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Bosnian Jews mourn Moris Albahari, one of Sarajevo’s last Ladino speakers
(JTA) — Moris Albahari, a Holocaust survivor, former partisan fighter and one of the last Ladino speakers in Bosnia and Herzegovina’s dwindling Jewish community, passed away at the age of 93 last month.
It is believed that he was one of four native Ladino speakers remaining in a country where the Judeo-Spanish language once flourished and was spoken by luminaries like Flory Jagoda, the grande dame of Ladino song, and Laura Bohoretta, the founder of a uniquely Sephardic feminist movement in Bosnia.
Bosnia’s small Jewish community — with barely 900 members throughout the country, 500 of whom live in Sarajevo — are mourning the loss of a living link to communal memory as well as a dear friend.
“From you, uncle Moco, I learned a lot about Judaism, about life, about nature and especially about people. About both the good and the evil,” Igor Kožemjakin, the cantor of the Sarajevo Jewish community, wrote in a memorial post on Facebook, referring to Moris as “Čika,” or uncle, a term of endearment in Bosnian.
“It is a terrible loss, especially for Sarajevo. Our community is very small, especially after the Holocaust,” Eliezer Papo, a Sarajevo-born Jew and scholar of Ladino language and literature at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “We’re not speaking just in terms of prominent members of the community, we’re speaking in terms of family members. Everyone is like a family member.”
When Albahari was growing up in the 1930s, the Jewish community of his native Sarajevo numbered over 12,000. Jews made up more than a fifth of the city and it was one of the most important centers of Jewish life in the western Balkans.
In his youth, the city was part of what was then the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Formed out of the borderlands between the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires, it was a multiethnic state composed of Croats, Serbs, Bosniaks, Slovenians, Macedonians, Hungarians, Albanians and more. Among them were many Jewish communities both Ashkenazi and Sephardic.
The unique mix of of Muslim, Jewish, Catholic and Orthodox Christian communities, with their mosques, synagogues and churches defining Sarajevo’s skyline, earned the city the nickname “Little Jerusalem.”
Speaking in a 2015 documentary made by American researchers, “Saved by Language,” Albahari explained that his family traced their roots back to Cordoba before the Spanish Inquisition, and through Venice, before settling in what would become Bosnia when it was part of the Ottoman Empire.
“We didn’t want to ‘just’ write an article about Moris or Sarajevo; we wanted [the audience] to see what we saw and hear what we heard,” Brian Kirschen, professor of Ladino at Binghamton University, who worked on the documentary with author Susanna Zaraysky, told JTA. “This resulted in a grassroots initiative to create the documentary.”
In the film, Albahari takes the researchers and their viewers on a tour through what was Jewish Sarajevo, giving glimpses of the thriving Ladino speaking community in which he was raised and explaining how ithe language would save him many times, when the Nazis and their Croat allies, the Ustaša, came to shatter it.
“In sharing your story of survival during the Holocaust, you opened doors that remained closed for decades,” Kirschen said in a memorial post on Facebook. “Some of your stories were even new to members of your family, but each survivor has their own timeline. While you experienced great pain during your life, from your story, we also learn about moments of kindness and heroism. Through your story, you also taught us about the power of language.”
Albahari wasn’t yet a teenager when, in 1941, Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy invaded Yugoslavia. The Nazis occupied the eastern portion of the country, including what is now Serbia, while they raised up a Croat fascist party, known as the Ustaša, to administer the newly formed “Independent State of Croatia” — often known by its Serbo-Croatian initials, NDH — in the western regions that included the modern-day Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The Ustaša collaborated in the Nazis’ genocidal plans for Europe’s Jewish and Roma comunities, and they had genocidal designs of their own for the Orthodox Serb communities living in the NDH.
To that end they established the Jasenovac concentration camp, which would become known as the Auschwitz of the Balkans. By the war’s end it had become the third largest concentration camp in Europe, and behind its walls the overwhelming majority of Sarajevo’s Jews — at least 10,000 — were massacred. Including Serbs, Jews, Roma and political dissidents of Croat or Muslim Bosniak background, as many as 100,000 people were killed in Jasenovac.
