Police work outside of the Sons of Jacob Synagogue in Belleville, Ont. We are not short on laws that make Sunday's shooting a hate crime – we are short on the will to enforce them, consistently, at every level, Steven Wernick writes.Sammy Kogan/The Globe and Mail
Steven Wernick is senior rabbi of Beth Tzedec Congregation in Toronto.
On Kol Nidre night, as the community of Sons of Jacob Synagogue in Belleville, Ont., gathered for the opening of Yom Kippur – when the congregation asks, together, to be forgiven and spared – a man outside with a shotgun opened fire. Stained glass shattered; shots meant for people at prayer struck nearby cars and houses.
Constable Jeff Smith, a 13-year veteran of the Belleville Police Service, stood between that gunfire and the door. He was hit and critically wounded. Premier Doug Ford called him a hero who stopped a tragedy. In my own tradition, the Torah commands, in Leviticus, to “not stand idly by the blood of your neighbour.” Constable Smith followed that command without ever hearing it in the language of the Hebrew Bible, and a member of my congregation has already raised more than $100,000 for his family on GoFundMe. The Canadian Jewish community, through the UJA Federation of Greater Toronto, has established a fund as well.
That is what a community can do in a day. The state has done less. Belleville was not a bolt out of a clear sky. It capped three years of the same: Bullet holes at a Montreal yeshiva; a synagogue and a Federation CJA office firebombed in a Montreal suburb; the synagogue firebombed again a year later; an arson at a Vancouver synagogue; a Toronto Jewish school shot at repeatedly in a single year; three more synagogues hit by gunfire in Vaughan and Toronto this past March; a Molotov cocktail thrown at a Montreal temple in June. Each time, concern was expressed and seriousness promised. Each time, the target moved closer to the sanctuary door, and this week it reached the officer standing in front of it.
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Within hours, the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs said what needed saying: “Jewish Canadians should not need armed police outside their synagogues simply to pray safely. Canadians cannot accept a future, as now exists in Europe, in which synagogues and Jewish schools can only operate safely behind permanent armed police and soldiers with machine guns.”
The CIJA called on leaders to say clearly that antizionism is driving this violence.
That is not a new accusation. It has a name: The “three Ds,” coined by the Soviet refusenik turned Israeli statesman Natan Sharansky – demonizing Israel in language reserved for absolute evil, holding it to double standards applied to no other country and delegitimizing its right to exist as a Jewish state. None of that invalidates honest criticism of a government; Israeli ministers themselves have pursued policies that betray their country’s founding values. But what we saw in Belleville is different: The conviction that Jewish self-determination is itself worthy of punishment, turning every Jew, everywhere, into a stand-in for a state a gunman has never set foot in.
Canada adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism in 2019 and published a handbook on applying it in 2024. In June, after his own address on antisemitism, I asked Prime Minister Mark Carney in an op-ed to commit to implementing that handbook across every federal institution. He did not.
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Ontario adopted the same definition in 2020, by order-in-council – but the bill that would have written it into actual law, binding every ministry to what its own preamble called a “whole-of-government approach,” passed second reading that February and has sat in committee ever since. Mr. Ford says he expects those responsible for the Belleville shooting to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Good – but also, his government should pass the bill it let die. We are not short on laws that make this a hate crime. We are short on the will to enforce them, consistently, at every level.
Law by itself is only words on a page; it earns the right to be defended only when it delivers justice to the people it was written to protect. Jewish Canadians in Belleville, Vaughan, Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver need federal funding for paid-duty police at threatened synagogues and schools, delivered in days, not months. They need the regimes bankrolling this violence, starting with Iran, confronted by name. And they need “do not stand idly by the blood of your neighbour” to bind a government too. Mr. Carney, Mr. Ford: As CIJA put it, “No more thoughts and prayers. The clock is ticking and our leaders must act before lives are lost.”
Yom Kippur asks a question: Who shall live, and who shall die? This year in Belleville, a police officer answered that question with his own body before God. He should not have had to. That is what I am asking Canadians, our Prime Minister and our Premiers to hear.