Jack Frieberg in Toronto on December 18, 2025.Sammy Kogan/The Globe and Mail
Jack Frieberg’s parents were Holocaust survivors.
Louis and Gerda Frieberg came to Toronto in the 1950s to start a new life in the New World. He worked as a carpenter, she as a seamstress, making 70 cents a dress in a Spadina Avenue sweatshop. As Toronto boomed in the postwar years, they saw an opportunity and started a construction company.
In time, their son Jack co-founded a firm of his own that turned old warehouses and factories into brick-and-beam offices. Like his parents, he prospered. Today, at 69, he has four grown children. Two work in real estate, two in tech. They have given him 10 grandchildren, aged one to 15.
On Wednesday evening, he had family and friends over to observe Hanukkah and light a candle on two beautiful menorahs. Yet, even as he celebrates, Mr. Frieberg wonders: Is this the end?
Canada was good to his mother, who came to love the country that took her in. It has been good to him and to his children. But is it still safe for them?
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Statistics Canada says that two-thirds of the hate crimes motivated by religion last year were aimed at the Jewish community, which represents less than one per cent of Canada’s population. A significant minority of Canadians blame the victims. A recent national poll found that more than a quarter feel that “Jews are often to blame for any acts of prejudice they face.”
A Jewish girls school in Toronto has been repeatedly shot at. Synagogues have been vandalized and firebombed. One was recently hit for the tenth time in 18 months, its windows smashed by a hooded attacker. At a seniors building in a traditionally Jewish part of Toronto, someone tore the mezuzahs from the apartment doors. Every Jewish event and institution is under increased guard.
On Friday, Toronto police said three men had been arrested in connection with offences aimed members of the Jewish community, including attempted kidnappings. One of them is accused of conspiracy to commit murder on behalf of a terrorist group.
“What’s our country becoming?” Mr. Frieberg asks. “Is it time to leave?” He and his wife have even bought an apartment in Israel – an insurance policy in case “this country turns against us.” Others that he knows are looking at moving to Panama or Costa Rica.
Even those who have no such thoughts say that life has changed. When I reached out this week to Jewish friends and contacts, every one of them said they were appalled but not at all surprised to hear of the mass shooting in Sydney.
Australia, like Canada, has seen a surge in anti-Semitic incidents. It was only a matter of time, they told me, before someone turned hateful sentiment into a murderous act: an attack on a joyous Hanukkah party at Bondi Beach.
One friend who lives in Toronto’s Bathurst Street corridor, a centre of Jewish life in the city, passes a mobile police unit on her daily drive, a reminder of the threat to her community. Looking at what is happening all around her, she feels a kind of shocked numbness.
Demonstrators waving Palestinian flags and chanting hateful slogans have been marching through the streets of Canadian cities ever since the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel. Some even march through Jewish neighbourhoods, as if every Jew in Canada were to blame for the war in Gaza. Extremism has become normalized.
Mr. Frieberg’s mother saw what happens when hate is unleashed. She grew up in a German-speaking village in Poland, where her father ran a general store. When the orgy of destruction that became known as Kristallnacht broke out in November 1938, she saw synagogues burning in the German town just across the border. It was only a prelude. She would spend much of the coming war in a labour camp. She lost 172 members of her extended family in the Holocaust, including her father.
In her long and fruitful life in Canada, she dedicated herself to Holocaust education, speaking at events around North America and helping found the Toronto Holocaust Museum.
Gerda Frieberg was 97 when she died in 2023. Oct. 7 was just months away. Ever since that terrible attack, Mr. Frieberg and his children have been asking: What would she say now? What would she do?
Her memory is with them this Hanukkah, a holiday that honours Jewish resilience and resistance. On Thursday night, the Friebergs lit a sixth candle on their menorahs and put them proudly in the window, where the reflection of the little flames flickered in the glass.