Albahari was 11 years old when the Ustaša came to deport him and his large family to Jasenovac. A former teacher working as an Ustaša guard in the town of Drvar, where the train stopped, warned Albahari’s father, David, about their destination, and he was able to help his son escape from the train.
The teacher helped guide the young Moris to an Italian soldier named Lino Marchione who was secretly helping Jews.
This was the first case when Albahari’s Ladino came in handy. Ladino is largely based on medieval Spanish, with a mixture of Hebrew, Aramaic, Turkish and other languages mixed in. For speakers of Serbo-Croatian, a Slavic language, it’s entirely incomprehensible. But for a speaker of another Romance language such as Italian, it’s not such a stretch to understand, and Moris was able to converse with his Italian savior.
With his family gone, he was taken in by a Serb family, and changed his name to Milan Adamovic to hide his Jewish identity. Still, by 1942, it became clear that neither as Adamovic nor Albahari would he be safe in the town. So he fled to the mountains.
“If there was [a battle] I took clothes from a dead soldier to wear, I lived like a wolf in the mountains, you know. Visiting villages [asking for something] to give me for eating, it was a terrible time,” Albahari recalled in “Saved By Language.”
He would only feel safe in villages under the control of partisan forces. Yugoslavia was the only country in Europe to be liberated from Nazi rule by its own grassroots resistance.
During his time in the mountains, Albahari joined up with a partisan unit aligned with the movement of Josip Broz Tito, who would lead Communist Yugoslavia after the war. By the war’s end, Tito’s partisans numbered over 80,000 and included more than 6,000 Jews, many in prominent positions, such as Moša Pijade, who would go on to serve as vice president of the Yugoslav parliament after the war.
Moris was out on patrol as a partisan when he came upon a group of American and British paratroopers. They raised their weapons at him, thinking he was an enemy. Moris tried to communicate, but he spoke no English.
When he asked the soldiers if they spoke German or Italian, they shook their heads. When he asked about Spanish, one perked up: a Hispanic-American soldier by the name of David Garijo.
In Ladino, Alabahari was able to explain that he was not an enemy but could lead them to a nearby partisan camp where they would be safe.
“Ladino saved my life in the war,” Albahari recalled in the documentary.
At the partisan camp, Morris received even bigger news: The family that he had assumed had all perished after he left the train were in fact alive. The former school teacher and Ustaša guard who had warned his father had met them at the next train junction to help them escape. Furthermore, around half of the Jews in the train car were able to escape using the same hole Moris used during his initial escape.
Ultimately the family all survived the war, unlike so many other Jews of Sarajevo.
“Where is Samuel, where is Dudo, where is Gedala? They never came back,” Albahari lamented, listing missing neighbors while walking through Sarajevo’s old Jewish neighborhood in the documentary. “Maybe we are happy because we are alive after the Second World War, but also unlikely because every day we must cry for these dead people.”
When Moris returned to Sarajevo, it was an entirely different place from the bustling Jewish community he had once known.
Gone was the sound of Ladino in the streets and alleyways of Bascarsija, the market district where so many of Sarajevo’s Jews had once lived. Gone were the synagogues — only one of the many synagogues that had existed before WWII still functions. Gone was the robust Jewish life that was once a central part of Sarajevo.
Moris was still only 14 by the war’s end, so he returned to school and ultimately graduated at the top of his class. He became a pilot and later director of the Sarajevo Airport.
In this new world, Ladino was spoken, if at all, only in the home.
“Always, when I hear Spanish, I hear my father and mother, and all the synagogues, prayers in Ladino and rabbis who spoke Ladino. But that is in the past,” Albahari says in “Saved by Language.”
Eliezer Papo, who is a generation younger than Albahari, recalled that in his youth Ladino had long been reduced to a language of secrets.
