I don’t need a survey to tell me the city of Toronto – my hometown – has become a Jew-hating cesspit

Children are removing Magen David necklaces. They’re asking parents not to report abuse. Some are switching schools. Some are moving homes so that they can send their children to schools in a different - hopefully less hostile district. This is not anecdotal. This is data. And yet, if you’d been in Toronto during that period, as I was – and have been since – you didn’t and don’t need data. You just needed to open your eyes.

For more than 50 years I lived in Toronto – the largest city in Canada. On October 7, I watched the transformation of the hometown I loved – where I’d attended public schools, university, worked, and raised my children – into a feral, Jew-hating cesspit.

That Saturday afternoon, while the slaughter in Israel was still ongoing, Toronto suburbs with significant Muslim populations were openly celebrating the Hamas attack. And due to what can only be described as a very “light-touch” law enforcement approach, the festivities quickly morphed into “protests”, which have become a regular feature of life. Anti-Zionists have had the run of the town – blocking major transport hubs, intersections and central streets with explicitly antisemitic demonstrations and placards. Police facilitate this activity.

Jewish community events are often disrupted and require heavy police protection. Jewish schools have been firebombed repeatedly; synagogue-goers harassed. Synagogues vandalised. Bomb threats are not uncommon. Several have targeted Jewish nursery schools.

Many Jewish families have moved. Out of province. Out of country. Many are planning to move. And many are hoping they won’t have to.

Since October 7, Jewish children at Toronto’s public schools have been harassed, assaulted and blamed for all manner of ills. Both the police force and school board in Toronto are the fourth largest in North America. For many years now, these institutions have championed what I would consider extreme DEI ideologies – as has the government of Canada, particularly under former prime minister Justin Trudeau.

All this was unfolding in real time, right in front of Deborah Lyons – Canada’s Special Envoy on Antisemitism, who this week retired from her post, three months before the end of her term and only a few days after the survey’s release.

Full disclosure: I know Lyons personally. She was appointed just nine days after the October 7 massacre. I have also written publicly about her performance. Initially, I was hopeful and prescriptive. That changed quickly.

For the first few months of her tenure, she focused, oddly, on appearing with her Muslim counterpart charged with combating Islamophobia. Those were stage-managed events at which they relayed Trudeau’s preferred bromides. Lyons placed strong emphasis on Holocaust education, as if that would somehow mitigate the post-October 7 vitriol.

While in Toronto in autumn 2023, I became closely involved with families whose children were experiencing physical and psychological violence. School administrators and police were involved in many cases. Even at that early stage, a tendency to turn the “blame” onto the Jewish child became apparent. Parents were invariably told their children had somehow “provoked” the hostility. That there were “two sides to the story”.

I attended an emergency meeting in a Toronto public school in November 2023, where 70 per cent of the pupils were Jewish. All the school board pooh-bahs for the district were present. They sat at the front of the room looking deeply serious and droned on about policies and procedures. The school gym was standing room only – filled with hundreds of distressed parents. When they lined up to speak, the room became very heated. 

One family I worked with had been stymied by school and board officials for weeks. The violence continued throughout the year, culminating in a group of antisemitic students cornering one of their children and throwing rocks at him, along with hateful taunts. This followed months of open playground bullying. The teachers never seemed to notice.

The students doing the bullying were new immigrants to Canada from a Muslim majority country. They told one child in the playground that they “would do to [him] what Hamas did to Israelis.”

The parents reported this and other incidents to the police. Police punted the problem back to the school. The school deflected to the board. The board cited process and fairness and referred the parents back to the school. That family’s children were removed at the end of the year. I expect many others were as well.

Enrolment in Jewish day schools in Toronto is surging – unsurprisingly.

Now, many months later, Lyons has released a painstaking survey compiled by an academic. Yes, it verifies a dangerous reality. But what took so long? It is difficult to believe that this is “news” to anyone. It is clear that Lyons hung on to the job just long enough to release this survey, which she clearly considers to be groundbreaking.

For all the diligent fact-gathering overseen by Lyons’ office, the survey overlooks a critical element: who is doing the harassing? Do they tend to belong to a particular religious group? Are they recent immigrants? Lyons’ survey, for all its detail, does not even ask.

There’s a reason antisemitism is flourishing in Canada.

Vivian Bercovici served as Canada’s Ambassador to Israel from 2014-16. She publishes articles and AV podcasts at stateoftelaviv.com and writes a regular column for the National Post (Canada)