right to defend itself, condemned Hamas, and expressed sympathy for Palestinian civilians caught in the war.

A classmate messaged her: “How are you white and in the Middle East go back to Europe what r u yapping about,” according to a screenshot of messages. “I had to show everyone how f–king brainwashed you are,” a Palestinian classmate she had previously been friendly with wrote Green on Snapchat.

“It’s quite horrible, honestly. Going into school every day, people saying things, looking at me, giving me dirty looks, the messages that I’ve got,” Green said.

The toll wore on her as one of the few Jews caught in an inhospitable sea. Her school, with a distinguished specialty arts program, had a proclivity for supporting progressive causes, her father, Evan Green, said, and the melding of anti-Israel advocacy with left-wing activism made his daughter a pariah in the eyes of classmates.

Bullying continued into the current school year. Green forwarded screenshots showing a group chat on Instagram where she was barred from a party because she was a “Zionist.”

As classmates began adding students to a group chat about the party, one of Green’s friends asked if Green could join; “she’s a zionist so!!! prob not!!!” a student replied, prompting three people to heart the comment. When Green’s friend said Green was a fellow student and should be able to join, the classmate was unmoved: “im lowk (lowkey) trying to make sure the party is a safe space for people and having a zionist there doesn’t align with that,” the student responded. Another agreed: “It would feel unsafe, people who support genocide should not be around sane people.”

Students had already taken their online grievances with her into the real world, Green said. When her literary arts class asked students to give presentations on what they did over the summer, Green planned to share “hilarious stories” from her time in Israel. “Nothing political at all.”

Students who denounced her as a genocide-enabling Zionist approached the teacher and expressed fear that her talk might become a triggering diatribe, Green said.

“I was forced to go in during lunch to rehearse my story in front of the teacher because she thought it was going to be political.” The teacher didn’t ask to vet anyone else’s presentation, she said.

According to Green and her father, she has since been removed from the classroom while the school looks into the matter. “I’m not able to go into my last two classes of the day until the issue gets resolved because they’re worried for my safety,” she said. Green’s mother has since filed a police report.

The Ottawa-Carleton School Board District did not respond to requests for comment prior to publishing deadline.

Green and her father both believe if similar treatment targeted a member of another marginalized group school leadership would have taken it far more seriously. Despite having a no-bullying policy, Green said no school official checked to see how she was doing.

The year since Oct. 7 has raised alarms for the Greens. The bullying leaves them mulling a school transfer. “It’s so complicated I’m not sure yet. I just don’t want to deal with antisemitism anywhere else either,” Green said.

“I hate being in school every day.”

– – – –

Benjamin Derible, a graduate student in public policy at Dalhousie University in Halifax, said that the day after the Hamas atrocities student associations were posting messages “in support, not of Israel or the Jewish community, but for Gaza,” he said.

“Before we even knew the scale of what had happened, (by) Oct. 8, campus is already becoming hostile,” Derible said. “All of a sudden we have that almost on the daily.”

A lifelong Haligonian, he remembers a city largely insulated from Jew-hatred. “It never crossed my mind,” he said, “that Halifax would see consistent antisemitism. It was definitely a shock.”

Over his previous four years at Dal he could only recall one incident of antisemitism, a swastika drawn in a campus dorm, which school officials immediately removed and then issued a statement explaining the severity of the graffiti.

“I think it was the reason I was so confident in the university,” he said. “They took care of it swiftly, put out a statement condemning it. The university has definitely shifted its tone and is far less, or less willing, to make statements about antisemitism.”

Derible said he met with school officials several times, including in November with representatives from the Atlantic Jewish Council, but said the conversations failed to bring substantial change. Dalhousie could only be expected to send “neutral emails” that gestured to the problem of antisemitism, always tying it to Islamophobia.

A year later, life on campus and in Halifax still feels “heavy,” Derible said. “You walk down the street and you’re kind of waiting to see something, or waiting for something to happen because it’s so regular now.”

Life on many campuses changed after Oct. 7.

The day of the Hamas attack, Jeremy Urbach, a fourth-year business student at Western University in London, Ont., vowed to begin preparations to make aliyah, a Hebrew term for Jews immigrating to Israel.

“Literally, on Oct. 7, I made the decision to go to the (Israeli) army. I made a vow. There’s no way this is gonna happen again without them going through me first,” the 23-year-old said by phone from an Israeli kibbutz in the Galilee.