“Mostly, Ladino was used when the elders didn’t want youngsters to understand,” Papo said.
Only later, in the 1980s, did community members realize what was being lost and begin to gather to maintain their language, recount what Jewish Sarajevo had been like and share their wartime stories of survival.
“He never took his story to the places of revenge, but he took it and his life experience to a place of ‘Never again,’ not just ‘Never again for Jews’, but never again for anybody,” said Papo.
Like many Sarajevans, World War II would not be the last major conflict Albahari would see. Less than 40 years later, war would once again come to Sarajevo with the break-up of Yugoslavia.
From 1992-1995 the city remained under constant siege by Bosnian Serb forces looking to break away from what would become Bosnia and Herzegovina. Moris joined with other Jews of Sarajevo in working to provide aid to their fellow Sarajevans during the harsh period.
Sarajevo’s synagogue was turned into a shelter and a soup kitchen. The community ran a network of underground pharmacies and a message service allowing Sarajevans to get word to family and friends outside of the city during what became the longest siege of a capital city in the history of modern warfare.
“Moris was an inspirational persona to many members of Jewish community and La Benevolencija,” Vlado Anderle, the current president of that local Jewish humanitarian organization told JTA. “He was a man with such inviting spirit and energy.”
When the dust settled on the breakup of Yugoslavia, and the new Bosnian state rose from its ashes, Moris found himself once again in a new role.
During the communist era in Yugoslavia, religious activity was discouraged. Sarajevo’s Jews emphasized the ethnic character of Jewish culture rather than the religious one. In the new Bosnia and Herzegovina, that was no longer true. So the community worked to reconnect with their religious identity as well.
“Everybody looked up to the people who had Jewish upbringing before the Second World War,” Papo recalled. “This doesn’t mean that they were rabbis. Just that they knew it better than anyone else.”
Moris, whose formal Jewish education ended in his preteen years, was appointed president of the community’s religious committee.
As such it often fell on him to represent Judaism to the Bosnian society at large, often in a very creative way, according to Papo, who in addition to being a scholar of Ladino is ordained as a rabbi and serves the Sarajevo community as a rabbi-at-large from Israel.
In one case, while being interviewed on a major Bosnian television station, Moris was asked why Jews cover their head with a kippah or other hat during prayer. Moris’ response, or rather creative interpretation, as Papo called it, was made up on the spot.
Moris’ interpretation began with the ancient temple in Jerusalem where Jews once had to fully immerse in a ritual bath before entering.
“Since the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed it was reduced to washing the uncovered parts of the body only, before entering a synagogue, similarly to Muslims: the feet, the head, the hands…” Papo recalled him saying. But in Europe, as Moris’ answer went, they began to cover more and more of their body. “In Europe they started wearing shoes, so the feet were not uncovered anymore, and then they started wearing a hat, not to have to wash their head… you know it’s Europe, one could catch a cold if going out with wet hair…”
“A few months later, I came to Sarajevo, and found that everyone has heard this explanation and is talking about it, not just people in the community, but in the street,” Papo said. “And you know, I let it pass, I couldn’t correct them, it was just so beautiful. That was his genius.”
“Identity is all about telling stories. And Moris was one of the great storytellers of the community,” Papo added. And through his stories he expressed an identity which was “made of the same contradictions that Sephardic Judaism is made of, that Sarajevo is made of, that Bosnia and Herzegovina is made and that Yugoslavia was and is made of and that the Balkans are made of.”
Albahari is survived by his wife and a son.
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In Orban’s rule, Israelis saw a model for their own country. Will he also be one in defeat?
(JTA) — For years, critics and supporters of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu alike have seen Hungary’s Viktor Orban as a model for his politics.
Netanyahu long called Orban a “true friend” who consistently backed Israel against criticism in Europe, and his allies said Orban’s policies kept Hungarian Jews safe amid increasing danger. His critics say he followed Orban down a dangerous path of democratic backsliding.
