In October 2025, Jewish worshippers gathered at Manchester’s Heaton Park Synagogue for the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur in Hebrew), the most solemn day on the Jewish calendar. A terrorist attacked the congregation, and two people died in what was the first fatal antisemitic attack since the Community Security Trust (CST) began monitoring British antisemitism in 1984.^[1] Less than three months later, families celebrating the first night of Hanukkah at Sydney’s Bondi Beach came under gunfire. Fifteen people were killed, and forty more were wounded.^[2]

Tel Aviv University’s annual Antisemitism Worldwide Report counted twenty people killed in four antisemitic attacks across three countries in 2025, the highest toll in a single year in more than three decades.^[3] Across Europe, Canada, and Australia, monitoring groups show that the surge in antisemitism following Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel has not subsided.

Europe: Old Soil, New Violence

In the United Kingdom, CST recorded 3,700 antisemitic incidents in 2025, more than double from the 1,662 it logged back in 2022.^[4] During the first six months of 2026, CST documented another 1,926 incidents, including 135 assaults—an 82 percent increase over the same period in 2025. The threats extend well beyond online hostilities too. In April 2026, a man stabbed two visibly Jewish men in London’s Golders Green neighborhood in what authorities treated as an act of terrorism.^[5]

France, home to Europe’s largest Jewish community, tells a similar story. The Jewish community security service recorded 1,320 antisemitic incidents in 2025, roughly triple the 436 recorded in 2022. In Germany, federal police recorded 5,729 politically motivated crimes with an antisemitic background in 2025. That number is roughly double the 2,811 reports logged in 2022.^[6] But incident counts only capture part of the picture.

A European Union survey completed in 2023 found that 76 percent of Jewish respondents concealed their Jewish identity on at least one occasion, and 34 percent reported avoiding Jewish events or sites out of concern for personal safety.^[7] Those figures cannot measure the later surge, but they reveal how insecurity had already entered daily life, and a public climate in which people feel compelled to conceal who they are is itself a serious warning.

Canada: “A National Crisis”

Long regarded as a safe haven, Canada now faces what B’nai Brith Canada—a Jewish advocacy and human rights organization—calls “a national crisis of antisemitism.” The organization documented 6,800 antisemitic incidents in 2025, the highest annual total since it began tracking incidents in 1982. That amounts to nearly nineteen incidents every day. Most of those incidents (92 percent) occurred online, but the violence offline is growing. By mid-July 2026, officials had documented 27 violent antisemitic incidents for the year, compared with ten incidents during all of 2025.^[8]

The consequences were painfully concrete in Ottawa in August 2025, when a Jewish woman in her seventies was stabbed while shopping in the kosher section of a grocery.^[9] Police classified the attack as a hate crime, and a routine errand became a reminder that hostility toward Jewish people can intrude even into the most ordinary of moments. In the Toronto area, shootings also targeted synagogues and a Jewish school. These attacks threatened places where families gather, worship, and educate children. Behind the national total are parents deciding how to reassure their children, congregations considering security measures, and neighbors wondering whether the next attack will come closer to home.

B’nai Brith Canada’s Richard Robertson warned, “Canada cannot wait for its own Bondi Beach to get serious about the national crisis of antisemitism.”^[10]

Australia: From Warning Signs to Bondi

In 2025, the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) recorded 1,750 antisemitic incidents, nearly four times the 472 recorded in 2022. Before the Bondi Beach massacre, an arson attack damaged Melbourne’s Adass Israel Synagogue in December 2024, and then a fire was set at the entrance of the East Melbourne Hebrew Congregation in July 2025 while about twenty people were inside for a Sabbath dinner.^[11]

ECAJ research director Julie Nathan said the Jewish community “was shocked but not surprised by the massacre at Bondi,” calling it “a culmination of more than two years of vilification and demonization of Jews and Israel.”^[12] The progression from threats and vandalism to attacks on gathering places is especially disturbing. A synagogue is more than a place of worship. It is where families gather, traditions endure, and generations share a common history. A public Hanukkah celebration is meant to bring families together to affirm Jewish life, but at Bondi Beach, that shared joy was shattered by violence.

Beyond the Headlines

Behind every report of rising antisemitism is a person who bears the cost. Maybe it is a student who hesitates to wear a Star of David necklace, or a family reconsidering whether to attend synagogue. Or maybe it is a Jewish business owner wondering whether displaying a mezuzah on his doorpost might invite hostility.^[13] These are the everyday decisions that reveal the human cost of antisemitism. But the experiences of Jewish communities across Europe, Canada, and Australia remind us that antisemitism is not confined to one country, one political movement, or even one moment in history. Although the circumstances differ, the consequences extend beyond the immediate victims, affecting entire families, neighborhoods, and communities.

The challenge is not simply to recognize antisemitism when it makes international headlines. It is to confront the prejudice, misinformation, and indifference that allow hatred to take root long before violence occurs. Jewish communities should not have to choose between expressing their identity and feeling safe. Protecting that freedom calls for vigilance, education, solidarity, and a willingness to speak out when antisemitism appears in everyday life.

How You Can Respond

Here are four ways to move from concern for the Jewish people to action:

• Educate yourself. Learn how you can recognize antisemitism and name it.
• Pray with specifics. Pray for Jewish communities in Manchester, London, Paris, Toronto, Montreal, Sydney, and Melbourne; for the families of the Bondi victims; for the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion as it prepares its report; and for protection over synagogues and schools.
• Show up locally. Call a nearby synagogue or Jewish community center and ask how you can help. A note of support, a visit, or your presence at a vigil speaks volumes.
• Push back online. With 92 percent of Canada’s recorded incidents now occurring online, reporting antisemitic posts and refusing to share them makes a difference.

Above all, recognize the people behind these statistics. A person entering a synagogue, shopping for kosher foods, or gathering to light Hanukkah candles should not have to weigh the possibility of being attacked for being Jewish. A meaningful response to antisemitism is measured not only by what society condemns after violence occurs but also by the safety and the dignity it works to protect before another attack takes place.