As Canadian Jewish families began celebrating the holiday of Passover, a commemoration of Jewish persecution and redemption, many found the ancient narrative colliding with a modern reality of rising fear at home. 

Early Friday, a Jewish-owned restaurant in Toronto was struck by gunfire for the second time in weeks — a targeted, 14-bullet assault that police called a “glaring example of domestic terrorism.” 

The incident marks the latest in a wave of antisemitic attacks, highlighting what Jewish leaders describe as “systemic” Jew-hatred in Canada. And it is even leading some Jewish Canadians to consider their own kind of exodus from their country, with one communal leader saying that “the promise” that Jews could practice their faith openly in the country “has been broken.”

“There’s a real sense — and I don’t want to overstate it — but that the Jewish community in Toronto has felt under siege since [the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks in Israel],” Rabbi Debra Landsberg, who leads Temple Emanu-El, a Reform synagogue in Toronto’s North York district, told Jewish Insider.

On March 2, Landsberg’s congregation was shot at several times, as her family and at least one staff member remained near the building following a Purim celebration. No injuries were reported, but the exterior and front lobby sustained significant damage. 

The shooting was the first in a series of three synagogue attacks in Toronto last month. One week after Temple Emanu-El was targeted, the front doors of Shaarei Shomayim Synagogue and The Beth Avraham Yoseph of Toronto were shot at in the middle of the night, causing damage to both buildings. 

In another recent incident, Canadian law enforcement arrested three Toronto-area men accused of planning violent kidnappings targeting women and members of the Jewish community. 

Israel’s ambassador to Canada, Iddo Moed, said that last week’s restaurant shooting “the 12th incident of its kind in the latest wave of antisemitism and violence against the Jewish community in Canada.” UJA Federation of Greater Toronto warned that the incident should cause “all Canadians to be extremely concerned by what’s happening in our country right now.”   

Toronto police have responded to the surge of violence by deploying armed officers at Jewish institutions around the city, an effort that was ramped up during the Passover holiday. 

Canada has experienced some of the most severe manifestations of the global surge in antisemitism since Oct. 7. — with higher rates of antisemitic incidents than other countries but lower conviction rates. 

In the first two months of 2026 alone, 22 antisemitic incidents were reported in Toronto, representing approximately 62% of all reported hate crimes in the country, according to police. Based on population, a Jewish Canadian is 25 times more likely to experience a hate crime than any other Canadian, according to the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA).  

Some Jewish leaders told JI they have come to expect sluggish or nonexistent responses from law enforcement and political leadership, a failure that they say exacerbates the problem. 

One month after the synagogue shootings, no arrests have been made. Police say investigations are ongoing. 

A spokesperson for the Toronto Police Department told JI last week that “the synagogue shootings are being examined for potential links … information, evidence, and intelligence are being shared to determine whether there are any connections.” 

“There has been a systemic failure across jurisdictions to face antisemitism,” said Richard Marceau, senior vice president of strategic initiatives and general counsel at CIJA, an agency of the Jewish Federations of Canada. Marceau asserted that society has “a complete misunderstanding” of what antisemitism is, whether it stems from “the far left, far right [or] Islamic circles.”

“There’s also a reluctance to act,” he said. “There’s a desire to say ‘we’ll just let a little steam out and the pressure will go away.’ There’s no consequences to what’s happening [so] people feel emboldened.” 

“In terms of fighting on the criminal legal side, the police are reluctant to press charges and go from a ‘let’s keep the peace’ mentality to ‘let’s enforce the law,’” continued Marceau, a former Bloc Québécois member of parliament. “Charges are dropped by the prosecution for no good reason. Often judges don’t understand what antisemitism is.” 

“If there’s one thing that should be clear it’s that Jews are under threat and this type of thing should not take such a long time,” Marceau said of the investigations into last month’s synagogue shootings. “There should be infrastructure to make sure that the people who attack are quickly found and identified.”

“There’s also a reluctance to act,” Marceau said. “There’s a desire to say ‘we’ll just let a little steam out and the pressure will go away.’ There’s no consequences to what’s happening [so] people feel emboldened.” 

Marceau noted some positive movement since the Toronto synagogue shootings. Bill C-9, which would amend the criminal code to strengthen penalties against hate-motivated crimes, protect religious spaces and ban public display of hate symbols, passed in the House of Commons last month. Marceau called for the Senate “to quickly pass it.” 

