Synagogue Shot at in Toronto; Security Measures Considered

The synagogue where I was bar mitzvahed was built in 1963. The Nazi Holocaust of the Jews of Europe had ended only 18 years before. But those nightmares seemed remote from the verdant and prosperous cul-de-sac in northern Toronto that led to the door of Temple Emanu-el. Light streamed into the lobby through large picture windows. The congregants gazed out at the world through undraped glass, confident and hopeful. They invited the world to gaze back in. On the night of March 2, 2026, at about 10:45 p.m., a car pulled into the synagogue’s driveway. A person stepped out of the passenger side and aimed a handgun at the synagogue’s glass windows. According to the synagogue’s rabbi, Debra Landsberg, surveillance video did not capture the faces of the shooter or driver, or the car’s license plate. It caught instead something less practical but more telling: the shooter’s outward calm. This person emptied the gun, paused, then resumed firing, 20 shots in all. The bullets shattered nine panes of glass, their wooden framework gouged by bullet fragments. Two months later, the synagogue’s windows remain boarded over. The synagogue’s rabbi, board, and other decision makers are pondering a new and difficult dilemma: how to fortify their house of worship against a world where Jews are again marked for violence by their neighbors. This is the backdrop for the vehement response that so many Jews and friends of Israel have had to a column by Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times last week, in which he alleged a systematic Israeli campaign of sexual violence against Palestinian prisoners and detainees. Anti-Semitic violence in the Western world is quickening in tempo and intensifying in lethality. Much of that violence can be blamed on anti-Jewish incitement that draws on the deepest foundations of anti-Jewish myth.