Now, in the wake of Orban’s spectacular defeat in Hungary’s election earlier this month, the comparison has taken on a different cast.
“Israel, soon,” Gilad Kariv, a Reform rabbi and member of Knesset from the liberal Democrats party wrote as he published a photo on his social media page of vast crowds gathering in Budapest to celebrate Orban’s defeat.
The election in Hungary comes as Israel looks ahead to an election in the next six months, with polls showing Netanyahu facing an uphill battle to retain power. For his many critics, the results are fueling optimism for an Orban-like upset in Israel.
“Congrats Hungary. A new chapter is on the horizon for Israel too. It’s time for everyone who believes in a Jewish and democratic Israel to stand together and commit to that shared vision,” wrote UnXeptable, the Israeli opposition movement that launched in response to Netanyahu’s efforts to weaken the judiciary’s independence. “A brighter future is possible.”
On the right, too, the comparison was clear. In the hours after Orban’s defeat, one of the anti-Netanyahu protest movement’s most recognizable slogans, “Israel will not become Hungary,” was repurposed, ironically, by voices on the right as reassurance that Israel would not follow Hungary’s political trajectory.
Olga Deutsch, vice president of pro-Israel watchdog NGO Monitor and a researcher at the right-leaning Misgav Institute, said the discussion in Israel has been overwhelmingly inward-looking.
Israelis “view news from abroad through very local lenses,” she said. “There is much less debate on whether Orban had an amazing human rights track record inside of Hungary, or even about the Russia versus Ukraine discourse in the context of the EU. Rather, they debate his loss in the context of what that will mean for Israel.”
One strain of implications revolves around whether Magyar will be as supportive of Israel and its leader as Orban was. Early indications suggest that the answer is no. After Netanyahu suggested that Magyar had invited him back to Hungary this fall, Magyar announced that he would abide by the compact creating the International Criminal Court, meaning that Netanyahu cannot visit without facing arrest.
Tom Gross, a journalist with expertise on Middle East issues, said in an interview that he believed Israel was functioning as an “easy sacrificial lamb” for Magyar as the new Hungarian government seeks to unlock frozen EU funds.
“Even though Magyar may not personally have animosity towards the State of Israel, Israel — and in particular Bibi — will be the easiest sacrificial lamb to offer up to win over Brussels on other issues,” Gross said.
Yonatan Levi, a researcher at the London School of Economics and a fellow at Molad-The Center for the Renewal of Israeli Democracy, a Jerusalem-based policy group focused on democratic institutions, said the “intense public attention” to the Hungarian vote among Israelis was unusual for reasons going well beyond the Hungary-Israel relationship.
“I don’t remember any elections in a foreign country in recent years, except for the United States, that Israelis followed as closely as the Hungarian elections,” he said.
He attributed that focus to the widespread perception that Hungary has seemed like a blueprint for Netanyahu and his partners.
“Many of the laws and reforms that allowed Viktor Orban to take control of the courts, eliminate the free media, and completely politicize the public service have also been promoted in Israel in recent years,” Levi said. “So until now, Israelis have looked at Hungary to understand what might happen in Israel if it continues on its current path of democratic retreat.”
Suddenly, they have been given a glimpse of a different future, he said.
“Now, thanks to the dramatic developments of recent weeks, Israelis are examining Hungary closely precisely to understand how populist leaders such as Netanyahu and Orban, who are gradually eroding democracy in their own countries, can be defeated,” Levi said. “From a threatening model from which to learn what to be wary of, Hungary has become a source of hope.”
Exactly how Israel might replicate Hungary’s results is less clear. The two countries have different electoral systems, such that Orban and the man who defeated him, Peter Magyar, together garnered about 85% of the vote, with Magyar’s Tisza party drawing an absolute majority.
In Israel, there are 18 political parties, with most polls showing 11 currently polling at the level that they would achieve seats in parliament if the election were held today. No party comes close to a majority and while polling currently shows the opposition bloc likely to be able to form a majority coalition, it would do so only narrowly. The pool includes not just right, center and left but religious Jewish parties and an Arab party — a much wider span than in Hungary.