“All around, the authorities have been given a failing grade on this. All the lights are flashing on Canada’s dashboard — things need fixing and the fixing needs to happen now,” said Marceau.  

Landsberg, former president of the Toronto Board of Rabbis, said that among her congregants, “everybody is just a little jumpier” since last month’s attack. “The police are responsive but not forthcoming with information. Visible police presence has been noticeable here and at other Jewish institutions. The care and concern from our police has been real.” 

But many questions remain, said Landsberg. “Whether or not they are able to solve this — and what it will take — and do they have the clear support of political leadership, to make Jews safe and feel safe? As time goes on, one imagines that we might live without ever having someone brought to account for this.”

“The political response has been complicated and underwhelming,” continued Landsberg. “Since Oct. 7 at least, the question of whether laws on the books are being implemented when it comes to hate crimes against Jews is an open question. I don’t know many people who are convinced that the law has been applied during some of these protests when there is classic imagery of Jews as rats.” 

Few Jewish institutions have been targeted as severely as Kehillat Shaarei Torah, a Modern Orthodox synagogue that has endured 10 separate attacks in the last two years alone. The congregation is also located in North York, but about 2.5 miles from most of Toronto’s Jewish life. 

Geographic distance hasn’t spared the synagogue from becoming a target of antisemitic incidents, the first of which occurred the Thursday before Passover two years ago when “about six or eight of our windows were smashed by somebody with a hammer who came in the middle of the night,” the congregation’s leader, Rabbi Joe Kanofsky, told JI. 

“We got through Pesach and then there was another by the same person, judging by the security tapes, who came back to get what he missed,” said Kanofsky. “He missed our doors, he came back to smash our glass doors and some more windows. We had a couple more things throughout the summer into the next year.” 

Other incidents included a sign outside of the synagogue calling for the release of the hostages kidnapped by Hamas on Oct. 7 being set on fire and dead animals being thrown onto the property. The windows were also smashed several more times. 

Frustrated, synagogue leaders installed a black iron fence around the perimeter of the building in December 2024. That “slowed things down” until November 2025, said Kanofsky, “when we had somebody, possibly the same person, come smash the windows with a hammer again. That was our most recent and brought us up to 10 figures all together.” No arrests have been made in any of the attacks. 

Canada operates under three levels of government — federal, provincial and municipal — and Kanofsky expressed dissatisfaction with the political response, noting that certain branches have performed worse than others. 

“The municipal government seems to be wishing the problem away,” he said. “If they close their eyes they imagine it’s not so bad and maybe they’ll give a little money for increased security so the Jews can take care of that.” In March, days after the Toronto synagogue shootings, the Canadian government announced a new $10 million investment through the Canada Community Security Program to help Jewish institutions enhance security. 

“I haven’t heard much from the provincial government until the three shootings in March happened. Right after that happened, the provincial government called the meeting of rabbis. [Doug Ford,] the premier of Ontario, asked a lot of questions and listened, sharing his plans for beefing up security. After a long time, finally there was some attention from the provincial government, which oversees prosecutions. That’s where things are falling apart, things do not go to trial and if they do they are dropped.”  

“From the federal government, our representatives in Ottawa have been fairly supportive. There’s a bit of a degree of ‘it’s somebody else’s job’ and everyone points to someone else,” continued Kanofsky. “But the police are always there for us before and after we call. If the rest of the levels of government were as determined as the police, we probably would not have this problem.” 

While nearly half of Canadian Jews reside in Toronto — which is home to about 150 Jewish institutions — the problem extends beyond Canada’s largest city. In Ottawa, the country’s capital, a Jewish grandmother was stabbed in August while shopping at a kosher supermarket. In 2024, Jews in Montreal were granted an injunction to prohibit the spate of anti-Israel protests, which included chants of “death to the Jews” in Arabic outside of a school, occurring within 50 meters of dozens of Jewish institutions. 

In what The Atlantic recently called “Canada’s Polite Pogrom,” many incidents targeting Jews have been quieter, without broken glass or bones, but disruptive and exclusionary nevertheless. 

