Some 50,000 people attend a rally in support of Israel, in Toronto, Canada, June 9, 2024. Credit: Doron Horowitz/Flash90.
Some 50,000 people attend a rally in support of Israel, in Toronto, Canada, June 9, 2024. Credit: Doron Horowitz/Flash90.
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Canadian grassroots leaders say they fill post-Oct. 7 holes left by large Jewish groups

“The big organizations have never been wartime organizations,” Amir Epstein, of Tafsik, told JNS.

The UJA Federation of Greater Toronto, a more than 100-year-old network of some 100 agencies, schools and camps, raises some $40 million annually and its foundation has some $205 million in assets, according to its website. B’nai Brith Canada, which has been around for 150 years, had some $4.4 million in revenue for the reporting period ending on Dec. 31, 2023, per the Canadian government.

The leaders of several much smaller and more meager Jewish groups—which have surfaced since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, terror attacks in southern Israel—told JNS that they believe their grassroots groups have been serving Canadian Jews better than have the institutional behemoths.

“I think the big organizations have never been wartime organizations,” Amir Epstein, co-executive of Tafsik, told JNS.

“They give money to Israel. Is that important? Yes, it is. They help the elderly. Is that important? Yes, it is. They help children with disabilities and a bunch of other social programs. Is that important? Yes, it is,” added Epstein, whose group was officially launched to the public in February 2024 as a “Jewish civil rights group combating hatred.”

At issue, to Epstein, are some of the other ways the legacy Jewish groups spend their money. “It’s nice to have a Jewish Community Center and swimming pools. Maybe this is the social club for old people,” he told JNS. “But what was the plan after Oct. 7?”

He noted that the major Jewish groups receive “hundreds of millions” of Canadian dollars in annual donations and that the Toronto Federation is building a $36 million (U.S.) ice skating rink, reportedly the “first and only Jewish community in North America to own its own indoor ice-hockey arena.”

“Could you imagine what we could do with 1% of that?” Epstein told JNS. “Maybe a little bit less money for building, you know, ice hockey rinks, and a little bit more money for the grassroots, who are fighting on the ground, making a huge difference for the community.”

The major groups, in Epstein’s view, are out like Tom Hagen in “The Godfather,” when Michael Corleone tells him, “You’re not a wartime consigliere.”

“We’ve learned something interesting—that the big organizations are giant ships, and you can’t expect a giant ship to quickly change course and develop programs to do what we need,” Epstein told JNS. “Also, the big organizations are limited by red-tape politics. So let these new guys come in who are on jet skis. We can turn quickly, we move fast, and we can get a lot done.”

The major Jewish groups disagree.

Sara Lefton, chief development officer at UJA Federation and executive director of the Jewish Foundation, told JNS that it will take a “multitude of different approaches” to fight Jew-hatred after Oct. 7.

Toronto
Pro-Israel attendees of a rally calling for the release of Israelis held kidnapped by Hamas terrorists in Gaza in Toronto, Canada, Sept. 1, 2024. Credit: Doron Horowitz/Flash90.

“I appreciate that everyone has different perspectives about what the larger organizations are doing, not doing,” she said. “I’m very proud, and I know my colleagues are very proud, of the fact that there’s a tremendous amount of work that has been done. Some that people see, and a lot, frankly, that people don’t see.”

That doesn’t mean that anyone, including her employer, has “any sort of monopoly over this fight, and, in fact, the opposite,” she said. The Federation “has a tremendous amount of respect for grassroots groups, grassroots leaders.”

It is a “phenomenal” and “healthy” sign that groups have their individual strengths, according to Lefton. She also disputes that the Federation is a slow “cruise ship” that can’t maneuver like nimbler “motorboats.”

The Federation gathered some 20,000 people for a Rally for the People of Israel two days after the Oct. 7 attacks, she told JNS. Federation “put in resources quickly” and attracted a “broad spectrum” of the community, which “perhaps grassroots groups might have trouble with on their own,” she said. “If that’s not nimble.”

“There is something to be said about having an organization in place that can mobilize quickly,” she said. “We have access to the community.”

UJA created a “community mobilization team” to, in part, work easily and seamlessly with grassroots organizations, Lefton told JNS. “It’s a very specific and deliberate effort,” she said, and the Federation “will absolutely be there to support them, to partner with them, to provide guidance, advice.”

She added that grassroots representatives have joined the Federation’s frequent Zoom calls with the mobilization team over the past year, and the Federation drew on input from those groups when it organized its Oct. 7 anniversary event.

Federation has some funding available for grassroots initiatives, she told JNS, but generally, charities “are limited in how they can provide grants to non-charitable entities.”

“I’m not sure every community leader or every community activist understands charitable law in Canada,” she said. “There are specific rules that guide how and when we can partner and support initiatives.”

Daphna Pollak
Daphna Pollak at a protest outside a Red Cross office in Canada. Photo by Dave Gordon.

Not making ‘outcry to enforce the law’

Moshe Ronen, a Canadian lawyer and former vice president of the World Jewish Congress, has more than five decades of experience on the grassroots level and at major Jewish organizations. He is chair of a group called Maspik that counters Jew-hatred.

Ronen told JNS that grassroots groups are popping up after Oct. 7 for two reasons. Jewishness and caring for the Jewish community have “woken up,” he said, and many are frustrated. “There’s a sense that some things should be happening,” he said.

Legacy organizations are seen as “too accommodating with government, too accommodating with policing, in terms of the actions that could have been taken or should have been taken,” he told JNS. “They’re not really making that outcry to enforce the law.”

“Their attitude is non-confrontational,” he said. “Their attitude is more of the do-not-escalate, where grassroots don’t have to have that barrier.”

