The violence, including a deadly attack at a Hanukkah celebration in Australia, continued a spike that began following the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attack and Israel’s subsequent war in Gaza, the report’s authors said.
“The data raise concern that a high level of antisemitic incidents is becoming a normalized reality,” said Uriya Shavit, the report's chief editor.
Deadly antisemitic attacks were recorded on three continents. Fifteen people were killed at the holiday event at Sydney’s Bondi Beach in December. There were additional deaths in two antisemitic attacks in the U.S. in Washington, D.C., and Colorado; and in Britain, two people were killed at a Manchester synagogue on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar.
Each year, Tel Aviv University’s Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry and the Irwin Cotler Institute for Democracy, Human Rights and Justice releases the report about antisemitism ahead of Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day.
The day marks a national memorial for the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust, which begins Monday evening.
The new report also tracked an increase in antisemitic attacks that resulted in physical harm, including beatings and stone throwing.
It found that 2025 was the deadliest year for antisemitic attacks since 1994, when the bombing of a Jewish community center in Argentina killed 85 people and wounded more than 300. An Argentine court has blamed Iran and its Hezbollah proxy for the attack.
According to the report, there was a moderate increase in the overall number of antisemitic incidents last year compared with 2024, but that total represents a huge jump from 2022, before the war in Gaza. The report tracks incidents that range from physical attacks and vandalism to verbal threats and harassment on social media.
“The peak in the number of incidents was recorded in the immediate aftermath of the Oct. 7 attack, after which we began to see a downward trend — but unfortunately, that trend did not continue in 2025,” Shavit said.
In the United Kingdom, there were 3,700 antisemitic incidents in 2025, up from 3,556 in 2024. In Canada, the number of incidents grew from 6,219 in 2024 to 6,800 in 2025, a number more than three times higher than in 2022.
The report found that even after the Gaza ceasefire took effect last October, antisemitic incidents continued to rise from the same period during the previous year. In Australia, there were 588 antisemitic incidents between October and December 2025, up from 492 during the same period in 2024. There were a total of 472 antisemitic incidents across Australia during all of 2022.
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If you can't deny it, distort it!:
Holocaust distortion is on the rise. It does not always appear as outright denial of the murder of six million Jews. Increasingly, it takes subtler forms — reshaping the historical record in ways that erode understanding of what happened and why. Beyond the dangerous manifestations of rewriting the Holocaust itself, there are also increasing efforts to distort its aftermath. The story of the hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees who survived the war only to remain stateless is too often overlooked, minimized, or reframed in ways that obscure their plight. Few examples illustrate this more clearly than the history of the refugee ships that carried Holocaust survivors toward British-mandated Palestine in the years immediately after the Second World War.
(Sidebar: it is fruit of a poisonous tree trying to find its way to acceptability.)
The Nuremberg trials of 1945–46 exposed the full horror of Nazi crimes against the Jews of Europe. As the world learned the scale of the genocide, one might have expected that the survivors who emerged from the devastation would quickly find refuge.
But that was not the case.
By 1947, at least 200,000 Jews remained homeless and stateless across Europe, many confined to displaced persons camps. They were survivors of ghettos, camps, and hiding. Many had lost entire families. Returning home was often impossible; communities had been destroyed and antisemitism remained widespread. Liberation had come, but security and belonging had not.
For many of these survivors, the possibility of rebuilding their lives in the historic homeland of the Jewish people offered a rare glimmer of hope. Their aim was simple: to live normal lives in peace after the immense tragedy they had endured.
That hope became world famous through the story of the ship Exodus 1947 . On July 11 of that year, more than 4,500 Jewish refugees boarded the overcrowded vessel in Sète, France, hoping to reach Palestine despite British restrictions on Jewish immigration. A week later, British naval vessels rammed and boarded the ship. The passengers were ultimately deported back to Europe and sent to displaced persons camps in Germany — two years after the war’s end.
Exodus was only one of dozens of ships carrying Jewish refugees toward British-mandated Palestine. My parents were on another.
In May 1947, my parents, Berek and Bella, boarded a ship called the Pan York , later renamed Komemiyut, the Hebrew word for sovereignty. They had met in a displaced persons camp in Poland after the war. My mother had survived Auschwitz; both had lost most of their families in the Holocaust. Among the passengers was my sister Sara, then 18 months old.
Like thousands of other survivors, they were trying to rebuild their lives. They sailed from Marseille toward Haifa, determined to escape the uncertainty of Europe.
The British intercepted the ship before it could reach port. The passengers were subsequently sent to internment camps near Famagusta in Cyprus, where thousands of Jewish refugees were detained behind barbed wire. Only in 1948 were many of them, including my parents and my sister, finally allowed to sail to Haifa.
This story matters because it reminds us what happened to Jewish survivors after liberation. The war had ended, but for many Jews the nightmare was not over. They had survived extermination only to face statelessness, confinement, and closed borders. The refugee ships were not symbols of ideology or power. They were vessels of human desperation, carrying people who had nowhere else to go.
Yet public understanding of that history is fading.
Recent Canadian survey data reveal a striking misconception: large numbers of Canadians believe the country was open to Jewish refugees during the Second World War. Nearly half of respondents think Canada welcomed them.
The historical record tells a different story. Canada’s response to Jewish refugees during the Holocaust years was among the most restrictive in the Western world — a policy later summarized by the haunting phrase “None is too many” (the title of the book by Irving Abella and Harold Troper that documented the government restrictions).
(Sidebar: worse than that.)
It was because so few countries opened their doors that ships like the Exodus and the Pan York existed in the first place.
For my parents and for thousands like them, the journey was never about politics. It was about survival after the destruction of their families and communities. They boarded overcrowded ships because the world had left them with nowhere else to go. To forget that — or to recast their story in ways that blur the reality of their suffering — is to deepen the distortion of Holocaust memory itself.
In a troubling twist of historical revisionism, some now portray those same refugees — people who had just survived ghettos and death camps — as aggressors who settled on someone else’s land. In reality, they were survivors of an unimaginable catastrophe who sought to rebuild their lives and live peacefully alongside others. Yet from the beginning there were too many who refused to accept the possibility of coexistence. Eight decades later, those refugees are sometimes depicted as if the mere act of seeking refuge and rebuilding their lives constituted wrongdoing.
The distortion does not stop there. Today’s antisemites even tell the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors to “go back to Poland” — as if Jewish refugees and their descendants remain perpetual outsiders wherever they live, made to feel unwelcome by some in the place they call home.
If we are serious about preserving the memory of the Holocaust, we must also defend the truth about what happened to those who survived it. The refugees of the Exodus, the Pan York, and dozens of other ships were not symbols or abstractions. They were survivors — people who had endured the destruction of their families and communities and who sought, after the darkest chapter in Jewish history, the simple chance to rebuild their lives in peace.
But the West is not serious about remembering the Holocaust or any other genocide.
The Narrative must be maintained.
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