Paul Lungen
CJN
Jewish community representatives met with senior Ontario lawmakers last week in a bid to elicit provincial support for enhanced security measures at Jewish schools.
The meeting with Attorney General Michael Bryant and Minister of Community Safety and Correctional Services Monte Kwinter was “excellent,” said Bernie Farber, executive-director of Canadian Jewish Congress, Ontario region. The ministers and their senior staffs were receptive to the delegation’s contention that the Jewish community requires provincial assistance to protect Jewish schools from the current spate of anti-Semitism, he said.
The ministers assured the community leaders, which included incoming Congress president Ed Morgan and representatives of UJA Federation, that they would take their case to cabinet, which will consider providing assistance to the community to increase security measures at the schools. A follow-up meeting with the ministers is expected in the near future, Farber added.
“The commitment we received is one we haven’t received before, to bring it to cabinet,” Farber said. “We wanted to make sure [concerns over anti-Semitism] was number one on their radar screen… They fully understood our issues.”
Speaking to the media following the meeting, Bryant said, “We had a very productive meeting to discuss particularly sensitive areas. This is part of an ongoing conversation we’ve been having since we formed the government to ensure we’re putting the right resources in the right places.
“This government firmly believes that no one deserves to live in fear. We will do everything we can to end this campaign of hate, through the justice system and through every part of government.”
The meeting came shortly after the school library at a branch of United Talmud Torahs in Montreal was set ablaze by arsonists, who left a note saying the fire was in retribution for Israel’s killing of Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin.
As well, two more Jewish cemeteries – one in Toronto, the other in Kitchener – were vandalized, with headstones turned over. Those incidents came on the heels of vandalism incidents at Bathurst Lawn Memorial Cemetery in Toronto and the Beth David Cemetery in Brantford, Ont. In addition, homes in the Toronto area have been smeared with swastikas and graffiti, a synagogue and school had windows broken and fundraising signs were defaced.
Farber said protecting students in Jewish schools was the community’s top priority and should also be so for the provincial government. Public schools in high-crime areas already have surveillance cameras and other measures in place to protect students. Jewish schools have the right to the same protections, he said.
The Montreal incident “was a second wake-up call” following incidents of vandalism in Ontario, Farber said. “It demonstrated that these attacks could progress to be a huge danger to the community.”
He noted that four Jewish cemeteries in Ontario had been desecrated in just four weeks, while he could recall only three similar incidents in his 20 years with Congress.
Prior to the recent surge in occurrences, B’nai Brith Canada reported in its annual Audit of Antisemitic Incidents that there had been a sharp rise in anti-Semitism over the last three years. A total of 584 incidents were reported across Canada in 2003, an increase of 27 per cent over the year before. Four hundred of the incidents took place in Ontario, and of that number, 315 occurred in the Greater Toronto Area.
At Pape Avenue and Gerrard Street in the east end of Toronto, vandals also overturned nine headstones at the 150-year-old Pape Avenue Cemetery over Passover. Because of the cemetery’s age, many of the headstones are fragile, said Benjamin Applebaum, executive director of Holy Blossom Temple, which operates the cemetery. They are also generally not as bulky as modern ones and several of the toppled stones were cracked.
“We have to figure out how to repair it,” he said.
Even though earlier incidents of cemetery desecrations had been reported, “it’s always a shock. It’s very discouraging and unsettling when something like this happens.”
Applebaum said the cemetery, which was filled to capacity in the 1930s, is surrounded almost entirely by barbed-wire topped fencing. It appears that the perpetrators jumped a fence at the groundskeeper’s home and another fence to get into the cemetery. Holy Blossom plans to upgrade security in those areas, he added.
Former MP and cabinet minister Barney Danson said his grandparents are buried in the cemetery. Although their graves were untouched, “It’s a shock that [cemetery vandalism] can still happen in Canada.”
Nevertheless, the climate of anti-Semitism in Canada today pales compared to when he was growing up, Danson said, adding he is heartened by the political and public response in support of the Jewish community.
In Kitchener, meanwhile, 12 headstones were knocked to the ground over Passover at the Beth Jacob Cemetery, said Gordon Strauss, president of the Beth Jacob Synagogue.
An anonymous former resident of Kitchener, the son of Holocaust survivors, offered a $10,000 reward for information regarding the crime, but as of last week, the police had no leads, Strauss said.
The incident was “very upsetting” to the 120-family congregation, he said. The headstones, which were otherwise undamaged, have been righted.
The cemetery, which is more than 80 years old, is in the centre of town and is surrounded almost completely by a wrought iron fence. The congregation is now considering improving security, he added.
“The fact it happened during the Jewish holidays, right after Good Friday, with [Mel Gibson’s] movie [The Passion of the Christ] going on… Who the hell knows [why it happened]?
“I hope it’s not a hate crime,” Strauss added, though he pointed out the Waterloo Regional Police hate crime unit is involved in the investigation.
Local Christian and Muslim leaders denounced the vandalism and offered moral support to the Jewish community, Canadian Press reported.
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Meanwhile in Montreal, government house Leader Jacques Saada disclosed that he handed over to the RCMP at least one of a number of hostile letters he has received attacking him as a Jew. The most recent came earlier this year.
Saada, MP for Brossard-La Prairie, a riding on Montreal’s South Shore, decided to go public about getting the letters as well as phone calls described as menacing, after the firebombing of a United Talmud Torahs school in Montreal, his press secretary Marie-Claude Lavigne said.
She described one letter in January as “pure hatred,” but not necessarily a death threat.
Lavigne told Canadian Press the incident was an unpleasant reminder for Saada, 56, of his experiences in his native Tunisia and in France where he grew up and lived until emigrating to Canada as a university student.
Saada told The Hill Times, a weekly publication in Ottawa: “I have received phone calls and also written correspondence which were either threats or direct accusations… related to my faith and who I am.
“I think the most important danger would be indifference to those acts.”
First elected in 1997, Saada represents a riding with only a small number of Jews, although he has lived in the area for many years. He was first appointed to cabinet in December, and is also responsible for democratic reform.
Saada complained of a number of defacements of his posters with swastikas during the last election campaign, as well as of threatening calls and letters at that time.
With files from Janice Arnold in Montreal