Eighty percent of Jewish doctors and medical students surveyed by the Jewish Medical Association of Ontario reported experiencing antisemitism at work after the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks. In 2024, more than 100 Jewish doctors stopped acknowledging their affiliation with the University of Toronto’s Temerty Faculty of Medicine in protest of what they saw as the school’s failure to protect Jewish students and faculty. Almost a third of Ontario’s Jewish doctors say they are considering leaving Canada because of hostile work environments, according to the JMAO survey. 

A group of Jewish teachers in British Columbia filed a human rights complaint against their own union, accusing the BC Teachers’ Federation of excluding, harassing and silencing its Jewish members. A federal investigation into Ontario’s K-12 schools found nearly 800 antisemitic incidents reported in elementary and high schools since 2023, many stemming from teachers’ conduct. The Toronto International Film Festival briefly dropped a documentary from its lineup that chronicled an Israeli grandfather’s experience rescuing his family from Hamas on Oct. 7, before a global effort successfully pushed for its reinstatement.  

Jewish life in Canada wasn’t always this way, said Irwin Cotler, Canada’s former justice minister. 

“When I was in the Ministry of Justice, at that time we had nowhere near the levels of antisemitism we’re witnessing now,” Cotler, who served as a member of Parliament, attorney general and Canada’s first special envoy on combating antisemitism, told JI. He called the current situation “an unprecedented explosion.” 

“One would have thought that the times since [Oct. 7] would have resulted in actions to combat antisemitism. We’ve had on a public level, tragically almost, denials that Oct. 7 took place or support and justification — even celebration — for it in the public squares,” he said. 

Upon completing his term as Canada’s special envoy on combating antisemitism in 2023, just before the Oct. 7 attacks, Cotler recalled reporting that “the conventional paradigm for combating antisemitism on the far right and far left was still true.” But, he continued, “the most important finding I had was that we were witnessing an increasing mainstream normalizing antisemitism and particularly in the campus culture, with an absence of outrage underpinned by indifference and a failure to appreciate that antisemitism is not only increasingly threatening Jews but that it’s toxic to democracies and an assault on our human rights values.”

If not addressed quickly, Cotler warned that there’s “a ticking bomb here in Canada for what will be the Bondi massacre occurring in Canada,” a reference to the December 2025 mass shooting at a Hanukkah gathering at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, that killed 15 people. 

“The synagogue shootings here are part of a pattern. We are experiencing not only the highest level of antisemitic incidents since tracking began in the 1970s, but the real disturbing data has been the dramatic increase in hate crimes targeting Canadian Jews. Hate crimes are different from other forms of antisemitism because they are identity crimes that target the whole community and reverberate within the whole community,” continued Cotler. 

Cotler described law enforcement and government as ineffective. “Arrests are not made or if they are made then charges are not laid. If charges are laid, prosecutions are not proceeded with, or if prosecutions are proceeded with the courts do not sustain it,” he said. 

Canada “needs a wake up call,” continued Cotler, “and it needs a whole government commitment at [all] levels to combat antisemitism. If the government gives a 10 percent increase in community security it’s basically telling Jews to protect themselves and giving a little more money to do that. That’s not a response. If you don’t have leadership at the governmental levels, lack of leadership will trickle down and start to become part of the culture of inaction. What we’re witnessing from the government are performative tweets and virtue signaling, but not effective leadership and action on the ground.”

Last month, frustration with political leadership deepened for many Jews with the election of Avi Lewis, a far-left Jewish anti-Zionist, as the leader of the New Democratic Party, widely described as Canada’s democratic socialist party.

“We are left with a deep sense of sadness,” Marceau and Rachel Chertkoff, senior vice president of community engagement at CIJA, said in a joint statement following the March 29 election. “When a leader declares that Zionism is inseparable from ethnic cleansing, he is not engaging in legitimate policy critique. He is telling Jewish Canadians that a core part of their identity is illegitimate. That is exclusion.” 

Cotler, who was friends with Avi Lewis’ father, Stephen Lewis, said the election left him “concerned — not about criticism of Israel, but engaging in obsessive preoccupation in calling out alleged Israeli genocide.”

As a member of Parliament, Cotler said he was “close” with the NDP. “The astonishing difference [is] now we’ve gone down the road where NDP is no longer a place Jews feel they can be at home,” said Cotler. “It’s tragic because of the important role Jews played in the founding of the NDP.” 