Various opposition leaders have taken the opportunity to suggest that they are Israel’s version of Magyar, a conservative who came up in Orban’s Fidesz party and broke with him only in recent years.
“I see that all the trumpeters and conspiracy enthusiasts are now explaining that Orbán lost in Hungary because of the ‘global left.’ They missed the fact that the election winner, Péter Magyar, is far from left-wing,” tweeted Yair Lapid, the head of the Yesh Atid party who was briefly prime minister after negotiating a deal to seize power from Netanyahu’s Likud party in 2021.
Lapid went on: “The man grew up in Orbán’s party and defines himself as a ‘conservative liberal’—which is the Hungarian version of center on democratic issues and economic right-wing (yes, like Yesh Atid).”
Yair Golan, who leads the liberal Democrats, which is heading toward its first election, said he, too, saw hope in Hungary.
“Orbán tried everything: he took over the media, weakened the judicial system, and tried to create a reality in which he couldn’t be replaced. But in the end, the Hungarian people had their say at the ballot box. The citizens proved that no poison machine and no cheap populism can defeat the simple human desire to live in a free society, clean of corruption and functioning,” he tweeted. “For us, this is a living reminder of what’s about to happen right here.”
For some Israeli observers, the lesson from Hungary is that Netanyahu’s opponents should look to his own camp for a candidate to unseat him. Gross said that when it comes to Orbán, Magyar “shares his political outlook and comes from inside the Fidesz party establishment.”
That, he said, points to a similar dynamic in Israel. Israelis may be tired of Netanyahu because of the longevity of his time in office, Gross said, but he has already “won the battle of ideas in the sense that the only likely successor to Netanyahu would be somebody who shares those ideas.”
For the opposition, he said, “their best bet of unseating Netanyahu is finding someone else such as Naftali Bennett and rallying around him,” rather than trying to challenge those ideas directly.
Perhaps the closest cognate to Magyar in Israel, Bennett was the other half of the power-sharing arrangement that briefly knocked Netanyahu out of power, but unlike Lapid, he started his career in politics in Netanyahu’s party — and while he left it sooner than Magyar left Fidesz, he remained in Netanyahu’s coalition until 2021.
Bennett is a center-right politician who aligns with Netanyahu’s outlook on some major policy issues but distances himself from Netanyahu’s politics, which he says are filled with “poison” and cronyism. He has been hiring technocrats who say they can build a government without the corruption that Netanyahu has been accused of fostering. And like Magyar, he has been stumping across his tiny country, working determinedly to build support for an election in which he is rising in the polls.
Bennett did not publicly comment on Orbán’s loss — but he sent a powerful signal the same day when he announced the recruitment of two prominent women who previously served as government ministry director-generals, Keren Terner and Liran Avisar Ben Horin, to his party.
The comparison has limits. Bennett has already served a term as prime minister, giving him a track record and public perception far more fixed than Magyar’s. Unlike with Magyar, Bennett’s break with his political mentor required allying himself with ideological enemies, making it far less likely that he can peel off votes from Netanyahu.
“Right now it seems like Bennett is able to take a lot of votes from the center left but not necessarily a lot from the right wing,” Ofir Gutzelson, a founder of UnXeptable, said during the group’s webinar last week unpacking the election results.
The Israeli journalist Yair Navot said on the webinar that Bennett could take a page from Magyar and negotiate with other parties to form an informal coalition ahead of the election, which is not yet scheduled but must take place before the end of October.
That way, Israelis would be able to vote for their own preferred parties, rather than have to compromise on their beliefs, even as it would be clear going into the election that Bennett would be the prime minister if the coalition prevailed. But he said he understood that such an arrangement would be challenging in Israel, with such a wide range of ideologies at play.
Navot offered the example of Gadi Eisenkot, the former IDF chief whose son was killed in Gaza, as another figure who could potentially play the same role — without the added baggage of a previous term.
