Gunshots struck a Jewish elementary school in Toronto on Friday for the third time in seven months, the latest in a series of antisemitic attacks that prompted officials to announce a new push to address Canada’s rising hate crimes.
In Montreal earlier this week, the police said they were investigating an arson at a Jewish community center and synagogue that had been targeted before.
“I’m sickened by reports of shots fired at a Jewish elementary school,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said on Friday in a post on X. “This is a hateful, antisemitic attack on Toronto’s Jewish community.”
Bullet holes pockmarked the front of the school, Bais Chaya Mushka Girls Elementary School in north Toronto. Six shots were fired by a person who was shown on security video footage getting out of a vehicle that drove up to the school around 2:30 a.m. Friday, the police said.
Gunshots were also fired at the school in May and October, and the police have arrested two people in connection to one of the earlier attacks. The school belongs to the Chabad Lubavitch movement, a Hasidic branch of Judaism.
“It’s very, very hard to be woken up in the middle of the night to such news, and it is now the third time,” Rabbi Yaacov Vidal, the school’s principal, told reporters. “Parents are concerned, frustrated, in fear.”
Toronto Police, the largest metropolitan police force in Canada, has focused more resources on tackling rising hate crimes since the start of the war in Gaza last year.
About half of the hate crime incidents reported in Toronto were against the Jewish community, and there have been spikes in reported hate crimes against Muslims, Palestinians and Arabs.
As of October, about one year after the attacks by the Hamas militant group in Israel, Toronto police said that it made 161 arrests for hate crimes.
On Friday, Rachel Bendayan, an associate public safety minister, announced that she and another federal government official will convene law enforcement agencies across the country to discuss antisemitic crimes. She said the goal was “to ensure that we stem this violence.”
In September, Canada announced that it would spend about 274 million Canadian dollars, about $191 million, over six years on combating hate, including providing funds for police departments and community groups to help them gather data on bias incidents.
The number of hate crimes reported to police in Canada last year reached a record 4,777, according to the national census agency, a 32 percent increase from 2022.
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