Landsberg noted that the writing was always on the wall: Canadian Jews would face a harsher reality than their American counterparts. 

Canada is “50-plus years slower in reaching integration. In many ways the American story — of freedom and exodus — has been integrated naturally, the early Civil Rights Movement, for example,” Landsberg said. “There isn’t that comparable norming of the Jewish story [in Canada]. The first Jew who made it into a political cabinet position wasn’t until the late 1960s, decades after there were Jews on the Supreme Court in the U.S. Same thing with leadership in medicine and universities. It’s much later here. It’s a much smaller community that is made up of many more immigrants. It’s a different community in that this is home but these are people who have had to flee homes already. Canada’s understanding of Jewish citizens as part of the multicultural story that it has been trying to create has played out differently.” 

Marceau, who splits his time between Montreal and Ottawa, has three friends who have left Canada because of antisemitism. “In discussions around Shabbat tables or at synagogue, [fleeing] is a constant conversation that is happening,” he said. “The promise that everyone could be openly themselves in Canada, to practice whatever faith they want — has been broken — certainly for Jews.” 

Similarly, Kanofsky said that among his 200-family congregation, “people have already received second or third passports through their parents or grandparents. People are gathering their documents. Younger families are looking into Central America or other places that might be more hospitable. These are people that if you would have asked five years ago would have said they have deep roots and are not going anywhere for the long term. The Canadian Jewish community had a very deep-seated feeling of being part of society and being protected. A lot of that has been deeply damaged by the complacency of the government over the last couple of years.” 

“Jewish communities will for sure learn from mistakes from the past and no one will stay longer than is necessary. People in our congregation have already gone on aliyah,” continued Kanofsky. “In a hurry, everybody gained a sense of mobility when they saw the inaction of the government.”

But, even when describing the boarded-up front lobby of her congregation — where leaders are still debating the type of shatterproof glass to install — Landsberg painted a picture of a resilient community with hope for the future.

“This is probably the same for Jews in the U.S.,” she said, “but there’s a sense of clarity that many people are really feeling a deep discomfort with how society here is handling this, and also the sense of strength [because] the Jewish people have been through a lot.” 

It is difficult to think about a present that doesn’t include the melancholy, haunting music of Leonard Cohen, the dark and sultry edges of “Hallelujah,” the words of a young man grappling with his faith in “Lover, Lover, Lover.”

But that present almost didn’t exist. In October 1973, the 39-year-old singer-songwriter was living on a Greek island, mourning what he considered to be the end of his career.  

And then the Yom Kippur War began.

Cohen hopped a boat to the mainland, and then a flight to Israel, where he found himself wandering in and out of Tel Aviv cafes before being recognized by like-minded musicians. Cohen was soon on the road, where he and the other wartime entertainers — most of them Israelis — traveled from army base to outpost to camp to raise the spirits of disheartened fighters on the brink of catastrophic loss. Less than a year later, he would release one of his most acclaimed albums.

“I think that, for him, our crisis here in Israel was, in some ways, a way out of his own personal crisis, which might have been a more pressing crisis for Leonard Cohen,” Matti Friedman, author of the new book Who By Fire: Leonard Cohen in the Sinai, told Jewish Insider in a recent interview.

The tour has become a historical event of its own, encapsulated within a much bigger historical event, and despite the myriad writings, films and documentation surrounding the war, little was recorded about Cohen’s tour through the desert. He is mentioned in passing in news articles from the time, and some who saw him perform have photographs, but no concert video exists. 

Enter Friedman, the Israeli-Canadian writer and journalist, who has for years chronicled little-known events in modern Israeli history. His Pumpkinflowers reflects on his own experiences in the First Lebanon War; Spies of No Country spotlights the young Mizrahi men who undertook dangerous missions across the region to help secure Israel’s independence in the 1940s.

The former Associated Press reporter made aliyah in 1995, when he was 17, but grew up in Toronto. Cohen was from Montreal. “I grew up, of course, with Leonard Cohen playing in the background, a kind of childhood soundtrack,” Friedman said. “It’s really my parents’ music, but I just had ‘Sit Down,’ ‘Bird on the Wire,’ and those songs were always on. If you’re Canadian, and certainly if you’re a Canadian Jew, you don’t have a lot of cultural heroes. So Leonard Cohen looms very large.”

