Y’alla Oklahoma: As antisemitism surges, Tulsa Jews invite Canadians to join them

Michael Sachs, a Jewish community professional from Vancouver, witnessed a surge in antisemitic incidents in Canada in recent years — on school boards, in teachers’ unions, in public sector workplaces. In his son’s elementary school class, some of the other children made Nazi “Sieg Heil” salutes.

Sachs and his wife, a teacher in a Jewish school, feared for their children’s future ability to express their Jewish identity, in addition to having preexisting concerns such as high housing prices and the country’s fentanyl crisis.

The couple weighed options for relocating, and followed up on an invitation to an unlikely destination: Tulsa, Oklahoma, a mid-sized city in the American Bible Belt whose downtown boasts an eight-story-tall gold-colored statue of an oil driller. Sachs had to look up where Tulsa was located on the map.

“When we first were on the flight down, we were like, ‘Maybe. Let’s see,’” Sachs said. “By the time we got on the plane to head back, we had made the decision we’re going to move.”

The family’s move helped kick off Tulsa’s Jewish community’s new program called Lech L’Tulsa — a play on the biblical phrase Lech Lecha, or “Go forth” — that is attempting to lure Canadian Jews to the city.

The project has found an unexpected level of interest ahead of its inaugural tour for Canadian Jews this month. It comes amid a wider shuffling of Jewish populations after the bloody Hamas-led invasion of southern Israel on October 7, 2023, which sparked the Gaza war and caused an unprecedented spike in antisemitism and turmoil for Jewish communities worldwide.

“It’s a reflection of a sorting of North American Jews in general into political tribes, geographically relocating in order to be with people who are more of their own political ilk,” said David Koffman, the chair of the Study of Canadian Jewry at York University in Toronto, Canada.

Jews are targeted in hate crimes more than any other group in Canada, a figure that surged following the start of the Gaza war. Recent incidents include gunfire at synagogues, violent chants at a Holocaust museum, antisemitic bullying of schoolchildren, support for terrorism on college campuses and attempted kidnappings of Jewish women.

Sachs has heard about antisemitism from Lech L’Tulsa applicants. One woman, wearing a Star of David in downtown Toronto, said she had been spit on and called a “baby killer.” Another applicant’s child was accosted at knifepoint by an antisemitic assailant, Sachs said.

For most of the applicants, though, antisemitism is only the “tipping point” for a potential move to the US. The other top concerns are the economy, cost of living and health care.

“These topics, which are topics that every community is facing, then on top of it, you add the lens of antisemitism. I think that that lens is what has triggered such a big response, but no one is leaving just because of antisemitism,” Sachs said.

Sooner State Jews seek expansion

Lech L’Tulsa is an outgrowth of Tulsa Tomorrow, a program launched by members of the Tulsa Jewish community in 2017. David Finer, a Tulsa businessman, had noticed that even as the city was on the upswing, young Jews were leaving and the Jewish population was declining. Finer and a group of friends decided to market Tulsa to young Jewish professionals to stem the outflow.

“People don’t know about Tulsa. When people from big cities say, ‘Let’s move somewhere, let’s go to Nashville, let’s go to Austin,’ they have an idea what those places are. Tulsa, no one knew,” Finer said. “When they come here, they say, ‘Good grief. What a place.’ After October 7, it became even more pronounced that people should consider coming to a place where there’s not that kind of antisemitism.”

Tulsa’s Jewish community is small, with around 2,500 active members, and Tulsa Tomorrow seeks to expand that cohort, said Rebekah Kantor-Wunsch, the group’s executive director and an Oklahoma native.

“We’re also looking for people who are less transitional, less nomadic. We really care about including people in our program who can see themselves living here long term,” Kantor-Wunsch said. “We really want to relocate people who are in a position to plant roots, be involved in community life, expand their lives and their families.”

Tulsa Tomorrow has brought around 600 people to the city for visits, 113 of whom made the move and are still living in Tulsa, Kantor-Wunsch said. The program focused on Jews from other areas of the United States before sparking interest in Canada.

