OPINION: Clinging to hope after Belleville, Ont. rocked by vicious storm of antisemitism
· Toronto Sun
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Seven years ago, I wrote what I thought would be a message of hope and encouragement to my community in Prince Edward County.
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I was 16, and filled with so much optimism about the future. It was almost Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, which always falls nine days before Yom Kippur.
In that message, I encouraged residents of Prince Edward County to evaluate their position on the social shifts the region has seen in recent decades. I envisioned a community that “lets (people) be proudly Jewish and proudly PEC. Why is it that we have built a place where being both is a challenge?” I questioned.
That fall, September/October 2019, I attended a local Rosh Hashanah gathering where I spoke with the local community about the antisemitism I had experienced and expressed in my writing, and nine days later, I attended the Yom Kippur services at the Sons of Jacob synagogue in Belleville, Ont.: the only local synagogue for most
of the surrounding rural areas.
A few months later, the mailbox outside my family’s home was cut down, and the wooden post was scrawled with a swastika. We reported the incident to the OPP’s non-emergency line. They took a report over the phone, and we installed a new mailbox and security cameras. “This,” I thought, “is the challenge I meant.”
Moment of fear and doubt
I experienced and saw my family experience a moment of fear, of doubt for our safety. But things did continue safely.
Now, seven years later, the challenge I depicted seems to have been so severely outdone so many times over that I struggle to find a word that seems competent to replace it. The news that Sons of Jacob had been the target of a shooting during this year’s Yom Kippur services was jarring and heartbreaking. The time my loved ones and I have spent in that building, watching the light break through the stained glass, of course came rushing back.
Still, it was not as jarring as it would certainly have been then. The scale has shifted, and the capacity for violence has elevated so dramatically I fear that coming generations will lose grasp of a frame of reference for real peace. Certainly, the peace I hoped for for Prince Edward County and the surrounding areas’ Jewish communities has been shattered.
The experience of receiving texts from my friends and my parents’ friends seeking information, full of fear and anxiety and unable to reach their loved ones, or inside the synagogue describing “hitting the floor,” being evacuated and shuttled by bus to the police station where they were individually interviewed long into the night, took me rushing back through the last few years, from desperately reaching out to friends in Israel on Oct. 7 to watching 16 people gunned down celebrating Hanukkah in Sydney, Australia, to last year’s Yom Kippur when two men were stabbed to death outside their synagogue in London, England, and right back to my own community, my friends ducking for cover in my synagogue, the bullet holes in the stained glass.
The cycle is undeniable, and the terror my family and community are feeling is palpable. The vicious storm of antisemitism that has ripped through not only rural Ontario but the global community over the past several years has real, fatal consequences, and it cannot be allowed to continue to fester in developed society or more Jewish people will die. It is by luck, and by the incredible bravery of Const. Jeff Smith, who risked his own life to protect the congregants inside the synagogue, that more did not die.
Message of hope
I want to close with a message of hope, but I cannot say for sure that I have retained much of my old optimism. I do, though, have a wish for the people in my community in Belleville and Prince Edward County, and for those people far beyond those places in every town and hamlet and city where hatred and division have embedded themselves in your neighbours and siblings and friends. Extremism and polarization are easier to spread and adopt than they have maybe ever been. Information is available everywhere, all the time, and that availability is often completely unrelated to information’s veracity or authenticity.
It is not only easy to be misled and radicalized, it is the natural outcome of the current circumstances and climate. In order to avoid the extremism that surrounds us, in order to prevent yourself from becoming radically attached to causes you may have been misinformed about, you must actively guard yourself against that
extremism and that radicalization and that misinformation.
I do not really hope that each person will take up that guard, but I do wish it very much, and I encourage it. I wish for nuance and moderation, and for peace and for the return of hope. I wish for a safe year to come, and for the full recovery of the police officer who engaged in combat with the shooter in Belleville and who very likely saved the lives of many of my friends and neighbours. May we all see a sweet new year.
– Talia Epstein has her MA from Queen’s University, and grew up in the Belleville-area Jewish community