But Navot said he thought Israelis should be focused on tactics as much as who is running. “If there is one important lesson to learn from Hungary for Israelis, for Israel, it is first of all the importance of the turnout,” he said.
Hungary’s turnout was historically high, near 80%. Turnout in Israel’s 2022 election, the most recent, was about 70%. Since then, emigration has spiked, particularly among young families and more liberal Israelis who have felt alienated by years of war and the country’s internal political fights. Unlike Hungary, Israel does not allow absentee voting, so those voters will need to fly back to Israel — buying historically expensive tickets in the process — if they want to participate in the coming election.
But some who want to see Israel pull a Hungary say there’s no need for left-wing voters to get involved.
In the Facebook group Right-Wing People Against the Conduct of this Government, the psychologist Chen Herman drew approval with a video in which she proclaimed that the Hungarian election results were “a celebration, not in a mystical sense but in the most practical sense.”
She said Hungarians had not gotten carried away in their vision for what the election could accomplish — and in doing so had been able to deflect the same criticism that anti-Netanyahu Israelis tend to face from his party acolytes.
“The voters in Hungary chose between right and right. They understood that to beat the system, they needed to step outside themselves and vote strategically. What were people trying to say about them? That they’re traitors to security? That they’re ungrateful? That their leader is Trump’s best buddy? … Sound familiar?” Herman said.
“But they decided to choose a government that isn’t corrupt, and that’s why it worked. They didn’t get scattered. They didn’t ask for too much. Simple,” she went on. “So if there’s anything to learn from the Hungarians, it’s to get grounded, to understand reality. If there’s a majority here holding right-wing views, and it might affect the elections, you just need to choose: corrupt right-wing or non-corrupt right wing.”
With at most six months to go before Israel’s election, it’s not clear how shaken Netanyahu himself is. He waited hours before congratulating Magyar, but some of his ministers embraced Magyar sooner.
“Netanyahu’s worst nightmare is not losing a friend in Budapest,” Jonathan Meta wrote on Substack. “It is watching Hungarian voters do something he has devoted considerable energy to making sure Israeli voters never quite manage to do themselves.”
Netanyahu and Orbán were more than just leading avatars of the global right, along with Trump. They also share staffers and even a pollster, the conservative American John McLaughlin.
The night before the election, the Israeli journalist Amit Segal, who is seen as close and friendly to Netanyahu, invoked past Israeli elections in which media polling — long criticized for being out of sync with voter behavior — failed spectacularly in capturing the final result.
He noted that McLaughlin had defied the consensus of mainstream Hungarian media by projecting a victory for Orbán’s Fidesz party. “Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?” Segal said during a broadcast in which he indicated both that he believed Orbán could prevail but that if the Hungarian leader did not, it could bode poorly for Netanyahu this fall.
As it became clear that McLaughlin had indeed misjudged, the clip circulated widely in Israel, with comments piling up. A typical one: “If it can happen there, it can happen here.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Houston synagogue and Jewish day school closed due to unspecified threats
(JTA) — A Houston synagogue and Jewish day school closed Wednesday after receiving threats to their shared campus.
The threats to Congregation Beth Israel, a Reform synagogue, and the Shlenker School, a preschool and elementary school, were communicated to the Houston Police Department, which informed the Jewish institutions.
The Shlenker School said on its website that it had closed “out of an abundance of caution,” and the Jewish Federation of Greater Houston said it did not believe there was a risk to the broader Jewish community.
“This situation is fluid, ongoing, and under investigation,” the federation said in a statement. “After significant discussions with both the FBI and HPD, we have been advised that it is safe for other local Jewish institutions to remain open. Local law enforcement agencies are increasing patrols around Houston-area Jewish institutions.”
The federation did not immediately describe the nature of the threats. The Houston Police Department did not respond to a request for comment.
