Antisemitic incidents hit another record high

Jewish advocacy group B’nai Brith says anti-Jewish hatred is being normalized in Canada and its annual count of antisemitic incidents hit another record high in 2025.

“We cannot allow antisemitism to be rendered into mere statistics that we grow numb to. There was an immense and tragic human cost to the 6,800 incidents recorded in 2025,” the group’s advocacy head Richard Robertson said Monday at a news conference on Parliament Hill.

The report says those 6,800 incidents were up from 6,219 in 2024, and were the highest number recorded since B’nai Brith began collecting the data in 1982. They included acts of violence, harassment and vandalism aimed at Jews in Canada.

The organization tracked an increase in antisemitic acts in B.C. and Ontario and a decrease in Quebec and Alberta.

The reported incidents include shocking acts of physical violence — including the beating of a visibly Jewish man in Montreal, captured on video, whose attacker threw his skullcap into a puddle.

“An assault on a Jewish man in a park in front of his children is not just another notation in the violence column. It is an incident that creates generational trauma and leaves an entire cohort of society questioning if they are safe to remain in this country,” Robertson said.

“A Jewish person that was harassed is not just a statistic. They are a person that was told that they should have been gassed along with their ancestors at Auschwitz. A Hakenkreuz (swastika) drawn in a schoolyard is not just an incident of vandalism. It is a diabolical act of hate that leaves Jewish children afraid to go to school.”

The report also includes incidents that do not meet the legal threshold of a hate crime — such as Montreal’s Pride festival barring Jewish groups over concerns about anti-Palestinian commentary, a decision the festival reversed following calls from politicians.

The report says antisemitic incidents in Canada — which have included gunfire, arson and vandalism attacks on synagogues and Jewish schools — have doubled in number since 2022.

The increase followed the brutal October 2023 attack by Hamas militants on Israel, which prompted Israel to bomb the Gaza Strip, triggering massive political shifts from Iran to Syria.

Israel’s campaign in Gaza has drawn widespread condemnation over the high number of civilian deaths. Israel also has been widely denounced for rising settler violence in the West Bank and a series of policies targeting the rights of Palestinians.

B’nai Brith said anti-Jewish hate is being spread under the guise of anti-Zionism, which the group frames as the act of demonizing those who support in the existence of a Jewish state in the Middle East.

Other groups — including some run by Jewish critics of Israel — say justified criticism of how Israel treats Palestinians and Arabs has been wrongly conflated with anti-Jewish hate.

Israeli ministers have expressed Jewish supremacist ideas and called for actions widely understood as ethnic cleansing. The Israeli parliament has passed a death penalty law that Ottawa last month called a discriminatory act that is “dehumanizing the Palestinian people.”

Robertson argued there is a difference between criticizing Israel’s government and blaming Canadians.

“It is OK to hold political views. It is OK to challenge a nation’s response to issues. It is not OK to subject a minority in this country to unprecedented levels of hate because of the actions of a foreign government,” he said.

The group also argued that online hate is going unchecked, with Jewish Canadians being exposed to threats and racist imagery that could serve to normalize violent attacks.

“We have ceded our digital spaces to radical actors who seek to incite hate and indoctrinate others with their extremist ideologies,” Robertson said.

The group is calling for tighter regulation of online spaces, more training for police on identifying and countering incidents of hate, and banning “events that incite hate and intimidation.”

The report also called for terrorism listings for three foreign branches of the Muslim Brotherhood but did not suggest the group is operating in Canada.

Monday’s report comes days after the Senate Human Rights Committee called for more education, better digital literacy and a federal task force on hate to fight a spike in anti-Jewish hate crimes and acts of intimidation.

The committee noted calls from civil society groups to avoid a chill on free speech while bolstering actions that counter anti-Jewish hate.

The Senate committee called on Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government to restore the antisemitism envoy role it scrapped in February. The Liberals have replaced the role — along with a separate envoy on Islamophobia — with a new advisory council on rights, equality and inclusion.

B’nai Brith CEO Simon Wolle said the switch removes a co-ordinating role for someone focused on anti-Jewish hate.

“We have a void, a vacuum, a gap. The problems continue to escalate and there’s actually no mechanism in this country to solve the problem,” he said in an interview.

He said Ottawa is offering “more words about a possible solution or alternative with very little action, very little definition, very little understanding” of the new advisory council’s mandate and timeline for action.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 27, 2026.