Primary and secondary schools in Ontario, Canada, failed to investigate 49% of antisemitic incidents reported to school officials, and more than 40% of Jew-hatred instances involved Holocaust denial or glorifying Nazis, according to a government-commissioned survey on Jew-hatred in K-12 schools in the province.
The report, dated July 14, lists 781 instances of antisemitism. “Several times a day on multiple days in September 2024, a 13-year-old Jewish girl in Waterloo was surrounded by five boys repeatedly shouting ‘Sieg Heil!’ and raising their hands in the Nazi salute. On each occasion, she begged them to stop, but they persisted,” it states. “In October 2024, a 6-year-old in Ottawa was informed by her teacher that she is only half human because one of her parents is Jewish.”
Michael Teper, president of the Canadian Antisemitism Education Foundation, told JNS that “in the public school system, Jewish students are frequently ostracized, isolated and assaulted verbally and physically.”
“Little is being done to resolve the crisis,” he told JNS.
The office of the Canadian special envoy for preserving Holocaust remembrance and combating antisemitism oversaw the report led by Robert Brym, a University of Toronto sociologist.
From late January to early April of this year, 599 Jewish parents were surveyed. They reported 781 antisemitic incidents, estimated to affect at least 10% of the province’s 30,000 Jewish students. The report covers incidents that took place between October 2023 and January 2025, with more than 80% of the incidents taking place in the Toronto and Ottawa metropolitan areas.
Of the 51% of cases that schools investigated, in nearly 9%, they said that the incident in question wasn’t antisemitic or recommended that the reported victim be removed from school permanently or attend classes virtually. Some16% of parents moved their children to other schools, per the report.
‘Sounding the alarm’
Josh Landau, director of government relations for Ontario at the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, the advocacy arm of the Jewish Federations of Canada-UIA, told JNS that the report makes clear that “antisemitism is a serious problem.”
“We’ve been sounding the alarm for a long time now, and it is completely intolerable,” Landau told JNS. “It must change, and we need to see the government act decisively to combat this rising antisemitism in schools.”
“We are disappointed by the delay in implementing the new and expanded mandatory learning about the Holocaust in the compulsory grade 10 history course, and we argue that the government should accelerate the implementation of that mandatory curriculum to address the troubling lack of understanding and ongoing dehumanization of Jews,” he said.
Every new story of a victim of antisemitism is “shocking but not surprising,” he told JNS.
“We’ve been seeing this huge increase in antisemitism within the K-12 space for years now, and we need the government to take action,” he said, adding that every school board in the province must adopt and apply the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of Jew-hatred, “so that hate is recognized, recorded and addressed consistently.”
The report notes that the Toronto District School Board adopted the IHRA definition in 2018, “but in practice, it often fails to recognize and classify those incidents as antisemitic,” Landau told JNS.
‘We expect more from them’
Brym, the University of Toronto sociologist, told JNS that the IHRA definition “should be enforced,” but “it hasn’t been enforced largely because it would cause a backlash.”
Aaron Kucharczuk, co-founder of the Jewish Educators and Families Association of Canada, who is acknowledged in the study, reviewed a pre-publication draft.
He told JNS that some children asked that their parents not report antisemitic incidents, fearing they would become targets of more harassment or bullying. Some stopped wearing jewelry with Jewish symbols and Hebrew lettering, he added.
“These problems were not being dealt with effectively,” he told JNS. “Then the silence leaves more opportunities for even more antisemitic incidents to occur because they never responded to the earlier incident.”
“Students can make mistakes, and they can have learning opportunities about what’s right or wrong to say,” he said. “But teachers need to model good behavior, and we expect more from them, and clearly, the schools have been failing in their duty to make sure they’re held accountable.”
Teper, of the Canadian Antisemitism Education Foundation, is a lawyer. He told JNS he has had difficulty holding educators to account in the school system.
Since 2021, he has filed more than 25 professional misconduct complaints related to Jew-hatred against Ontario teachers. The regulatory body for the teaching profession in the province, the Ontario College of Teachers, has a “poor” investigation process, he told JNS. (JNS sought comment from the Ontario College of Teachers.)
“Investigations are routinely delayed unduly, sometimes for years,” told JNS, noting that it’s no wonder that Brym “cites a high degree of under-reporting.”
“When complaints are finally processed, they are either dismissed based on the investigation committee having a superficial understanding of the nature of antisemitism, including the IHRA definition, or the investigation committee bends over backwards attempting to formulate excuses for the member’s behavior to justify the issuance of inordinately lenient consequences,” Teper told JNS.
In one instance, it took a year and a half after he filed a complaint on April 24, 2023, before the discipline committee revoked a teacher’s license for, among other things, referring to Jews as “baby killers” on social media, he told JNS.
“If it were black people, LGBT2SQ+ people or indigenous people targeted by certain college members, would the college be this casual and lackadaisical in its approach?” he told JNS. “Why is it that at the Ontario College of Teachers, Jews don’t count?”