The incident comes as security experts have warned of continued elevation of threats to global Jewish communities amid the Iran war, and it follows an attack on a Detroit-area synagogue last month by a man who had expressed sympathy for Hezbollah. It also reprises an extended string of hoax bomb threats to Jewish institutions across the United States that caused a large number of closures in 2023 and 2024, both before and after the start of the war in Gaza.
The federation said it would go forward with events that were planned to mark Israeli Independence Day.
“Federation Yom Ha’atzmaut events will occur as planned this afternoon/evening with appropriate security in place,” the Federation said in its statement. “The safety and security of the Houston Jewish community is of utmost importance to all of us.”
According to its website, Congregation Beth Israel is home to 1,500 families and is the oldest Jewish congregation in Texas.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Canadian Senate Report on Antisemitism Calls for Hate Crime Units Nationwide, Guarding Synagogues From Protesters
People attend Canada’s Rally for the Jewish People at Parliament Hill in Ottawa, Ontario, in December 2023. Photo: Shawn Goldberg via Reuters Connect
Canada’s Senate on Tuesday released a report which offered a comprehensive roadmap for countering rising Jew-hatred across the country, urging multiple reforms including an expansion of law enforcement resources to investigate hate crimes, a boost in Holocaust education, and implementation of a digital literacy program for youth.
Jews remain the top targets of religiously motivated hate crimes, with Deborah Lyons, the former special envoy on preserving Holocaust remembrance and combating antisemitism, reporting that the Jewish community comprises one percent of the Canadian population but experiences 70 percent of all such hate crimes.
Jews are also the top targets for hate crimes overall in Canada.
Public Safety Canada documented 1,345 hate crimes targeting religious groups in 2023, a 75 percent leap from 2022, with 71 percent targeting Jews.
“Standing United Against Antisemitism: Protecting Communities and Strengthening Canadian Democracy,” the report from the Senate Standing Committee on Human Rights (RIDR), cites an alarming update from the Jewish Parents of Ottawa Students Association.
“Jewish students opt to conceal their identity rather than confront the distressing realities of derogatory name-calling, character assassinations, isolation, and peer rejection,” the group says. “In more extreme circumstances, children as young as seven years old have encountered harassment, intimidation, physical assault, threats of both physical and sexual violence, and even death threats.”
Justin Hebert, a former student and a former president of the Jewish Law Students Association at the University of Windsor, discussed encountering peers who advocated for atrocities. As documented by the Senate report, he asked, “How can I be expected to have a meaningful conversation with the student who told me the murder of Israelis is always justified while Israeli students are actively enrolled at the school, or that rape is a legitimate form of resistance, or that babies can be taken hostage if their parents are colonizers?”
The report also describes antisemitic incidents in medical settings and even at rape crisis centers.
According to a written brief submitted by Doctors Against Racism and Antisemitism, in one example “staff physicians at a major children’s hospital [were] being told to remove pins expressing solidarity with civilians held by Hamas in Gaza, but that pins expressing opposition to Israel were not restricted in the same way. The organization also cited examples of medical residents refusing to work with their Jewish colleagues, and of movements to boycott Israeli-produced pharmaceuticals, ‘compromis[ing] patient care and professional ethics.’”
Revi Mula, vice-president of Canadian Women Against Antisemitism, said that “rape crisis centers, shelters, and women’s organizations have” excluded Jewish women, linking their identity with Israel’s actions in Gaza. “Jewish women also face gendered antisemitism. They are subjected to slurs,” Mula said.
The report offers 22 recommendations to counter this revival of the world’s oldest hatred. Foremost among them is the reinstating of a “Special Envoy on Preserving Holocaust Remembrance and Combating Antisemitism.” Other key steps the report emphasizes include establishing a Digital Safety Commission and ensuring that the Advisory Council on Rights, Equality, and Inclusion includes a focus on antisemitism in its mandate.
The commission also explores expanding efforts to counter hate crimes through growing law enforcement resources.
