Floral tributes are left Friday near the Manchester synagogue, where multiple people were killed on Yom Kippur, in what police have declared a terrorist incident.Hannah McKay/Reuters
This week’s deadly attack on a synagogue in Manchester, England, constitutes the inescapable confirmation that, eight decades after the Holocaust, antisemitism is once again a virulent international contagion.
Violent attacks on Jewish people in the United States, Canada and Great Britain have come in the three countries that were the leading military and cultural opponents to the institutionalized antisemitism of Nazi Germany, which began in 1933 and reached a crescendo of cruelty with the establishment of an archipelago of concentration camps across wartime Europe.
Two victims of Manchester synagogue attack were shot by police
The spread of antisemitic activities, ranging from deadly synagogue shootings (Pittsburgh) to firebombings and arson attacks (Montreal) and, now, an automobile-and-knife attack that left two dead – one of them apparently shot by police accidentally – on the most sober and sacred day for Jews (Manchester), coincides with a period of heightened tension among Jewish communities after the Hamas attack on Israel in 2023 and the ensuing Israel-Hamas war being prosecuted by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“This has been escalating since the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks,” said Noah Shack, the head of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, in an interview. “Harsh words are leading to the stabbing of a woman in an Ottawa grocery store and a father beaten in front of his children in a Montreal park. There’s serious concerns about the safety of going about our daily life. That’s why it’s so important for Canada to reinforce security at synagogues, community centres and other places where Jews congregate.”
And though the war in Gaza may be more a provocation than a cause of antisemitism – and though the conflict has drawn thousands of activists into visibly disruptive but largely non-violent demonstrations – it has revealed a deep well of anti-Jewish sentiment that officials and Jewish leaders continually underestimated.
The persistence of antisemitism, and the assumption that it was a pestilence of the past, is reflected in an evocative passage in As a Jew, a meditation on faith by Sarah Hurwitz, a former speechwriter for both Barack and Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton. “If the main thing you know about antisemitism is the Holocaust,” she writes, “it’s easy to get the impression that antisemitism originated sometime in the 20th century, and the Holocaust was a one-off – that out of nowhere, after just a few decades of hating Jews, the civilized world lost its mind and started killing them.”
CIJA urges government to increase security at Canadian synagogues after Manchester attack
The war in Gaza intensified feelings, to be sure, and prompted an antisemitism counteroffensive at universities by the Trump administration that itself has become a stimulus for deep division.
The attack outside the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation in Manchester occurred on Yom Kippur, the annual moment of reflection and repentance when Jews acknowledge their sins and ask for God’s mercy and forgiveness.
“All of us were holding our breaths at Yom Kippur and are heartbroken at what happened,” said Rabbi Lisa Grushcow of Montreal’s Temple Emanu-El-Beth-Sholom the morning after concluding her own services. “We have to move from ‘This isn’t who we are’ to becoming a society that talks about what we should be. It’s not acceptable that synagogues become fortresses and that rabbis have to worry on Yom Kippur about what their security protocols are.”
Deadly Manchester synagogue attack raises fears about growing antisemitism in U.K.
B’Nai Brith Canada identified 6,219 antisemitic incidents last year, an increase of 7.4 per cent, that included bomb threats and an arson attack on Vancouver’s Schara Tzedeck synagogue. The group concluded that the episodes comprised “a stark warning for Canadian society.” (There is contention surrounding how such incidents are defined.)
In the United States, the Anti-Defamation League identified 9,354 antisemitic incidents last year, a 344-per-cent increase in the past five years. The group said incidents of vandalism and assault were up about 20 per cent last year.
“I wish – I pray – we didn’t have to have any more of these post-tragedy conversations,” said Carole Zawatsky, the chief executive of Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life, where in 2018, 11 congregants were gunned down during Sabbath services, in an interview. “It is a terrible way to finish Yom Kippur. This is among the greatest fears of so many in the Jewish community, and too many are afraid simply practising their religions.”
British police said on Friday they may have accidentally shot two victims, including one who died, in their attempts to stop an attack on a Manchester synagogue during Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar.
Reuters
And in the U.K., a study conducted by the Institute for Jewish Policy Research this summer found that a third of Jews felt unsafe in Britain in 2025, a steep rise from the 9 per cent who felt that way before the Hamas attacks. About half of British Jews said they regarded antisemitism in the country as a “very big” problem, a more than fourfold increase in the past dozen years.
In all three countries, Jews enjoyed unprecedented comfort for the past several decades. The restrictive covenants in real estate disappeared under an assault of court orders. The quotas limiting Jews at exclusive universities crumbled. The bans on Jewish membership in city clubs and golf and shore resorts fell. And Jews assumed remarkable prominence in occupations, including the law, that they had been denied for decades.
In the United States, a tenth of the sitting senators in Washington, including Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, are Jewish. In Canada and Britain, Jews have served as chief justices of the Supreme Court.
In an op-ed in The New York Times, Michael Roth, the first Jewish president of Wesleyan University, a formally Methodist school, said the Trump administration’s fight against antisemitism is “a cover for a wide range of agendas that have nothing to do with the welfare of Jewish people.”
Mr. Roth said Mr. Trump’s actions – demanding a comprehensive overhaul of university procedures, admissions policies and classroom content as the cost of maintaining well-established federal funding programs – “pose a direct threat to the very people they purport to help.”
Meanwhile, a parallel debate rages over whether anti-Israel sentiments, often expressed as opposition to Zionism, constitute antisemitism.
“The prevailing consensus among scholars over the past 30 or 40 years,” Columbia University historian Mark Mazower wrote in On Antisemitism: A Word in History, released only two weeks ago, “has generally been that any attempt to come up with a hard-and-fast definition of antisemitism is bound to run into problems because as a concept it is impossibly multi-faceted, varying in time and place.”