By Howie Silbiger
As Passover approaches, Federation CJA is urging Montreal’s Jewish community to remain vigilant. In previous years, that kind of message would have faded into the background. This time, it comes after months of incidents that have changed how people think about walking into a synagogue or sending their kids to school.
In Toronto, several synagogues were hit by gunfire over the past few weeks. The same kind of attack, repeated within a short stretch of time, aimed at places where people gather. It’s not something you can shrug off.
Montreal has seen its own version of this. Jewish schools have been shot at, synagogues targeted, and there have been assaults that go well beyond shouting or intimidation. For the people dealing with it, this isn’t abstract. It has already changed how buildings are secured, how access is controlled, and how seriously every new incident is taken.
Canadian intelligence has already warned about the possibility of a violent attack against Jewish targets, including scenarios involving someone acting alone and choosing a location that is easy to reach. That lines up with how most schools and synagogues operate, on fixed schedules, open to the community, built around the assumption that people can come and go without thinking twice.
In Toronto, police have now stepped in and drawn a line that should have been drawn years ago. Demonstrations that had been moving through the Bathurst and Sheppard area, right through the middle of a heavily Jewish neighbourhood, are now being kept off residential streets. Protesters can stay on main roads, but once they move into where people live, police can intervene.
It followed years of the same scenes playing out week after week, crowds showing up in the same neighbourhood, outside the same institutions, creating pressure that had nothing to do with protest anymore. People raised concerns, asked for intervention, and were told, in one way or another, to live with it. Now, after shootings, after threats, after everything has escalated, the line is finally being enforced.
That delay is on every level of government that let this drag on.
Municipal leaders in both Toronto and Montreal watched it happen in real time. They knew where these demonstrations were taking place, who they were affecting, how often they were returning to the same streets, and they chose not to step in. Most of the hesitation came down to optics. In the meantime, the situation kept getting worse. All they could muster was a half-hearted condemnation of “antisemitism and Islamaphobia” as if the two were somehow related.
The federal government carries even more of that responsibility. The Liberals treated this like a communications problem. They lumped antisemitism and Islamaphobia into one bucket. It wasn’t a communication problem, it was Jew hatred building in plain sight. Their solution was funding, as if throwing money at the problem would make it go away. They ignored the situation and didn’t try to fix the environment that allowed this to grow. When you avoid dealing with something for long enough, it doesn’t stay contained.
This isn’t solely a Canadian issue. Across Europe, Jewish institutions have been targeted in a range of attacks, with some investigations pointing toward organized efforts tied to foreign actors, including Iranian networks. At the same time, the tone in public has shifted.
And here in Canada, more and more people are starting to realize security hasn’t kept up. Many Jewish institutions still rely on unarmed guards, a model that may have worked in a different climate but is now being questioned. In other places facing similar risks, armed security is already standard.
Inside the community, people are thinking more seriously about what it means to take responsibility for their own safety, and what happens when the systems around them refuse to or are too slow to adjust.
Passover is coming, and instead of just planning seders, people are thinking about security, about doors, about who’s standing outside and what happens if something goes wrong.
That’s not normal, and it didn’t happen overnight. It took years of looking the other way to get here.
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.
