By Howie Silbiger
When bullets ripped through the doors of Yeshiva Gedola High School on an early November morning in 2023, it felt unreal, like something that happened somewhere else, to someone else. When more bullets tore through the doors of the same campus’s elementary school just days later, it stopped feeling unreal and became terrifying.
And when the mayor of Montreal stood at a press conference outside the school, hours after the second shooting, and declared that she stood against “antisemitism and Islamophobia,” something else became clear; Attacks on Jews could not even be named on their own. Politically, anti-Jewish violence had to be folded into a broader narrative, diluted, softened, made more palatable. Jews were being shot at, and city hall couldn’t outright condemn it.
There once was once an illusion that Jewish institutions in Canada existed outside the line of fire. That illusion vanished on that November morning. Jewish schools were directly in the line of fire, and the city refused to acknowledge the depth of the danger Jews were facing. While Jewish kindergarten students were navigating hallways with bullet dented lockers and bullet shattered doors, then Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told all Canadians that “Antisemtism and Islamaphobia had no place in Canada.” Once again, a community, under attack, failed by the politicians responsible to protect them.
In the days that followed the yeshiva attacks, a quieter conversation began to take place in Jewish homes across Montreal. Jews started talking about firearms safety courses. Not about buying guns, not about carrying weapons, but about learning how firearms work, how they are handled safely, what Canadian law allows and what it strictly forbids. It came from an old instinct that has resurfaced again and again throughout Jewish history; If no one is guaranteed to protect us, then, at the very least, we need to understand how protection works.
Canada’s gun laws are often described as strict, but they are also deeply philosophical. They are built on the idea that personal self defence is not a legitimate reason to be armed in public. You can own a firearm under tightly controlled conditions. You can train. You can store. You can follow every rule to the letter. But the moment you say the word protection, especially protection of yourself or your community, the system stiffens. Carrying a firearm for self defence is something Canada remains profoundly uncomfortable with, even when the threat is specific, repeated, and documented.
The expectation is simple. Call the police. Trust the system. Wait.
That expectation feels increasingly false when you look at what recently happened in Australia. At Bondi Beach, during a public menorah lighting organized by Chabad, Jews gathered to mark the first night of Chanukah. Suddenly gunfire erupted. Jews were gunned down in a targeted terror attack. Shockingly, armed police were present and did not immediately intervene. They stood down as hundreds of shots were fired and Jews were murdered. Unarmed heroic civilians were forced to rush in and try to disarm terrorists. Jewish lives were lost because the protectors we rely on didn’t act when it mattered most.
Bondi Beach shattered a comforting assumption, that if police are nearby, everything will be fine. The assumption that armed authority automatically equals immediate protection. The assumption that Jews just need to be patient and compliant and help will arrive in time to save lives. For Jews watching, the lesson was clear; If politicians can’t name anti Jewish acts as solely anti-Jewish and must conflate them with attacks on other religions and if armed police can hesitate and watch while Jews are being massacred, Jews cannot be expected to rely on them for protection.
Jews who train with firearms are not training to patrol streets or to defy the law. They know full well that they will never legally carry a gun to protect a synagogue or a school. They are training to understand risk, to understand responsibility, to understand the mechanics of violence so they are not helplessly ignorant of it. Training, in this context, is not about aggression. It is about clarity.
It is also about refusing to infantilize ourselves.
Jewish institutions are being targeted because attackers believe there will be no immediate resistance. That belief is reinforced every time a school is shot at or a synagogue is firebombed and the response is a press conference and a promise that police will “remain vigilant.” Vigilance does not stop bullets. Vigilance does not put out fires. Vigilance does not comfort parents dropping their children off at a building that has already been attacked.
There is a difference between living in fear and living awake. Jews who are training, planning, and thinking seriously about security are not embracing violence, they are responding to it. They are responding to a world in which Jewish vulnerability is no longer theoretical and in which history’s old warnings are starting to sound uncomfortably current.
The Quebec and Canadian governments can continue to try to offload protection of the Jewish Community as someone else’s problem or they can finally grapple with the reality that Jews are a targeted community and need more than sympathy after the fact.
Until provincial and federal Canadian governments come to their senses, Jews will follow Rabbi Hillel’s sage advice, “If I am not for me, who will be for me?” They will continue to have no choice but to take their security into their own hands. They will continue to prepare quietly, carefully, and within the law, because history has taught us one enduring lesson;
When protection is optional, Jews are the ones left unprotected.
Howie Silbiger is the host of The Howie Silbiger Show on Truetalkradio.com and Political Hitman on Israelnewstalkradio.com. He is the Editor-in-Chief of The Montreal Jewish News.
