The Name on the Window Was Enough: The Attacks on Kiva’s and the Normalization of Antisemitic Violence in Canada
In case anyone was wondering why so many Canadian Jews describe feeling vulnerable and unsafe
Kiva’s, the well-known Toronto Jewish bakery, was struck by gunfire and smashed windows in two locations over the weekend. This one is personal as Kiva was my grandmother’s cousin. Both were Holocaust survivors who rebuilt their lives in Toronto, and though he sold the business years ago, the owners have kept his name on the window ever since. Whoever fired at that window almost certainly knew none of this, since for those responsible the Jewish name on the storefront was evidently reason enough.
For me, the sense that the violence keeps landing close to home is not new. The Pride of Israel synagogue, where I grew up and where my parents have been members for decades, was vandalized in 2024, and last summer an elderly Jewish woman was stabbed in a hate-motivated attack at my local Ottawa grocery store, a Loblaws known for carrying the city’s largest selection of kosher food. The attack on Kiva’s makes three incidents with a personal connection, which might seem like a remarkable string of bad luck were it not for the reality that the volume of antisemitic violence in Canada now ensures that many Jewish Canadians can tell a similar story about their synagogue, their school, their grocery store, or their family. For anyone wondering why so many Canadian Jews describe feeling vulnerable and unsafe, that is the answer.
Kiva was part of a generation of survivors who arrived in Canada with little and built new lives on the promise that this was a country where a Jewish name on a storefront was just a name. The bakery became an institution for many in the Jewish community, which is presumably what made it a target. The attackers were not responding to the current owners or to anything they may believe about a foreign conflict, but simply to a Jewish name that has outlived the survivor who gave it.
The national numbers tell the same story. Just last week, Toronto police charged a man with a terrorism offence, with investigators pointing to ties to Hamas, and days later B’nai Brith reported that violent antisemitic incidents in the first half of 2026 had already more than doubled the total for all of 2025. I wrote nearly two years ago that antisemitism in Canada no longer shocks, yet since then the pace of violence has only increased.
The temptation is frequently to call on our leaders to do more, but the attacks came just days after the Combatting Hate Act took effect, which creates new criminal offences that include intimidation and obstruction provisions designed to protect access to places of worship, community schools, and cultural centres. I think Parliament largely got the balance right with the new law, but its approach reflects a model of protection based on identifying the places where Jewish life gathers and building a legal and physical perimeter around them. But a bagel bakery is not a synagogue or community centre, and no realistic security program can place a protective perimeter around every bakery, deli, bookstore, and storefront where Jewish life occurs.
None of this renders the new law, enforcement efforts, or security spending pointless, but it is a reminder that all address symptoms rather than the source. The reluctance to enforce the law and the violence itself have been enabled or worsened by the normalization of antisemitism in Canada since the Hamas terror attack on October 7, 2023. When glorifying terrorism is defended as protest, when targeting Jewish institutions is rationalized as political expression, and when each new attack is met with denial or false flag allegations, the message to the public is that antisemitism can be justified and to police and prosecutors that these cases are best avoided as a “two-sides” debate emerges around antisemitic hate.
Kiva’s generation rebuilt their lives here on the promise that Canada was different, yet the growing fear among Canadian Jews is that it no longer is. Restoring that promise will take more than another statute or security grant, as the violence only stops when antisemitism stops being a hatred that too many Canadians have decided they can live with, ignore, or explain away.
Post originally appeared at https://www.michaelgeist.ca/2026/07/the-name-on-the-window-was-enough-the-attacks-on-kivas-and-the-normalization-of-antisemitic-violence-in-canada/
Find me on:
I am so sorry this is happening to you personally and to your community and to our country. You are the canary in the coal mine and I would leave if I were you, if I could.
But I know leaving is very difficult, if not impossible. Family, trying to emigrate somewhere else, the loss of money to leave, where to go. These seem impossible hurdles to me but my life isn’t threatened.
Frankly yours is and the government will do nothing about it. That’s a fact.
Who could have imagined this before 2020 in Canada. It’s hard to believe which is why it’s easy to ignore.
Again, I am so sorry.
All instances of violence against Jewish places of 'assembly', whether synagogues, schools or bakeries, are illegal and should be condemned and their perpetrators prosecuted.
But such instances have been increasing not only or even principally "since the Hamas attack of October 7", but because of the disproportionately savage retribution that Israel continues to impose on Gaza, joined by the increasingly bold and violent treatment of people on the West Bank by illegal Israeli settlers.
Israel's atrocities should not logically or legally be visited on Canadian Jews, but they are not unconnected psychologically.