Israeli, Canadian officials clash over whether Great White North is safe for Jews

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Canadian and Israeli officials disagreed on Saturday—the day after a Canadian Jewish school was shot, for the third time, and after the country launched a new antisemitism forum—about whether the northern U.S. neighbor is a safe place for Jews.

“Canada—another day, another attack,” wrote Amichai Chikli, the Israeli diaspora affairs minister. “While Justin Trudeau, the only G7 leader who hasn’t visited Israel since Oct. 7, issues hollow statements, Toronto’s Beis Chaya school is shot at for the third time, and Montreal synagogue is firebombed again.”

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“Canada is no longer safe for Jews,” the minister stated.

Anthony Housefather, a Jewish member of the Canadian Parliament and the country’s special advisor on Jewish community relations and antisemitism, disagreed with Chikli.

“Amichai Chikli, that is a false and exaggerated statement,” Housefather wrote. “Yes, antisemitism has risen terribly in Canada and across the world. Yes, all governments and police need to do better. But Canada has been and remains one of the best places in the world for Jews to live.”

Goldie Ghamari, the first woman of Iranian descent to become a member of a Canadian provincial parliament, wrote to Housefather with what she said was a Persian word to describe him. “Look it up, Anthony,” she wrote.

When a social media user told Ghamari that Google translated the word she shared as “patriot,” she responded that the word had parts that mean “homeland” and “seller.”

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“Also known as ‘traitor,’” she wrote.

Leo Housakos, a Canadian senator and former speaker of the Senate, wrote that today at the Congregation Beth Tikvah Ahavat Shalom Nusach Hoari, a modern Orthodox synagogue in Dollard-des-Ormeaux, Quebec, “I stood in solidarity with a community that has endured two attacks on their place of worship.”

“The Israeli Consul General Paul Hirschson took the opportunity to rightfully highlight that the Canadian government and the mayor of Montreal have failed the Jewish community,” the senator said.

On Friday, Hirschson wrote that “everyone condemned the arson attempt of Beit Tikvah synagogue in Montréal (for a second time) so someone shot at the Chaya Mushka Jewish school in Toronto (for the third time). What’s with Canada?”

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