2026 ‘most violent year in recent memory’ for Canada’s Jews, B’nai Brith warns

Less than five months into 2026, Canada’s Jewish community has experienced more violent antisemitic attacks than all of last year, putting it on track to be the most violent year for the Jewish community in recent memory, B’nai Brith Canada warned on Friday.

According to the organization’s League for Human Rights, 11 violent antisemitic incidents have been recorded nationwide since Jan. 1, surpassing the ten violent incidents documented during all of 2025.

On Thursday night, three Jewish people were shot at with a gel blaster firearm from inside a vehicle as they exited the Chasidei Bobov synagogue on Bathurst Street in Toronto. That followed numerous other synagogue attacks recorded in recent months.

“These brazen attacks on Jewish Canadians are a sign of a crisis of antisemitism that has spiraled out of control,” said Simon Wolle, chief executive officer of B’nai Brith Canada. “Violence such as this, which has escalated from targeting synagogues to targeting Jewish people directly… happens when governments fail to act despite mounting evidence that antisemitism is becoming more normalized and dangerous.”

B’nai Brith took the unusual step of releasing preliminary 2026 figures because of the rapid increase in violent incidents, said Richard Robertson, the organization’s director of research and advocacy. He called on the federal government to establish an emergency task force to combat antisemitism, warning that “Jewish Canadians are being terrorized.”

Last year, Canada recorded a record 6,800 antisemitic incidents, B’nai Brith Canada said in a recent report. That was 9.3 percent higher than the previous record set in 2024, and translated to an average of 18.6 incidents per day.

Antisemitism has “metastasized” throughout all aspects of Canadian life, the group said at the time.

Toronto-area Jewish communities have been rattled by a string of recent synagogue shootings, including three separate gunfire incidents in March.

The 400,000-strong Canadian Jewish community has been among the hardest hit by antisemitism since the Hamas terror group launched its war against Israel on October 7, 2023. Since then, a Toronto Jewish girls’ school was hit with gunfire in overnight shootings three times, two Jewish institutions in Montreal were hit by firebombings, three men attempted to kidnap Jewish women, antisemitic graffiti was daubed on three synagogues in Nova Scotia, and a Jewish man in Montreal was beaten in front of his children.

Last week, B’nai Brith urged the Canadian government to take action against an extremist network that published an online “target map” identifying Israeli institutions.