This week, several Jewish synagogues in the United States and Canada were targeted by vandals and faced violent threats. In New York, a Brooklyn synagogue received an emailed bomb threat reading “I want $10,000 or I will blow up the bomb. You will blow up on the spot.” In Manhattan, Park Avenue Synagogue was defaced by a vandal who scrawled “Palestine” over “Israel” in a biblical quote inscribed on the building’s exterior. In Florida, a Boca Raton man was arrested after posting social media threats to commit a mass shooting at an unnamed local synagogue.In Canada, which has seen a precipitous recent increase in acts of antisemitism against Jewish institutions, another Ontario synagogue was targeted, this time when an assailant broke a window.

Also this week, news of shocking antisemitic incidents emerged from Western Europe. French Jews were stunned after a 12-year-old girl told police that three 12-to-14-year-olds raped her in the town of Courbevoie near Paris. Police described the crime as antisemitic in nature. In the United Kingdom, CCTV captured footage of a man attempting to kidnap Jewish children while their father pushed them in a stroller. In Belgium, a statue commemorating Belgian resistance fighters who fought against Nazis deporting Jews to Auschwitz had a swastika and other white supremacist logos spray-painted on it.

In Eastern Europe, Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko claimed that individuals suspected of corruption in Belarus, some of whom are reportedly Jewish, had “assumed a special privileged status.”

In the Middle East, Iranian Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and Tehran regime-backed terrorists espoused support for the destruction of Israel and attacks against Jews. Khamenei tweeted “death to Israel” seven times, and Ahmad Abd Al-Hadi, the representative of Hamas in Lebanon, vowed during an interview, “We would do [the October 7 attack] again!” 

This week’s Global Antisemitism Report highlights 132 new incidents, categorized as follows: 59 (44.7%) as anti-Israel or anti-Zionist manifestations of antisemitism, 56 (42.4%) as unattributable, 12 (9.1%) as Islamist, 5 (3.8%) as classical antisemitism, and 0 (0%) as Holocaust minimization and distortion.