Antisemitic Attacks Across Canada Spark Alarm as Jewish Community Faces Surge of Violence, Harassment

A wave of antisemitic incidents across Canada is raising alarm within the country’s Jewish community, as tensions linked to conflict in the Middle East continue to drive a surge in vandalism, harassment, and violence targeting Jews and Israelis.

In one of the latest antisemitic incidents, a kosher restaurant and a neighboring business in Montreal, the largest city in the province of Quebec, were vandalized on Wednesday, with antisemitic graffiti and swastikas spray-painted across their walls.

The incidents followed separate attacks in Toronto, a city in the province of Ontario, where shots were fired at a Jewish-owned restaurant and at a local synagogue.

A kosher restaurant in Montreal was spray painted with swastikas on its entrance in what is the most radical Islamist city in Canada. pic.twitter.com/pAgte47pyM

— Leviathan (@l3v1at4an) March 4, 2026

In another troubling antisemitic incident, a 15-year-old Jewish student in Halifax, the capital of Nova Scotia, has been forced to continue his education online after his school failed to stop repeated antisemitic harassment and bullying.

In an interview with the National Post, the boy’s mother, Aviva Rubin-Schneider, described how her son had been harassed for years by classmates at Park West School. 

He reportedly found swastika graffiti in the bathroom and was repeatedly subjected to antisemitic slurs such as “Jewseph” and “Jewboy,” while some students were also said to have performed Nazi salutes toward him in the school hallways.

The situation further escalated in 2024 when the boy was physically assaulted on school grounds, with fellow students punching and kicking him, throwing him to the ground, and hurling antisemitic slurs.

After the attack, Rubin-Schneider said her son “never really went back to school,” prompting the family to withdraw him entirely while citing Park West School’s inability to provide a safe learning environment.

Now, the boy continues his education virtually through the public school system and requires ongoing therapy.

“He literally doesn’t go to school anymore. He has absolutely no desire to be in school,” Rubin-Schneider told the National Post. “I’ve pulled him out completely. He’s got no desire to learn. He has no faith in any of the schools, the systems or anything of that sort.”

“The fact that my son does not go to school anymore just tells you he’s petrified,” she continued. “He doesn’t want to go to school. He doesn’t want to be around these kids. He knows he’s just going to be bullied again.”

When the incidents first began, the boy’s mother reached out to Halifax Regional Police’s hate-crime unit, leading an officer to meet with the school principal and later conduct student sessions on racism, intolerance, and hate crimes.

However, Aviva Rubin-Schneider said no further action followed, even after her son was physically assaulted on school grounds.

Like most countries across the Western world, Canada has seen a rise in antisemitic incidents over the last two years, in the wake of the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

Canadian Jews have been hit by a wave of antisemitic incidents, with at least 32 reported across five provinces in just the first week of January this year, according to data collected by the Jewish advocacy group B’nai Brith.

“Antisemitism in Canada is now accelerating at an increasing rate, spreading across provinces, platforms, and public spaces. That is a warning signal, and it demands more than piecemeal reactions,” the group wrote in a letter urging Prime Minister Mark Carney to create a Royal Commission that would explore the problem and draft policy proposals for solving it.

According to the group’s latest audit released last year, antisemitic incidents in 2024 rose 7.4 percent from 2023, with 6,219 adding up to the highest total recorded since it began tracking such data in 1982. 

Seventeen incidents occurred on average every day, while online antisemitism exploded a harrowing 161 percent since 2022. As standalone provinces, Quebec and Alberta saw the largest percentage increases, by 215 percent and 160 percent, respectively.

Now, concerns are growing about increasing targeted attacks on the local Jewish community, fears that Iran may activate sleeper cells abroad, and the risk of politically motivated violence linked to the escalating conflict in the Middle East.

Hours after the announced death of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, a boxing gym run by Iranian-Canadian dissident activist Salar Gholami in Richmond Hill, a suburb north of Toronto in Ontario, was struck by gunfire.