The apparent arson attack on a kosher restaurant in his Montreal building would have devastated his father, a Holocaust survivor who died in 2021, Howard Szalavetz told JNS.
“Thank God my father isn’t alive to see this,” said Szalavetz, 61, who bought the building with his father in 1987 and has owned it since. “It would have been horrible for him.”
Nöam, a kosher restaurant in Montreal, was destroyed in a fire early Saturday morning in an incident that authorities are investigating as a possible hate crime.
Firefighters were called at about 3:15 a.m. on Aug. 1 to a commercial building near Décarie Boulevard and Plamondon Avenue in the Côte-des-Neiges neighborhood of Montreal, the city’s police department, SPVM, told JNS.
The fire caused “major damage,” but no injuries were reported, the police department said.
Szalavetz shared video footage with JNS of a person appearing to leave the scene after the fire began. The police department told JNS that due to that footage, it transferred the case to its arson and explosives unit.
“We have not excluded any potential avenues of investigation,” the police department told JNS.
Szalavetz, who was born and raised in Montreal, said that he was awakened at about 3:30 a.m. and that he rushed to the building, which is about five minutes from his home. He understood the severity of the situation but said that it did not occur to him that the fire might have been set intentionally.
“My first thought was, ‘OK, it’s a restaurant,’” he said. “Even though it’s Friday night and it’s closed, restaurants are prone to grease fires.”
The scene outside the restaurant was “mayhem,” Szalavetz told JNS.
“You could see the building,” he said. “It wasn’t as engulfed in flames when I got there, but you could see the carnage. It was a very sad moment.”
The sight of the Jewish-owned business burning evoked Kristallnacht, the Nazi-organized pogrom also known as the “night of broken glass,” for Szalavetz, and it would certainly have done the same for his father, he said.
He and his father bought the the property and ran a taxi company out of the building for several years, before they moved into real estate.
“I have a lot of memories there,” he told JNS. “I moved out, moved back. The place has a lot more memories than just being a building I own. I spent a good part of my life there.”
It was not until about 8 a.m., about five hours after the fire began, that Szalavetz started to consider that it might not have been an accident.
Once firefighters could safely enter the building, they put on oxygen masks and retrieved the digital video recorder connected to the garage’s surveillance system, he said.
Electricity and gas had been shut off across several blocks, so Szalavetz joined police officers and firefighters in the lobby of a nearby hotel that had generator power to watch the footage.
“You could literally see somebody on the deck doing something,” he told JNS. “It was just before 3 a.m. The restaurant was closed, so he wasn’t there as a patron.”
“Then you see him move to the other side. You see him light something. You see the fire start. Then you see him walk away—run away,” he said.
“At that moment, the police said it was no longer just a fire,” he told JNS.
Szalavetz told JNS that he is convinced the attack was motivated by Jew-hatred.
“To me, the writing is on the wall,” he said. “It seems like a hate crime. There doesn’t seem to be another logical explanation, because they only targeted the kosher restaurant. They didn’t target the whole building.”
He never imagined that such an attack would occur in Montreal, despite the rise in Jew-hatred incidents since Oct. 7.
“I know these boys. They’re good boys,” he said, of Ynon Cohen and Meir Azerad, the brothers-in-law who opened the restaurant in 2023. “They don’t have enemies. They don’t owe people money. I’ve had conversations with them.”
The restaurant was “incredibly, incredibly popular,” Szalavetz told JNS.
“Montreal doesn’t have a huge selection of kosher restaurants,” he said. “It has several, but until then, it was more of, ‘We’ve got a captive audience. We don’t have to excel because we’ve got you as a captive client.’”
“These boys came in and really put a lot of effort into quality service and went above and beyond,” he said. “The result was that every night they were open, they were packed solid.”
The attack was the result of “inaction” in the face of rising Jew-hatred in Montreal, according to Szalavetz.
“As I said recently to somebody, I think it was actually a firefighter or a police officer, ‘This is what happens when society reacts this way after Oct. 7,’” he told JNS. “You allow protesters to become violent. You allow them to harass students at universities. This is another step down that path.”
“When you allow lesser incidents to go unpunished, you’re opening the door for more aggressive acts,” he said.
Since the attack, members of Montreal’s Jewish community have rallied around Cohen and Azerad, as they seek to rebuild the restaurant. Police and investigators have been “lovely” and “respectful,” Szalavetz told JNS.
“Both sides want to rebuild,” he said. “It’s more than a financial interest. It’s a moral interest. You cannot take us down.”
“It’s the Jewish survival instinct,” he told JNS. “You try to take us down. We’ll come back bigger and better. We’ll show you it’s only a setback.”
The attack has not changed the way Szalavetz views his investments in Montreal, nor has it made him reconsider his or his daughters’ future there.
“I’ve invested in Montreal through two referendums about Quebec separation,” he said. “Millions of people live here and will continue to live here.”
“People have their lives. People have roots. People believe good will conquer evil and that truth will prevail,” he told JNS. “You have to have hope. You can’t put your head in the sand.”
“Every place has its problems,” he added. “Maybe we have a few more, but nobody is sheltered.”