“I think a big reason was just my experience on campus. Like, all these people screaming and we couldn’t really do anything,” Urbach said. Shortly after the October 7 attacks, he said local activists held a celebratory rally expressing solidarity with Hamas. Campus protesters were denouncing Israel as an “apartheid” state and “evil.”

Brash, fit, and well-spoken, Urbach had become a prominent voice within the Canadian Jewish community during the pandemic after he started an Instagram account, Gishmak Herring. Gishmak, he said, “pretty much means ‘lit’ in Yiddish. A combination of lit, awesome and delicious.”

He became more passionate about his Jewish side, he said. He attracted thousands of followers online, and it even led to his own line of herring.

After October 7, Urbach became a determined advocate for the Jewish community on Western’s campus. At one point he and several other students “went rogue” and taped up posters around campus of the hostages kidnapped by Hamas.

“Before we knew it, there were literally kids following us and just ripping them down. I remember interacting with them, asking why they were opposed to advocating for Israeli civilians taken by a designated terrorist group.” The response, he said, was “we don’t care.”

Urbach said the school’s administration did little to reassure Jewish students they were safe on campus.

Last fall’s semester became a blur as the outside world punctured his academic bubble. He had friends in the Israel military, he said. “I didn’t know when I could talk to them next…. There were bomb threats at my brother’s high school at CHAT,” a Jewish school in Toronto, which he once attended, “and, like, I was expected to do these group projects. How could you really focus on this stuff when there’s just so much craziness going on? It was really hard and a lot of people struggled.”

Urbach decided to wear his kippah to his graduation ceremony, something he rarely did in public. It was important, he said, to “shake the dean’s hand like a yid.” He said he and his parents left the April ceremony through a separate exit, because anti-Israel protesters were “being so loud, screaming.”

He now wears a kippah all the time.

He spent the summer making content for Gishmak Herring. He knew he would be moving to Israel soon and wanted to make as many videos as possible to grow the account before leaving.

That led him to visit the University of Toronto’s pro-Palestinian protest encampment in May, where he wandered about wearing his kippah, on camera, offering protesters slices of Israeli watermelon, meant as a demonstration of his own, as watermelon is used as a symbol of support for Palestine because its colours match those of the Palestinian flag.

On Aug. 27, Urbach kept his promise and moved to Israel. He hopes to join a frontline military unit in January and said he had no reservations about uprooting his life in Canada.

“This is the best place to be Jewish. This is the best place where I could tell my story of being a ‘lone soldier’ making aliyah,” he said, referring to the term for foreign-born Jews who volunteer for the Israeli army without immediate family in the country. 

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Laurence Ittah, 28, had packed all but a few clothes into six suitcases in preparation for her move from Laval, Que. Her father collected them and flew ahead with her luggage to Israel so her stuff would be waiting when she arrived there three days later. Her flight was scheduled for Oct. 8.

As a Montreal-born-and-raised Jew, she had been planning her move, her aliyah, for a year before the war. She already thought life in Canada was difficult enough.

Ittah said she was an English-as-a-second-language teacher in Montreal, where most of her students were recent immigrants from the Middle East. Her students didn’t know she was Jewish, she said, yet they frequently and openly disparaged Jews.

“This topic was constantly discussed among them. They were openly talking about race. I walked into my classroom once and a student had drawn Hitler on the board and it said ‘Salut Hitler,’ which in French means, hail Hitler.

“I knew if I told them that I was Jewish, it would affect the whole year. And the fact that I actually hid it from them, I’m ashamed about it, but I felt I had to in order to make it through the year with them.”

By the time she was supposed leave for Israel, her flight was cancelled because of the October 7 attacks. Her father was safe, but he could not return to Canada for several days.

As the horrors of the attacks saturated the news, she realized this was the world she was supposed to move to.

“My whole family was calling me every single day begging me not to go and not to book a new flight and to wait for it to settle down,” Ittah said.

“But I just figured that would kind of make me a coward, you know? And it would make me not worthy of actually doing aliyah, because if I’m to move, I’m going to become an Israeli citizen, meaning that, like everyone else, I will have to live here in hard times and in good times.

“I actually never once hesitated…. I knew what I was going into. I knew it’s not the ideal time, but I feel like it’s the perfect time — the perfect time to really see if I’m meant to be here.”

Her immigration, arranged with the help of Nefesh B’Nefesh, an organization that facilitates Jewish immigration, was rescheduled for Nov. 29. She got on that plane and was reunited with her luggage.

“It was the ultimate test,” she said, from Israel. “I do not regret it, not for one day.”

