Anne London-Weinstein, an Ontario Superior Court of Justice judge, ruled on Jan. 7 that Iain Aspenlieder, a former lawyer for the city of Ottawa who pleaded guilty to vandalizing a Holocaust memorial, is free to go after serving five months in prison. Prosecutors had sought a two-year sentence for Aspenlieder’s crime, which was committed in June 2025.
At the time, Aspenlieder wrote “feed me” in red paint on the National Holocaust Monument in Ottawa, Ontario.
“It’s supposed to be a beacon of education and tolerance, and to honor the memories of all the victims,” Adam Silver, president and CEO of the Jewish Federation of Ottawa, told JNS of the memorial at the time.
Aspenlieder pleaded guilty to a charge of mischief for the vandalism in July.
London-Weinstein also ordered on Wednesday that he serve two years of probation; not approach Jewish or Israeli institutions, nor possess guns; and pay a “victim surcharge,” the CBC reported.
Michael Teper, president of the Canadian Antisemitism Education Foundation, told JNS that the charity is “disappointed and angry” about the ruling.
The group said in a community impact statement during the trial that Asplenlieder was “not a youth acting in ignorance, nor an outsider unaware of our history.”
“He is an adult, a lawyer, a member of a profession entrusted with upholding justice, guarding the rule of law and respecting human dignity,” it said in the statement. “As a lawyer, he should have known better.”
Tepter told JNS that defacing a Holocaust monument “is not simply an act of vandalism.”
“It is an attack on memory. It is an attack on the lessons we have learned to help prevent repeated mistakes and foster resilience against the illiberal ideologies sweeping the world,” he said.
It’s also a “direct insult to the survivors of the Holocaust, to the survivors’ families, to the 45,000 Canadian soldiers killed and another 55,000 soldiers wounded,” he told JNS. “When a lawyer desecrates such a monument, it is more than a private failure. It is a public betrayal.”
The judge made a “fundamental mistake” by not identifying the vandal as motivated by Jew-hatred, according to Teper. “We’re dumbfounded about how someone who deliberately goes out to vandalize a Holocaust memorial could possibly be acting for any other purpose,” he said.
Teper, a lawyer who holds Ontario and New York bar membership, told JNS that the vandal still violated the Canadian criminal code, even if he was acting based on his opinion about the conflict in the Middle East.
The law makes it an “aggravating factor in sentencing when the accused’s motivation is hate, bias or prejudice—any one of those three words,” he said.
The judge “then failed to consider bias or prejudice, when it was clear that, for all the places he could have targeted, he chose to target the National Holocaust Memorial,” Teper said. “That indicates bias and prejudice against Jews. Therefore, the judge made a significant conceptual error.”
‘Does not reflect the gravity of a hateful act’
The charity is also concerned about more than just this ruling amid a spike in Jew-hatred that has “continually plagued” Canadians in the form of “hate mobs,” according to Teper.
“The permissiveness and laziness of the law-enforcement authorities—prosecutors and police forces—make us sitting ducks for another Bondi Beach incident unless there is an immediate course correction,” he said, referring to the mass shooting in Australia on Dec. 14, the first night of Chanukah, that left 15 people dead.
Leaders of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, the advocacy arm of the Jewish Federations of Canada-UIA, stated that the group is “deeply disappointed” and that the punishment “does not reflect the gravity of what is indeed a hateful act and its impact on the Jewish community, not only in Ottawa but across Canada.”
Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center also said it is disappointed by the minimal sentence, as well as troubled that the judge ruled that the crime wasn’t motivated by hatred, despite what it said was “clear evidence of its impact on the Jewish community.”
The organization said that the judge told the court during sentencing that Aspenlieder “is proud of what he has done and was aware that his conduct would cause fear, upset and hurt within the Jewish community.”