In 2008-09, Cohen staged a comeback tour to recoup some of the losses sustained after his manager — who later was sentenced to 18 months in prison for harassment — stole upwards of $5 million from the singer. The tour stopped in Tel Aviv.

An Israeli newspaper covering the concert mentioned Cohen’s 1973 tour through the Sinai, sparking Friedman’s interest in a story that was nearly lost to history.

“I understood that Israelis felt a deep personal connection to Cohen, that it was beyond this, ‘Look at this cool star coming from America.’ It really felt like they know him. In some ways they feel like he’s Israeli, which is very weird. It’s not true of all Jewish artists; they don’t feel that way about Bob Dylan, for example, or Paul Simon. They do feel that about Leonard Cohen, and it had something to do, I realized, with this shared experience that they had had with this guy.”

Friedman set off to learn more about Cohen’s Sinai tour, clipping news articles and eventually talking to soldiers who remembered catching — or just missing, as was the case with one exhausted medic who couldn’t summon the energy to chase the music he was hearing on the base — a performance. Interviews with once-young soldiers led Friedman to one person, and then another, and then another who caught a “show” — often no more than the musicians playing for a group of several dozen exhausted young Israelis.

Who By Fire — originally a line from the Yom Kippur liturgy “Unetanneh Tokef” and, millennia later, used as a song title on Cohen’s first album in the post-war years — is interspersed with entries from Cohen’s 45-page manuscript recollecting his trip as well as pocket diaries he kept during the tour. The singer’s estate gave Friedman permission to read and use Cohen’s journals. The entries, largely unedited, present an account of the singer’s travels through the Sinai.

“It felt a bit weird, because I’m not sure what he’d think about people seeing, you know, behind the curtain, but I had the really incredible pleasure, for someone who loves Leonard Cohen, of looking through these notebooks, for example, and seeing drafts of his songs as they come out of his head,” said Friedman. “I saw the draft of ‘Who By Fire,’ [as it’s] being written down and the draft of ‘Lover Lover,’ literally the first time it is written on paper, and words are scratched out… ‘Chelsea Hotel [#2],’ there’s a few rough fragments of ‘Chelsea Hotel’ where he is still messing around with the words. So that’s an amazing thing.”

The diaries also contained, Friedman noted, Cohen’s “raw thoughts about this experience, before he had the opportunity to really polish them, or decide not to publish them, which is what ultimately happens. He writes a whole manuscript about the experience, which is a very strange and remarkable document that is written down really in the heat of the moment. He comes back from the war, sits down and writes this account of it, which is not the average account of a war. It’s not exactly a journal, but it feels very real, and very unfiltered.” 

Cohen’s recollections were ultimately never published — until now.

“It was quite amazing to sit with it and to be able to quote it,” Friedman added. “I just let Leonard Cohen speak to us about what this feels like.”

Who By Fire provides an unfiltered window into Cohen’s mindset and moments of self-awareness. At one point, he sees injured young soldiers being taken out of a helicopter and is overcome with emotion.

“Helicopter lands,” Cohen wrote. “In the great wind soldiers rush to unload it. It is filled with wounded men. I see their bandages and I stop myself from crying. These are young Jews dying.”  

In the next sentences, Cohen faces reality: “Then someone tells me that these are Egyptian wounded. My relief amazes me. I hate this. I hate my relief. This cannot be forgiven. This is blood on your hands.”

Cohen would later say he wrote his hit “Lover, Lover, Lover” to soldiers on both sides of the conflict. But when the song was released, a line had been changed, and Cohen no longer sang of going down “to help my brothers fight.” Those words, and the subsequent ones — “I knew that they weren’t wrong / I knew that they weren’t right” — didn’t make the final cut.

The year after the Yom Kippur War, Cohen would release “New Skin for the Old Ceremony,” featuring “Lover, Lover, Lover.” The album relaunched his career and set him on a path to global celebrity.

“It’s got some of his best songs on it. He’s never going make it easy for us,” Friedman said. “He never says, ‘The war restored my faith in my music.’ He never says that. So we’re kind of guessing. But I think it’s quite clear that that’s what happened.”