The idea of aliyah is unique. It’s a process that encourages Jews from the diaspora — those living around the world — to move to Israel. Israeli law gives Jews and their families a right to acquire Israeli citizenship.

Non-profit agencies, such as Nefesh B’Nefesh and the Jewish Agency, assist in the process and coordinate with the Israeli government.

In years past, many dismissed the idea that it might be safer to be a Jew in Israel than Canada, comparing the fear of terrorism and war in Israel to sleepy, safe Canada. Rising antisemitism in Canada and a stirring of nationalism for the Jewish state is changing that.

Despite Oct. 7 and an ongoing war, the number of aliyah applications from Canada since the attacks have more than doubled, according to Nefesh B’Nefesh.

There were 1,415 applications for aliyah submitted by Canadian Jews to the organization between Oct. 7, 2023, and mid-September 2024. In the previous October to September period there were 689 applications.

– – – –

Oliver Bleuer likes numbers. As a 63-year-old retired accountant in Montreal, he has relied on numbers all his career and still finds comfort and order in mathematical values. He prides himself on rational assessment and critical thinking; numbers over passion.

“My spreadsheets tell me that what I have (for retirement) will last me until I’m 92 here, without adding anything. In Tel Aviv, the same amount will last me until I’m 82 to 84, without doing anything more,” he said.

Bleuer and his wife, Carri, 58, have been considering a move to Israel, so Bleuer is crunching the numbers.

“I’m not an alarmist. I think we overemphasize the propensity for violence in North America directed at any one group,” he said. “I’m not expecting there to be pogroms or anything in Canada.”

That doesn’t mean he is confident Canadian society will remain a comfortable place for Jews.

“It’s not the students yelling and screaming ‘from the river to the sea’ that gives me unease, because every generation at that age has something that they’re screaming about. That’s part of growing up. But I see it now from adults who really should know better, who should be able to understand that we live in a society where we have to get along, otherwise the rule of law is going to just dissipate into nothing.”

The young people today will be among Canada’s leaders tomorrow and Bleuer is wondering “whether I want to deal with that, and I don’t think I should have to at this point in my life. And not out of fear. At this point, I’m asking myself, not so much whether I feel welcome here in the country of my birth, but that I feel more welcome in Israel.”

He knows what is happening in the region, but still sees Israel as a good bet, for living and investing. They submitted their applications for aliyah and are working through the process with Nefesh B’Nefesh.

The couple aren’t rushing out the door, but they want to be ready to.

One place he’s considering as their new home in Israel, where they have visited before, is now enflamed by the conflict. “It’s kind of hard to close on real estate in an active war zone — and you would think that prices go down, by the way. They don’t,” Bleuer said.

Even so, “the events of October 7 have not changed our minds to go. Period. Stop.”

He expects an increasing flow of immigrants to Israel because of rising antisemitism elsewhere. “There’s a significant Jewish population that doesn’t feel at ease anymore.”

– – – –

Sarah Ifrah, a former Toronto-based architect, was visiting her daughter in Jerusalem on Oct. 7, when air raid sirens woke her and a slumbering city in the early hours.

Ifrah, 50, dashed out of her Airbnb to wait out the attacks with family but, on her way, warning sirens blared and she ran into an entryway for shelter, she said. A young boy who was there raised his finger skyward.

“Fire! Fire!” he screamed, pointing to where an Israeli Iron Dome missile intercepted a Hamas rocket. “I get chills talking about it,” she said.

She hunkered down in Israel until her flight out, on Oct. 12, brought her back to New York City, where she had moved from Toronto during the pandemic and a divorce, to be close to her sister.

Although Ifrah moved to a predominantly Jewish neighbourhood in the Five Towns, she said ambient antisemitism she saw and heard was frightening: rallies supporting Hamas, student groups running public relations for the October 7 attacks, an uptick in hate crimes.

Toronto seemed even worse.

She regularly returned to Canada to meet with clients and see family. Even her house in the Bathurst and Lawrence area felt unsafe, a stone’s throw from Bialik Hebrew Day School, where a Toronto police vehicle was stationed in its parking lot around the clock after October 7.

“I still go to Toronto because most of my business is there. So, yeah, I was shocked. I saw stuff that was going on in Toronto. I was like, this is ridiculous. I don’t know what world I was living in.”  

She had mulled moving to Israel when her daughter and son-in-law moved there in 2022. She thought maybe in ten years, closer to retirement. When her granddaughter was born the next year, she cut the timeline in half. During a visit in Israel in April, moving there suddenly felt urgent.

