Police officers arrested an 18-year-old for allegedly carrying out two suspected hate-motivated assaults, firing a pellet gun at Jews in predominantly Jewish neighborhoods, the Toronto Police Service said on Friday.
Ruslan Novruzov, of Vaughan, in Ontario, was charged with four counts of assault with a weapon and two counts of possession of a weapon for a dangerous purpose, the department said.
The 18-year-old is accused of shooting gel pellets at three “visibly identifiable” Jews, who suffered minor injuries, from a moving vehicle on April 30 in one of the largest Jewish neighbourhoods in Canada.
On May 7, police responded to a similar assault at about 10:45 p.m., when a man fired gel pellets at three identifiable Jews outside Congregation Chasidei Bobov, a Chassidic synagogue near Bathurst Street and Wilson Avenue, one intersection away from the April 30 incident. One victim suffered minor injuries, police said.
The department said that officers found and seized two “two gel-blaster imitation firearms” after executing a search warrant at Novruzov’s home. He was due in court on May 8, the department said.
“This is not a prank. It was an act of intimidation meant to spread fear,” Vince Gasparro, a Liberal parliamentarian, told JNS. “It must be treated with the seriousness it deserves.”
“At a time when antisemitism is rising globally, we cannot allow this hatred to take root in our communities,” added Gasparro, whose riding, or district, includes the Chassidic synagogue.
Sara Lefton, chief development officer at the UJA Federation of Greater Toronto, told JNS that “these alarming antisemitic attacks, now occurring in rapid succession, must not be allowed to continue.”
“This escalation of intimidation and extremism is targeting not just the Jewish community, but all Canadians and will inevitably lead to much worse, with potentially lethal consequences,” Lefton said.
“Every Canadian should be very concerned right now,” she told JNS. “As for the Jewish community, we have faced this kind of threat before, and we have always and will continue to persevere.”
“We will not accept a future where we need to hide our Jewish identities,” she added.
“I utterly condemn this despicable act against people simply standing in front of a synagogue,” Brad Bradford, a mayoral candidate and member of the Toronto City Council, told JNS. “This appears to be another clear attempt to terrorize Toronto’s Jewish community.”
“Far too many antisemitic attacks have occurred in this city, and the status quo is failing to keep residents safe,” Bradford said. He added that Olivia Chow, mayor of Toronto, “must answer: What is being done to stop them?”
Mike Colle, a member of the Toronto City Council whose riding includes the synagogue, spoke to JNS outside the synagogue, where five police cars were parked.
“I am totally effing pissed off, OK?” he said. “That this kind of terrorizing of the Jewish community has gotten to the point where I’m calling for an end to the platitudes and, we’ve got to do something to take this on.”
“That’s why I’ve called for a boots on the ground emergency antisemitism task force here in Toronto,” to be made up of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Ontario Provincial Police and Toronto police, he said.
“Because this is going on every day, you know, windows smashed, people shot at with pellets, synagogues shot at,” Colle told JNS. “I can’t direct the police, but I’ll tell you, we need RCMP all hands on deck, and they refused.”
Colle got the City Council to pass a unanimous resolution calling for the task force, but the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Ontario Provincial Police “refused to be part of it,” he said.
“So when are they going to come on board and realize this isn’t just a local matter?” he told JNS. “This is orchestrated, financed by forces outside of Toronto, and it’s about time this was taken as an act of terror. That’s what’s happening here. I’m so livid.”
A source close to provincial parliamentarian Michael Kerzner, who is also the solicitor general of Ontario, said that he and Chow, the Toronto mayor, conducted a meeting Friday morning with synagogue leaders that was closed to the media.
The shooting is the latest in a spate of hate crimes against Jews in the country, which one major organization says has reached record levels.
B’nai Brith Canada’s 2025 annual audit of Jew-hatred, released last month, recorded 6,800 cases of anti-Jewish hatred across the country—the highest since the organization began tracking in 1982, and representing an average of 18.6 daily incidents. The figure marks a 9.3% increase over 2024’s then-record 6,219 incidents and a 145.6% spike from 2022 levels.
Shortly after the study’s release, Simon Wolle, CEO of B’nai Brith, told JNS that the findings reflect a “troubling and continued shift in antisemitism from society’s fringes to the mainstream.”
Talia Klein Leighton, president of Canadian Women Against Antisemitism, told JNS that she was asked recently whether Bondi Beach, the site in Sydney of the terror attack last Chanukah, is coming to Canada.
“It’s already here,” she recalled saying.
“I don’t even want to say we’re luckier that no one’s been hit and no one’s been deeply wounded, maimed or killed,” she told JNS. “But the gun violence is already here.”
“I don’t see it getting better anytime soon, certainly not when you have Mark Carney,” the prime minister, “making the kind of statements that he made yesterday about Gaza and Israel,” she said.
On May 7, Carney spoke with the “president of the state of Palestine” and “expressed Canada’s deep concern over the continued humanitarian crisis in Gaza and reaffirmed its opposition to Israeli settlement expansion and settler violence in the West Bank,” per a Canadian government readout of the conversation.
“He emphasized that unilateral actions undermine prospects for a lasting peace,” the readout added.
“All he does is fuel the fire against Jews in Canada,” Klein Leighton told JNS. “He’s not going to help Gaza. He’s not going to help the Palestinians.”
“What I don’t have respect for are the leaders who keep putting Band-Aid on top of Band-Aid on top of Band-Aid instead of making it so uncomfortable to be an antisemite in this country that they go back under the rocks that they came out of, that they can slither back to the underground they came out of,” she said.
Joe Matthews, acting deputy chief of the Toronto Police Service, stated that “we recognize that Jewish residents have been living with a heightened sense of fear due to repeated incidents targeting their community, and this only adds to that, which is unacceptable.”
“While the weapons used were imitation firearms, the impacts are very real,” he stated. “These are criminal acts that we allege were meant to intimidate and cause fear.”