Tulsa Tomorrow hosts groups interested in moving to the city for weekend trips, paying for the visitors’ travel expenses and organizing the logistics. The itineraries included Shabbat dinners, scooter tours of downtown Tulsa, yoga, hiking, brewery tours, sessions on real estate, visits to synagogues, and professional networking events.

The pitch includes the city’s low cost of living and housing, its arts and culture scene, its tech ecosystem and easy transportation. The Jewish community has a Reform and a Conservative synagogue, a Jewish day school, a Jewish Community Center, the state’s only Jewish museum, and a Jewish retirement facility. There is less infrastructure for Orthodox Jews, Kantor-Wunsch said.

Tulsa Tomorrow is an independent group. The project is supported by Jewish community organizations, along with donations from individuals and family foundations, and receives a fiscal sponsorship from the Tulsa Community Foundation, a non-Jewish nonprofit, Finer said. Fiscal sponsorships allow organizations that do not have nonprofit status to receive tax-exempt donations via recognized nonprofits.

Kantor-Wunsch said Oklahoma’s non-Jewish population is more conservative than that of US cities with large Jewish populations, such as New York City and Los Angeles, making anti-Zionist activism less of an issue.

“This being, religiously, a conservative state, a lot of people who live here are evangelical, super Christian, Baptist, and those people are very pro-Israel as well. The support that they have for the Jewish community is great,” she said. “I hear and see on the news all of the scary stuff about big protests, the antisemitism. That is so minuscule here. It’s just not well-received.”

The Anti-Defamation League tallied 30 antisemitic incidents in 2024 in Oklahoma, the sixth-lowest rate in the country relative to total population.

The American Jewish Population Project estimates that Oklahoma has around 17,300 Jews, less than half a percent of the state’s total population.

Antisemitism and southern hospitality

Sachs was born in Stamford, Connecticut, and moved to Vancouver at age 12. He raised his three children there while working for the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Jewish National Fund.

He connected with the Jewish Federation of Tulsa during joint projects that brought together Jewish community professionals from around North America after the 2023 Hamas invasion of Israel, and an acquaintance in Tulsa invited him for a visit.

He and his wife went on a Tulsa Tomorrow trip and the residents won them over, he said, relating, in one example, how he and his wife were touring different city neighborhoods in a rental car when they turned into a neighborhood to see a young couple unloading groceries from their vehicle.

“They look over and they wave at us like we’ve been neighbors for 20 years,” he said. “That’s a Tulsa thing to happen.”

They made the move six months ago, and Sachs wrote about the experience for Canada’s National Post. The article generated an outpouring of interest from Canadian Jews, leading to Tulsa Tomorrow adding its Lech L’Tulsa program to meet that demand. Information about the program has since spread through other articles and by word of mouth.

Lech L’Tulsa operates like Tulsa Tomorrow, but with a pitch and tours specific to Canadian Jews, an additional $2,000 stipend for relocation, and immigration legal support.

The applicants are considering different avenues for acquiring citizenship. Some may seek work at US companies that will grant them a work permit, while others already work for an American firm. Tulsa Tomorrow does not find employment for the applicants, and has less experience with international immigrants, so the program is still figuring out what works best and treating the applications on a case-by-case basis, Kantor-Wunsch said.

The first trip will prioritize applicants who have a more “clear visa pathway,” Sachs said. Sachs was born in the US, but his wife is Canadian and has had to go through the process of acquiring a Green Card.

The program has received around 300 applicants for the inaugural trip in February, which is expected to host around 50 people. Most applicants are part of a family, so the number of individuals represented is more than 600, above what organizers had expected, said Sachs, who works for the Jewish Federation of Tulsa. The applicants hail from every area of Canada except for the remote, sparsely populated north, he added.

Tulsa Tomorrow has helped a handful of Canadians relocate in the past, but the numbers have surged.

“Over the last two weeks, of the 300 applications that I’ve received in regards to this program, almost all are Canadian,” Kantor-Wunsch said.

Koffman said the numbers were “not insignificant,” given Canada’s Jewish population of around 400,000.

Most of the applicants consider Tulsa after looking at other destinations, such as Florida, and finding them too expensive or congested.

