Ben Mulroney: Canadian Jews are being asked to make a false choice - National Post
Bullet holes mark the front doors and windows of Temple Emanu-El in Toronto, on March 3. Photo by Peter J Thompson/National PostArticle contentThe following is adapted from a speech delivered by Ben Mulroney to the Jewish Federation of British Columbia in Victoria Sept. 17.
I’ve got a list as long as my arm of numbers detailing the rise of Jew-hate in Canada. But you don’t need the numbers. You have the experience.
On a Saturday morning in August of last year, congregants arriving at Temple Emanu-El — on a day when a 13-year-old boy was having his bar mitzvah in that building — found a message written on a pillar at the entrance. It called Jews evil. It called them child-killers. It promised revenge. In May 2024, someone poured accelerant on the front doors of a synagogue on Oak Street in Vancouver and lit it; the congregation put it out, and their rabbi said afterwards it could have been a pile of cinders. In a Vancouver neighbourhood, people chalked hate on the sidewalks for months, put a Jewish resident’s name on a sign, posted his cross-street online and told him to his face: “We know where you live.”
In a survey of Jewish British Columbians last year, 61 per cent said they now avoid wearing anything that identifies them as Jewish in public. A Star of David. A kippah. Sixty-one per cent. In Canada. In this decade.
Columnist Jesse Kline keeps you up to date with what’s happening in Israel and the effects of antisemitism on life here in Canada. Friday mornings.
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That is not a Jewish problem. When one per cent of the country has to hide who they are to walk down the street, that is a Canadian problem — a problem for every one of us, because a country that will tolerate this for one group will eventually tolerate it for another. It always has.
Last November, I went to Israel. I went with a delegation hosted by the Israeli government, and I’ll say that plainly, because it’s true, and because some people have worked very hard to make it sound like a secret. It wasn’t.
We went everywhere. The Knesset was a sight to behold. And Jerusalem — nobody prepares you for how beautiful it is, or for how much history is stacked, soaked and stained in every stone.
In the old city we went to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, built on the place where Christians believe Jesus was crucified and buried. Six different Christian churches share that one building. Greek Orthodox. Roman Catholic. Armenian. Coptic. Syriac. Ethiopian. And they do not always get along. Every chapel, every lamp, every stretch of floor belongs to somebody, and nothing can be changed unless all of them agree. There is a wooden ladder on a ledge above the front door that has been sitting there since at least the 1700s, because nobody can agree on who gets to move it.
