This feature story appears in the Rosh Hashanah 2021 edition of The CJN Magazine. Subscribe to our newsletter for details on how to get the rest of the issue and more from The Canadian Jewish News.
On a warm afternoon last May, the public square in north Toronto filled with people. Israeli pop music blared from loudspeakers and the crowd was a sea of Israeli flags, some slung around shoulders.
There was as much Hebrew heard as English; people yelling at their kids, greeting old friends and comparing COVID vaccination notes. Despite the numerous private security guards and police on horseback, the vibe was relaxed—more Tel Aviv than North York.
The ceasefire in the spring Hamas-Israel confrontation was about 10 days old and as the rally got underway, the speakers—a rabbi, a municipal politician and the event organizers—took to the stage to say that all Israel wanted was peace—for itself and its neighbours. The speeches invariably ended with a rousing rendition of Am Yisrael Chai (“The People of Israel Live.”)
The only thing missing was the official presence of the Jewish establishment—the powerhouses of UJA Federation of Greater Toronto or the national advocacy group, the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs.
The rally, and a honking, flag-waving parade of cars up and down Bathurst Street a week earlier, had been organized by volunteers, not by the city’s Jewish paid professionals. While the city was still under COVID regulations, these events were hastily thrown together, promoted on social media, and unabashedly public and Jewish.
The demonstrations of pro-Israel sentiment in Toronto weren’t isolated occurrences. The attacks by Hamas on Israel last spring highlighted tensions in the Diaspora as well, and across Canada, people frustrated by the Jewish establishment’s reluctance to confront the noisy pro-Palestinian marches began to organize by themselves. In Ottawa, Montreal, Vancouver, and elsewhere, they took to the streets, waving their Israeli flags defiantly.
In Vancouver, Marat Asadurian, the founder of a high-tech startup, stepped up for the first time in his life to organize a rally. The city’s Jewish organizations were going to hold a virtual event, they told him and others on a Zoom call.
Asadurian felt strongly that a peaceful, visible presence was necessary to show that Israel and Jews were not the demons they were being portrayed as in the media. “We’re not professionals. We’ve never done this before. We realized that nothing is going on, and we felt that we must show the Canadian public there is not just one side to the story,” he said.
Asadurian and co-organizer Yan Vule put the information out on WhatsApp and then on Facebook, and initially expected about 25 people would come. Between 200 and 300 people showed up and peacefully marched from city hall to the steps of the Vancouver Art Gallery. Many were former Israelis like Asadurian himself, but Canadian Jews came out too, he said.
“I hoped to show that there are people who live here who are Canadian citizens, who are voters, who support Israel. We are not Arab-haters, we are not against Palestinians. We wish for peace for both of our people,” he said.
A nascent group, Vancouver Stands with Israel, was born, and is still active on social media. It’s keeping a close eye on what is happening in the city, including in schools where some pro-Palestinian supporters are pushing their narrative, Asadurian says.
On the other side of the country, in Ottawa, something similar happened. Bella Kravtzov, a Russian-Israeli esthetician, and a few friends were frustrated that support for Israel was limited to online events.
Kravtzov said she had seen rallies supporting Israel in Montreal and Toronto and felt it was important that Ottawa’s Jewish community be represented as well.
“I called my friend and said the JCC and formal Jewish organizations did not want to do any initiatives. (We said), ‘let’s go, just us.’ We put these announcements in the Russian-speaking group and the Jewish (Hebrew)-speaking group in Ottawa. We received a very major response from people that wanted to join us in the rally,” she recalled.
They organized a car rally, to comply with COVID regulations, and over 100 vehicles came, each carrying three or four people—twice what she had been expecting.
It was so informal that Kravtzov says they didn’t even have a name for the organizing group. But the rally was covered by the mainstream media and demonstrated that Ottawa’s Jews were standing with Israel, she said.
For Lauren Lieberman, who works in marketing for a fashion company in Montreal, turning to social media to organize a pro-Israel rally came naturally. A social media influencer with about 25,000 followers, she has been outspoken about her support for Israel and her opposition to antisemitism, especially on TikTok.
Federation CJA had initially supported the idea of a public event, but backed away, she said.
“I understand that safety is their first priority but showing fear is not smart at this point,” she said. “You have to take chances.”
The rally turned violent, with Jewish participants chased and pelted with stones by pro-Palestinian demonstrators. “No one got hurt but it was very scary,” Lieberman said.
Since then, she has received numerous threats, some so disturbing that she has made her social media accounts private. She is undaunted though, and says she hopes to work with Federation CJA and plan a trip to Israel for other Jewish social media influencers.
But it is in Toronto, where the first stirrings of activism—independent of the major communal institutions—began, and where it has rippled out to the rest of the country.
About a year ago, Agnes Imani says she began to see what she calls “warning signs.” Imani, who was born in Budapest and grew up in Montreal before moving to Toronto about a dozen years ago, says rising antisemitism and growing calls to boycott Israel felt eerily similar to the stories her grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, told her about prewar Europe.
“I just felt extremely frustrated that nothing was being done by our Jewish organizations. And if something was being done, then we weren’t aware of what they were doing,” Imani said. “We have to be louder and we have to be much stronger as a community and we have to be recognized. I feel like our community always shies away from this.”
Imani said she was accused of fear-mongering, but after the sharp spike in antisemitic attacks last spring, she feels vindicated. (In Toron to, UJA Federation said antisemitic incidents, including verbal harassment and online threats, increased five-fold, with about 50 events reported in May, the month of the Hamas-Israel fighting.)