The 15th recommendation calls for the Canadian government and Royal Canadian Mounted Police to “work with provincial and territorial governments to establish and effectively resource specialized hate crime units in all major cities and regions across Canada, with a focus on education, community outreach, investigation, disaggregated data collection, information sharing, prosecution, and deradicalization efforts.”
Nearly a third of the recommendations reference education. The 10th urges the Canadian government to “develop and support digital literacy and social media education initiatives, including model materials and funding for programs, that help young Canadians recognize misinformation, disinformation, radicalization, extremist narratives, and online hate.”
Independent Senator Paulette Senior chaired the committee which drafted the 73 pages of analysis and recommendations.
“Canadians must stand united against antisemitism,” she said in a statement. “It is only by coming together to celebrate our shared values that we can thrive as a country. Antisemitism is a clear and present danger to our free and democratic society.”
Richard Robertson, director of research and advocacy at B’nai Brith Canada, praised the report, noting the inclusion of the organization’s ideas.
“B’nai Brith Canada applauds RIDR for elevating our recommendations to confront hate in this country,” he said. “We will continue to work with the Senate to ensure that these recommendations result in changes on the ground that benefit everyone in our society.”
According to the group’s latest audit of antisemitism in Canada 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.
B’nai Brith Canada cited four of its recommendations appearing in the Senate report: the call for an interdepartmental task force to address antisemitism in Canada, the digital literacy program for youth, the antisemitism focus on the Advisory Council, and an increase in antisemitism education for students.
“The Senate has listened to the community and produced pertinent and tangible recommendations to confront antisemitism in this country,” Simon Wolle, the Jewish advocacy group’s chief executive officer, said in a statement. “Now, it falls on the government to translate these recommendations into action.”
Noah Shack, CEO of the Center for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA), also urged swift implementation.
“The Senate’s report on antisemitism comes at a moment of crisis. As Jewish institutions face violent attacks and Jewish Canadians experience unparalleled levels of hate crimes, antisemitism is no longer confined to the margins — it has spread across our society and institutions,” Shack said. “In fact, the committee’s report and the hearings platform extremist voices calling for the destruction of those who support Israel.”
Shack emphasized that CIJA especially appreciated “the rooting of recommendations in agencies dedicated to law enforcement and intelligence, as this is crucial to combat antisemitism and the growth of radicalism both at our borders and inside our country.”
The 17th recommendation calls for the establishment of “narrowly tailored ‘safe access’ or ‘bubble zone’ measures where appropriate to protect access to certain religious institutions, places of worship, and community spaces.” This instruction came following years of objections by Jews attending synagogues when anti-Israel demonstrators would specifically disrupt and intimidate services.
Conservative Senator Mary Jane McCallum noted this problem, saying that “everyone in Canada deserves to feel safe. The increase in antisemitic rhetoric and attacks at places of worship and education is beyond troubling — it is a cry for action.”
The commissioners also considered the threat of antisemitism spreading on social media.
“Social media has been a conduit for antisemitic ideas, exposing young people, who may lack an understanding of history, to an unregulated and unverified source of information,” said Independent Senator Mary Robinson. “Education, by ensuring students know how to critically evaluate online content, is a powerful inoculant against the cheap pull of hatred.”
At a press conference on Tuesday morning announcing the report, Independent Saskatchewan Senator David Arnot insisted on “no dithering,” adding, “We have to have action. The time is now.”
“The plain truth is that Jewish Canadians are under attack in this country,” added Conservative Senator Leo Housakos. “They are under attack where they live, where they worship, and in their schools. And it seems that every day seems to bring in new events that might have been unthinkable just a few short years ago.”
Emphasizing the role law enforcement plays in the fight, Housakos said the report also recommends “training for police and judges to improve their ability to identify and respond to hate crimes and to better react when mobs of protesters feel entitled to march through Jewish neighborhoods chanting hateful slogans, and when synagogues and schools get shot at.”
Housakos added, “To be a Jew in Canada should not mean that you become a target. It’s time to acknowledge this and to swiftly respond, so that Jews in Canada no longer have to live in fear.”