“At that moment, I’m like, that’s it. I’m coming,” she said. Her decision to make aliyah was a mixture of wanting to be closer to her granddaughter and further from antisemitism in New York and Toronto.

She said she was with family on Ben Yehuda Street, a lively stretch of Jerusalem outside the Old City walls filled with nightclubs, hooka bars and restaurants. Her former husband sent a group message to the children pleading with them to leave Israel and return to Canada, for safety’s sake, Ifrah said. His worry seemed misplaced to her.

“When you’re there, they (Israelis) are living life. They’re loving life. They’re helping each other. Yes, they’re fighting an atrocity of a war, but they’re protecting us. They’re there for us.

“You come to Toronto, you come to the States, maybe you’re not going to be able to walk down a block without getting harassed in some way, shape or form,” Ifrah said.

She asserts that Jews in Toronto are more vulnerable than Jews in New York. Despite worries about gun violence and America’s political culture, she felt Canada presents more problems, where she sees a lack of political support for Canada’s Jews, particularly from the federal government.

“I just want somebody to care about me. And you know what? As much as (Canada) feels like a free country right now, and it still is, they really don’t care about me because nobody’s standing up for me in Canada.

“I’m going to a place where I know I belong. I know they want me there. I know they’ll fight for me there. I know there’s a future for me there. I don’t have to be scared there, not, at least, of my government and my people.”

The Holocaust loomed over Ifrah’s thinking.

“This could really happen again,” she said. “That is terrifying. It’s terrifying to see, in real-time, things happening, kids being closed out of things on campuses, people being hurt in the street, buildings being defaced, windows broken.”

She arrived in Israel on Sept. 28.

– – – –

Different people have different tipping points, and different reactions when they reach it, or see it on the horizon.

Toronto’s Jewish community recently established a private security agency to protect Jews and Jewish institutions in the region. After all, the vast majority of Canada’s Jews are staying put.

The United Jewish Appeal of Greater Toronto (UJA), a registered charity, launched the Jewish Security Network (JSN) last month with plans for a centralized, around-the-clock operations centre and “hardening” the defences of Jewish institutions.

Jeff Rosenthal, UJA chairman, said physical security of the Jewish community became the agency’s top priority after Oct. 7.

“It feels as though the social contract is being broken, and with that, a growing number of Canadians — students, especially younger parents that I speak with — are losing confidence in Canada as a safe place to raise their children,” Rosenthal said when announcing the JSN.

The JSN has warned that the anniversary of October 7 could bring increased danger to the Jewish community. While there is no specific threat, the alert says, JSN advises heightened awareness and security.

In Vancouver, Ezra Shanken, head of the Jewish Federation of Vancouver, has been battling fierce, public antisemitism from members of Samidoun, a B.C.-based, registered Canadian not-for-profit organization that displays ties to the designated terror group Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and members of Hamas.

“We stand with the Palestinian resistance and their heroic and brave action on Oct. 7. Long live Oct. 7,” Samidoun leader Charlotte Kates said from the steps of the Vancouver Art Gallery at an April rally, one of several public incidents.

“We’ve continued to challenge the government in really making it clear to Canadians that organizations like Samidoun don’t have a place here in Canadian society,” Shanken said.

Robert Brym, a leading scholar of Canadian Jews who recently retired as a sociology professor at the University of Toronto, says data confirms antisemitic hate crimes have risen sharply since October 7.

His forthcoming research, shared with National Post, says Toronto’s Jews experienced a 75 per cent rise in hate crimes, with most incidents coming post-October 7, leading the city in terms of religious-based hate crimes. (Muslims, too, have felt an increase in hate crimes since October 7, rising 17 per cent over the same period.)

“I wasn’t entirely surprised,” Brym said. “I was dismayed at the ferocity, the ferocity of the vitriol that was poured on Jews.”

Brym, co-author of the landmark 2018 survey of Canadian Jews, doesn’t buy into a pessimistic narrative of Canadian Jews surrounded and isolated. “I keep on reminding people that a few individuals, small groups, can be responsible for many incidents.”

According to his research, large segments of Canadians still have positive attitudes towards Jews and Israel. The flip side, that community leaders must work on, is there are pockets of extremely negative views, particularly among Muslim Canadians and non-Jewish university students.

He sees in his findings “room for dialogue and conciliation,” particularly between the Jewish and Muslim communities.

From there he sees hope.

National Post

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