Canadian authorities have opened an investigation after Beth Tikvah, a Modern Orthodox shul in Montreal, as well as a Jewish community center in the city’s suburbs, were targeted with firebombs on Wednesday in the second such attack on the congregation since the terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
According to the Montreal Gazette, police were called to the shul on West Park Boulevard around 3 a.m. after receiving a report of a fire at the building, which houses several Jewish institutions.
Officers doused the flames with a fire extinguisher and discovered the remnants of a crude firebomb. Glass was said to have been smashed, and smoke caused minor damage to the building.
Véronique Dubuc, a spokesperson for the Montreal City Police Service, said witnesses had seen a suspicious individual at the site, adding that CCTV footage was being examined to identify a suspect in the case.
The house of worship, located in the predominantly English-speaking suburb of Dollard-des-Ormeaux, was the target of a firebomb attack in November 2023.
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar urged Ottawa to “take the strongest possible stance against antisemitism” following the attacks.
“I strongly condemn the antisemitic attack on Montréal’s Beit Tikvah synagogue. This surge in antisemitism must not be tolerated! This is the second(!) act of arson on Beit Tikvah—the first synagogue attacked after October 7th,” he wrote in a statement on social media.
B’nai Brith Canada Quebec Regional Director Henry Topas, who also serves as a cantor at Beth Tikvah, called the incident “a terrifying reminder that Montreal is increasingly unsafe for Jewish people.
“This is the result of the failure of leaders at all levels to hold accountable those responsible for the hate and violence that is infesting Canadian society,” Topas charged in a statement. “Mayor Valérie Plante must act now to stop the exponential rise in hate and antisemitism which she has permitted to get out of control in Montreal.”
Shootings, firebombings and vandalism struck Montreal’s Jewish community in the first weeks of the war between the Israel Defense Forces and Hamas terrorists in Gaza, local sources told JNS in 2023.
“Between Oct. 7 and Nov. 7, the police reported 79 hate crimes in Montreal against the Jews. In the entire year before, the number was under 40,” Yair Szlak, president and chief executive officer of Federation CJA, the largest Jewish group in the city, said in a conversation with JNS.
Israel’s consul general in Montreal, Paul Hirschson, confirmed the sharp rise in antisemitic events, telling JNS it is “more than the 70-plus incidents listed by the police. A lot of it doesn’t even get reported.”
Montreal police told JNS that 25 other instances of antisemitism were recorded between Nov. 7 and Nov. 14, 2023, bringing the total number of reported incidents in the immediate aftermath of Oct. 7 to more than 100.
Canada is home to the fourth-largest Jewish community in the world with some 90,000 Jews in Montreal alone. The North American country also boasts a large Arab population originating from countries such as Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and Lebanon. JNS
I was Zoche to be attending the great Makom Torah in Montreal of Yeshiva Gedola-Merkaz HaTorah in the mid-1970’s right when the strongly-pro-French-culture-political-party — which advocated the Province of Quebec withdrawing from Canada to be its own rabidly French style country — took over the government. Understandably, there were grave concerns about the continuing safety for us Jews there in general, and for the Yeshiva in particular.
A short while later after I was not in the Yeshiva, I was Zoche to be there in the Beis Medrosh of Rav Avigdor Miller, ZT’L, when he bluntly stated that these alarms being sounded about dangers to Jews in Montreal and several other places are part of a large Zionist program. It is — in all the places where Jews are living — to look for any indications of instability and Sinas Yisroel, and upon spotting these indications, to loudly sound the alarm about them, with greatly amplifying & exaggerating the potential dangers, thus hyper-scaring the Jews there to leave and move to Israel.
This program is greatly wrong for a number of reasons. First of all, it brings the unnecessary uprooting & dissolution of what had been good functioning & developing & growing Jewish & Torah communities where the alleged dangers had in reality been not so super-super-terrible at all.
Furthermore, our Chazal explain to us that it is really a great kindness and gigantic benefit to us that Hashem, places us in our state of Galus to be SPREAD OUT among the many different non-Jewish world nations. For in this way, if in one locality, Chas V’Shalom, there emerges what truly is a deadly serious unbearable problem, we have the option to be able to leave there and go to a different place that is better. However, according to the Zionist plan, to have all of us be in just ONE PLACE of the modern Israel country, would, Chas V’Shalom, put us caught in ONE BIG “MOUSETRAP” where we would be, Chas V’Shalom vulnerable to one horrendous hyper-calamity.
What is especially fiendish about this current Zionist call (because of the emerging violence against us there) for Jews to now leave Montreal is that IF the Israel government & its IDF would have just done what they claim they are there to do — which is to give us Jews a safe homeland country to live in — and thus on October 7, 2023, would have done their job of protecting that (alleged) homeland and would have thus forcefully & decisively THWARTED the wicked Hamas attack, the whole resulting war would have not been necessary and all the horrific accusations against us that we are trying to genocide the Palestinians would have never emerged and all the resulting horrific Sinas Yisroel would have never emerged and these fire attacks against us in Montreal would have never emerged..
But now that the Israel government did not do that, and, instead, for whatever sick convoluted of convoluted reason, it deliberately ALLOWED the attack, we have this terrible long, long war, with all the terrible accusations that we are trying to genocide the Palestinians and all the Sinas Yisroel and all these attacks against us in Montreal and elsewhere.
So now the Zionist agents are “advising” us that we must leave our communities in Montreal and — WHAT, COME TO THEM (IN ISRAEL), AND THERE WE WILL BE NICE & “SAFE”???????
BUT ON OCTOBER 7, 2023 THEY CLAERLY SHOWED US THAT WITH THEM IN ISRAEL WE ARE ABSOLUTELY NOT SAFE!!!!!!!!!