Happy New Year. A blessed year. A sweet year of peace.
This is what we wish for ourselves every year. The symbols of the holiday – the pomegranate, date, apple dipped in honey, and even the head of a fish – represent our desire for goodness, for ourselves and for the world.
Even the beet, a symbol of the traditional prayer that “all those who wish us harm should disappear,” expresses a hope that they disappear only from our lives and our surroundings, and perhaps even become our friends.
Yet alongside the holiday symbols and prayers for goodness, the signs of antisemitism and the evil closing in around us are also increasingly evident. And as we pray to our God for peace and redemption, with the same fervor, many are praying for the opposite.
The day before writing these words, I read in The Jerusalem Post about an antisemitic demonstration taking place in a Jewish neighborhood in Toronto, within the boundaries of the world’s fourth-largest Jewish community, after Israel, the United States, and France.
From the description, I understand that this was not really a “demonstration,” but rather a dress rehearsal for a violent torchlight march and an attack on the local Jews as symbols of civilization itself.
Call for violence against Jews
At the head of the procession was an academic and lecturer at several academic institutions in Ontario, equipped with a sound system and carrying a carefully structured lesson plan: first, antisemitic blood libels in the style of “Jews rape and eat children,” followed by direct threats of annihilation, and finally rhythmic chants of “Khazir Khazir al-Yahud” – a call for violence against Jews.
Anyone who thinks this is an extreme and isolated event is mistaken. There are several such events every day, in the squares and streets of cities around the world. Antisemitism is being shouted openly, and all too often it encounters a sympathetic local public and government policies that understand and accommodate it. Toronto is, in this case, a shop window displaying the world as a whole.
How did it happen that the “Overton window” of 2026 allows blood libels and calls for murder to become legitimate rhetoric in public discourse, while the local police do not arrest those taking part and remove them from the illuminated part of the world?
And can we even call the free world “enlightened” when it has become so fashionable and acceptable to wish for the destruction of a particular people, under the thin disguise of a demonstration for justice and morality?
There is much to think about this Rosh Hashanah regarding the future of Zionism as a global network, of which WIZO is a part. If in the past Israel was under threat while Jewish communities were relatively protected, the situation is slowly being reversed, exposing communities to dangers that only our parents’ generation can remember.
Dangers that will require us to stand together firmly, in anticipation of tectonic shifts in the map of the Jewish world and its presence across the globe. Every day’s news brings Israel closer to becoming a safe haven that saves lives.
There is still much work ahead of us, as a people and as a country, and the next generation will not be without its challenges. But for now, at least for a few days, the symbols of the holiday will occupy our thoughts.
With their help, prayers for the good of a small people will overcome the wishes for its destruction voiced by the multitudes who hate it; our wish that “our good deeds multiply like the pomegranate” will overcome the many pomegranate – like blood libels about our “evil deeds”; and the holiday candles will symbolize and remind us of our hopes for a good year, a blessed year, a sweet year of peace – and, if possible, may all those who wish us harm disappear, and God forbid, may it not be we who disappear.
The writer is the chairperson of World WIZO.