---

Mounting Antisemitic Attacks, Institutional Failures Leave Canadian Jews Asking: Stay or Go?

Atara Beck

---

The remains of a kosher restaurant in Montreal’s Côte-des-Neiges neighborhood are seen after a weekend fire caused extensive damage in an incident police are investigating as possible arson amid a wave of antisemitic attacks targeting the city’s Jewish community. Photo: Screenshot

Rabbi Daniel Korobkin, spiritual leader of Beth Avraham Yoseph of Toronto Congregation, Canada’s largest Orthodox synagogue, moved from Los Angeles to the Greater Toronto Area in 2011.

Comparing Canada then and now, “I think it’s two completely different countries,” he told The Algemeiner. “This isn’t just my opinion. I speak to Canadians who have lived here their entire lives.”

Korobkin and his wife moved from the United States to Canada “because we saw it as a goldene medina, just like the United States,” he explained.

However, after then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper was unseated by Justin Trudeau in 2015, the prominent rabbi described a slow decline in the Canadian economy, followed by infringements on individual freedom during the COVID pandemic. But that “does not necessarily spell disaster for the Jewish community because the Jewish community had not been singled out,” he noted — until everything changed.

“Then we got to Oct. 7, 2023,” Korobkin said, referring to the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s invasion of and massacre across southern Israel.

Korobkin’s story is one of several relayed by Jewish leaders, activists, and experts who spoke to The Algemeiner about what has become an alarmingly hostile environment for Canadian Jews, many of whom are now actively discussing whether to emigrate from a country they once considered a haven.

Just last month, the national statistical office of Canada revealed that Canadian Jews were the targets of more than 70 percent of religion-motivated hate crimes and 16.7 percent of all hate crimes, regardless of category, reported to police in 2025, despite making up less than 1 percent of the country’s population.

According to observers on the ground, one source of this surging antisemitism is a growing Muslim population comprised largely of immigrants from regions where animus toward Israel is rampant.

“There are at least five or six times as many Muslims as Jews in Canada today, and the Muslims have organized themselves,” Korobkin said. “They have really got their act together … and part of the Islamist philosophy or creed is to bring sharia law to wherever they live.”

Korobkin stressed that this is “not representative of the entire Muslim community.” However, he noted, “in many of the radicalized Muslim voices that we see today, just like we see it in the UK and France and Australia, the creed is to dominate and silence all dissenting voices.”

According to Korobkin, the Jewish establishment in Canada is not handling the problem the way it needs to.

“I think there’s a certain amount of kowtowing to Canadian political leaders. It’s a strategy that I don’t think will work,” he lamented. “When the UJA [United Jewish Appeal] tells you that they scored a great victory in getting more security funding, all that means is that they managed to convince the government to give us more money to build higher walls and barbed-wire fences around our institutions. That’s not a good way to fight antisemitism, but that’s all they’ve got right now.”

In contrast, the grassroots movements are “pushing back hard,” Korobkin explained. “They’re saying, ‘We’re going to be in your face. We’re not going to take this lying down. We’re not going to retreat into our ghettos and our higher-walled fences.’ And that, I think, is the difference between the CIJAs [Center for Israel and Jewish Affairs] and UJAs on the one side and the grassroots groups like Tafsik and Unapologetically Jewish and even B’nai Brith.”

Korobkin argued that some Canadian politicians are more concerned with electoral considerations than confronting extremism. “And that, I fear, is a recipe for a very dark future for the Jewish community in Canada.”

“That doesn’t mean that all is lost and there’s no possibility for course correction,” Korobkin added. “But I will say this: There has never been a worse time to be Jewish in Canada than today, perhaps with the exception of during World War II.”

The prime minister’s response to antisemitism

Prof. Irwin Cotler, international chair of the Raoul Wallenberg Center for Human Rights and a former justice minister, served as Canada’s first special envoy on preserving Holocaust remembrance and combatting antisemitism from November 2020 to October 2023.

Cotler said antisemitism had historically been viewed through a “triangular paradigm” of threats from the far right, far left, and radical Islam.

“However, my principal finding at the conclusion of my first year as special envoy in 2021 was that while this conventional paradigm remained, what we were now witnessing was the mainstreaming, normalization, and legitimation of antisemitism in the political culture, the popular culture, the entertainment culture, the sports culture, and, in particular, the campus culture, the whole amidst indifference and inaction, let alone the absence of outrage,” he explained.

In February, Prime Minister Mark Carney eliminated both the office of the Special Envoy on Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combatting Antisemitism and the office of the Special Representative on Combatting Islamophobia, replacing them with a broader Advisory Council on Rights, Equality, and Inclusion.

On June 1, in an address to the Jewish community at Holy Blossom Temple in Toronto, Canada’s largest synagogue, Carney acknowledged the rise in antisemitism and announced the official launch of the Advisory Council, chaired by Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture Marc Miller, saying its first priority would be tackling the antisemitism crisis.

The Advisory Council includes lawyer Avnish Nanda and former Transport Minister Omar Alghabra.

Nanda has represented anti-Israel students who were evicted from an encampment at the University of Alberta.

Alghabra is the former president of the Canadian Arab Federation, which, after his tenure, lost federal funding over its support of Hamas and Hezbollah. In 2022, he defended his attendance at a Canada-Palestine Parliamentary Friendship Group reception hosted by Nazih Khatatba, editor of an Arabic-language newspaper accused of spreading antisemitism. In 2005, Alghabra criticized then-Toronto police Chief Bill Blair for participating in a Walk with Israel event and traveling to Israel.

Carney’s speech “acknowledged the scourge of antisemitism and that the covenant with the Jewish community had been breached, but there was no reference to Israel, no reference to anti-Zionism as a cover for antisemitism, and there was no mention of the ongoing delegitimization, dehumanization, and demonization of Israel, which is what has, in effect, put a target on the back of every Canadian Jew,” Cotler said.

“Regarding the Advisory Council, as I said when it was announced, such a council, while necessary to combat all forms of hate, tends to marginalize or erase the singularity of anti-Jewish hatred, its globality, and its descent into standing threats of intimidation, harassment, violence and even terrorism.”

However, Cotler added, “the inclusion of Omar Alghabra and Avnish Nanda on the committee is not the problem — it is the establishment of yet another advisory council, with a broad-based agenda and without the requisite expertise to understand and combat antisemitism, when what is needed is moral, political, and juridical leadership at the highest levels, as an expression of what Prime Minister Carney has himself called a ‘whole of government’ policy.”
.

Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney speaks at a Hanukkah menorah lighting in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, Dec. 14, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Patrick Doyle
.

read more….

---

---