“This is a very ‘at your own pace’ place to live. People don’t really suffer the hustle and grind mentality here,” Kantor-Wunsch said. “You can really get from one end of town to the other in 20 minutes or less. This is not a place where you’re sitting in traffic all the time.”

There is no single motivating factor for the applicants, but most cite Canada’s economy, cost of living, and a “loss of trust in the leadership of the country,” Sachs said.

“They don’t believe that the country is willing to take on this battle of antisemitism,” he said.

The average price of a home in the Toronto area is around $750,000 and in the Vancouver area around $1.5 million. The median home price in Tulsa is around $265,000.

A study by the Canadian Jewish Studies research journal found that, in Canada’s 2025 federal election, Canadian Jews prioritized cost of living, US-Canada relations and health care above antisemitism.

A reordering of Jewish populations

Koffman, who was not familiar with Lech L’Tulsa, said the program was part of a reordering of Jewish populations, not an exodus from Canada. He said most left-leaning Canadian Jews are not seeking a move abroad, while Jews considering a move to Tulsa are likely politically right of center. Meanwhile, some Orthodox Canadians are moving to Israel, more due to their affinity for the Jewish state and its well-established Orthodox communities than antisemitism in Canada, he said.

Israel’s Immigration and Absorption Ministry said that immigration from Western countries jumped last year, with around 420 Canadians making the move, an increase from the 389 who arrived in 2024 and 294 in 2023.

At the same time, hundreds of Israelis are moving to Canada. The Immigration and Absorption Ministry reported a surge in Israelis leaving the country after the start of the war, driven by the conflict and disillusionment with the Netanyahu government.

Other Jews are moving to Canada from the US, Latin America, Ukraine and France, Koffman said.

“On the balance, we might not be losing Jews, but just exchanging Jews — more religious ones to Israel, more secular ones to Canada,” said Koffman, who edited a 2021 book, “No Better Home?” about Jewish belonging in Canada, and serves as the editor-in-chief of the Canadian Jewish Studies academic journal.

Canadian Jews are also moving internally, relocating to different schools, synagogues, neighborhoods and provinces “to be with Jews who have more similar politics,” Koffman said.

The Pew Research Center reported last year that Jews were far more likely to immigrate than other religious groups.

American Jewish students are also increasingly attending college in southern and conservative regions due to antisemitism on campuses in areas like California and New York.

Finer said representatives of other lesser-known Jewish communities, such as Kansas City, Missouri, and Birmingham, Alabama, have approached Tulsa Tomorrow to learn how to pitch their cities as a destination for Jews looking to immigrate. The Tulsa Tomorrow website also saw a spike in traffic after New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, an anti-Zionist, was elected last year, he added.

The popular Israeli satire show “Eretz Nehederet” parodied the dilemma facing Jewish migrants — antisemitism abroad but turmoil in Israel — in a skit depicting an Israeli and an American running into each other at Ben Gurion Airport, each moving to the other country.

“You’re telling me you’re coming to Israel? Now? Are you crazy?” the Israeli says.

“You’re moving to New York? Now? Are you crazy?” the American responds.

Sachs said that, after arriving in Tulsa, his family experienced “positive culture shock,” such as grocery store employees telling them to “have a blessed day,” and comparatively huge portion sizes at restaurants. He had to adjust from the hockey-obsessed sports culture of Canada to Oklahoma’s fixation with football.

The Jewish and non-Jewish communities have been welcoming, he said. Weeks after he arrived, he contacted the Tulsa Oilers minor league hockey team, which agreed to host its first Jewish Heritage hockey game in partnership with local Jewish groups. The team will wear jerseys decorated with Stars of David. The game will take place a day after the Lech L’Tulsa tour and participants will have the option to extend the trip another day to attend the game.

Sachs acknowledged hardships such as missing family and friends in Vancouver. The family had planned to go back to Vancouver for their sons’ bar mitzvahs to celebrate with their social circle there, but decided to hold the ceremony in Tulsa, partly so their Canadian acquaintances can meet the city’s Jewish community, and because they now feel at home in Oklahoma.

“This is our community, and there’s a lot of people here that want to celebrate this simcha [joyous occasion] together with us,” he said.