“My dad left Hungary because we couldn’t openly be Jewish, because it was Communist,” Imani recalled. “I do this because I feel like I owe it to my parents who left everything we had behind to bring me to a place that can offer me a better life. When I see what’s happening right now, I don’t see a better life for my children in 20 or 30 years down the road if we don’t change things. I don’t want my children to have to escape from Canada because it’s not safe.”
About a year ago, she started to organize workshops and seminars about antisemitism. Recently, she has merged a number of groups and individuals doing similar advocacy work into a new organization, United Grassroots Movement, which planned the two rallies in Toronto. In June, the group purchased 86 advertising posters at Toronto bus shelters advocating “#NoHateAgainstJews.”
Her activism against antisemitism, which she says should more rightly be called “Jew-hatred,” is a volunteer effort. Imani doesn’t want her profession mentioned, because she is afraid that antisemites will hurt her business.
The organization bills itself as “a coalition of individuals across the professional, political and religious spectrum,” with the goal to “educate others about antisemitism, Israel and the Jewish people.” While it does not take any political position, its leadership tends to draw from the right wing of Canadian politics.
Among the group’s team at the end of June were a former campaign manager for the People’s Party of Canada leader Maxime Bernier who had jumped ship to the Tories; a recently retired columnist for the Toronto Sun; and people who had worked for Israel advocacy groups. A candidate for the federal Conservative party is listed as a “supporter.”
Imani says the donor who paid for the costs associated with the rally in North York’s Mel Lastman Square in May, which included a private security company, wants to remain anonymous. The group raised $25,000 for the bus shelter ads through an online appeal.
Shai DeLuca, an interior designer and media personality, and member of the United Grassroots Movement’s volunteer team, disagrees that the group is right wing.
“I consider myself certainly not to be right (wing). I am, and I embody what most would consider to be progressive. I am a gay, Sephardi Jew,” he said. It’s the same message he had at the rally in Mel Lastman Square, which he addressed.
He cautions that it’s dangerous to assume that one political party has a monopoly on combating or spreading hate.
“When we start to politicize hate, when we start to politicize antisemitism, saying it is on this side of the aisle, or that side of the aisle, we’re creating a problem.”
But it’s not a coincidence, DeLuca noted, that many of the grassroots organizers are Israeli. DeLuca, who was born in Canada, served in the Israel Defense Forces and lived in Israel for a number of years before returning to Canada.
In Israel, he said, he was accustomed to being in the Jewish majority. “This idea of keeping your head down and ‘this too shall pass’ is a very Diaspora mentality. It’s not an Israeli mentality.”
Morton Weinfeld, a professor at McGill University in Montreal and a keen watcher of trends in Canadian Jewish communal life, said it’s not surprising that a disproportionate number of former Israelis and Russian-Jewish immigrants have been involved in the new grassroots groups.
“Historically and more recently in Israel, they have been more outspoken in taking a militant and hard-line (stance) against what they see as too liberal a position,” he said.
The Jewish organizational scene may grow even more crowded soon with the emergence of a successor to the Canadian Jewish Congress, the national advocacy group that was subsumed by the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs 10 years ago.
The new group, the Canadian Jewish Community Forum, headed by former members and staff of the CJC, is starting by taking the pulse of the country’s Jews. “There’s a sense that what may be missing is the consultative process with the grassroots, (something) the CJC really fundamentally fostered in Canada,” explained Les Scheininger, spokesperson for the group and a former president of the Jewish congress.
The CJC “brought a diversity of views together and tried to reach some sort of consensus on behalf of the community. That seems to be something that is lacking over the last couple of years,” he said.
The CJCF is planning to survey Jewish Canadians to see what issues concern them. But already it’s clear that certain groups, such as youth and immigrants, need to be heard, Scheininger said. “There may be differences of opinion, and (those) have to be debated. Based upon our history, we have been able to reach consensus on some very fundamental issues.”
It’s not the first time in Canadian Jewish history there has been tension between grassroots groups and more established organizations, noted Weinfeld.
In the 1970s, for example, student groups advocating for Soviet Jewry took on a more militant position than communal agencies, and organized their own protests until eventually the establishment came on board. The same dynamic may be happening again, he suggested.
And in some ways, that can be a positive thing for the community, with grassroots and establishment groups each playing to their strengths, Weinfeld said.
Despite the claims that the larger organizations have lost touch with the community, they can still bring out the crowds and, in large cities, raise millions of dollars. In Toronto, a virtual rally for Israel during the May Hamas-Israel conflict attracted more than 10,000 households. In pre-pandemic days, the 2019 Walk with Israel attracted 30,000 participants and raised over $1 million.
But the Jewish community may be at an inflection point, Weinfeld said. It will depend if antisemitism continues to rise, and if the distinction between antisemitism and anti-Zionism becomes increasingly blurred.
“If this continues, this may lead to more of a fracture than we have now. There are some progressive elements in the Jewish community—they’re a minority—who have become energized. And even during and after Gaza, they seem to be very critical of Israel. But the mainstream now will be pushed to become more concerned with Israel’s welfare, more opposed to antisemitism.”
For her part, Imani is just getting started. If ever there was a time to get involved, this is it, she argued. “It’s not enough to just complain on social media… People need to actually get up and go attend a rally or join a webinar or donate, if that’s what they feel need to do.”
“They can’t just sit on the sidelines. We know what happened to us not so long ago when Jews sat on the sidelines and waited for things to get better. They won’t.”