Many pro-Israel supporters might find that they agree with the goals of grassroots groups, while larger organizations are “more prone to look for consensus because they have various parts that they have to bring together to the same table,” he told JNS.

“They appeal to a broader group or more extended parts of the organization that they need to reach,” Ronen said.

Ideally, legacy and grassroots groups ought to collaborate. “Sometimes, the legacy organization actually welcomes it because it fits into their current, favorite issue or what they think will appeal to their donors as well,” he said. “I think legacy organizations, similarly, can use the actions of the smaller groups to say, ‘Look, they are getting people out to the streets.’”

‘Should be a lot more’

Unlike the legacy organizations, organizers at the new grassroots groups largely volunteer to do so in their spare time outside their full-time jobs.

One of the most prominent of the groups, Tafsik, which Epstein and Bryan Lipovetsky lead, has hosted events featuring some of the most famous pro-Israel voices, and it also fundraised last summer to bring 15 kibbutz youth, who live near the Israeli border with Lebanon, to tour Canada and to go to a Jewish Canadian camp.

After Oct. 7, Epstein, who has a law background and worked in the food service industry and events promotion, had to “rein in all of my thoughts and my stresses, pain and anger into doing something that’s gonna actually help the community,” he told JNS.

He hopes that his organization, which has “a few dozen” active volunteers, can partner better with legacy Jewish organizations to build connections with “natural” allies like Canadian Iranians, Azerbaijanis, Venezuelans, Albanians, Kosovars and Hindus.

“Imagine the impact it would have, not only for other communities to see but even politicians to see, if there are hundreds of thousands of people on the street,” he told JNS. “This makes their concerns very real. If you’re not going to be involved with the community, don’t expect any other community to be involved.”

Avi Attali told JNS that he started OneGlobalVoice in his living room. “We didn’t have anybody. We didn’t know anybody. We didn’t have any experience,” he said.

The group held a rally with relatives of hostages 100 days after Oct. 7, and at the six-month mark, another OneGlobalVoice event drew some 5,000 people and included a speech by Pierre Poilievre, the Conservative Party leader, and provincial parliamentarian Goldie Ghamari.

Avi Attali
Avi Attali at a rally in downtown Toronto marking 100 days after the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Photo by Dave Gordon.

‘We’re about peace’

One of the other rallies the group held attracted 1,000 attendees, he told JNS.

“When you think that we are about 200,000 Jews in Toronto, there should be more people coming to show support for Israel. There should be a lot more cooperation between all these big organizations to help us get more numbers,” Attali said.

“There should be a process to help us because I think that after Oct. 7, so many people want to do things to help the community,” he added.

Darryl Singer and his wife Lianne Gotkind created Emet Talks to “change the ‘propaganda of misinformation’ narrative.” The group has helped draw in those who are alienated by the organized Jewish community, Singer told JNS.

“We have a lot of friends coming to us—a lot of friends in mixed marriages who were asking for more information about Israel,” he said. “They said they felt something in their heart, but they didn’t want to go to events run by a shul or the large organizations.”

He told JNS that he felt obligated to help.

“We grassroots people all do this out of the goodness of our hearts. I think that’s probably an important element of how we all got into this,” he said. “We felt obligated because we were failed by existing community options.”

Guidy Mamann
Guidy Mamann, president of the Toronto Zionist Council, at a rally in Toronto. Photo by Dave Gordon.

Volunteers are pitching in “at great expense,” according to Singer. “I don’t say that to be a hero or something like that,” he told JNS. “We’ve all taken time out of our busy days and made sacrifices and spent money, time and energy.”

Daphna Pollak, one of the volunteers at Canadians for Israel, told JNS that “legacy institutions” are more “social service agencies and have had a hard time adapting” to advocacy needs. 

“They are trying to adapt, but it’s taking a long time,” she said. “We saw things were missing in the community, and that’s why we stepped up.”

Toronto grassroots groups pool resources and volunteers, and they cross-promote each other’s work, according to Pollak. Canadians for Israel has held events ranging from protests outside Red Cross headquarters to stickering campaigns to outdoor havdalah services at the end of Shabbat, she said.

She thinks that grassroots groups should focus on protecting Jews, including teaching self-defense. If elected officials “don’t wake up to this soon, we’re going to have Amsterdam, Germany and New Orleans right here in Toronto,” she said, referring to several recent, Islamist attacks.

“Everyone needs to worry about protecting Canada before it’s too late,” she said. “Canada is at risk of losing itself, not just its Jews.”

‘New group of faces’

Dr. David Burstein, who wrote a book about loneliness and is a dentist who lives in Toronto, has attended several Tafsik events.

“Funny thing is that I have found I feel more attached to the Jewish community than ever before just because of the nature of what’s going on,” he said. “I’m having these conversations with other Jews, and that has meaning.”

At the Tafsik events, it “felt like a new group of faces,” and not the people he would see at events of the legacy Jewish groups. “It was also reassuring in that way,” he said.

The week after Oct. 7, Guidy Mamann and restaurateur Esther Mordechai began putting together what they say are the longest-running, weekly pro-Israel rallies in the world.

Mamann, the president of the Toronto Zionist Council, told JNS that he heard members of the Jewish community were pulling their kids out of school and some were too afraid to wear kippahs and Star of David necklaces shortly after the Hamas terror attacks.

“Obviously, this community needs a lot of healing, and we need to be united,” he said. “That’s what we did.”

“We came out, and we started with about seven or eight people, and then it grew. Next week and next week and next week until the consensus was, ‘We’re going to do this until this is all over,’” he told JNS. The day before the one-year anniversary of the attacks, some 3,500 people attended the rally—about a 50,000% increase from the first events.

“We embrace life. We’re about peace,” Mordechai told JNS. “Our focus is not on the other side. We’re there to support Israel, Israel Defense Forces and to bring the hostages home.”

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