The night they came for Jews in Belleville

Things were running a bit late.

When the shooting started, when the bullets were hitting the beautiful old stained glass windows on one side of the Sons of Jacob synagogue, the people - about two dozen of them - were already inside. The congregants were just outside the sanctuary, getting ready to go in for Yom Kippur services.

Fatefully, they weren’t in the sanctuary yet. Things had been running a bit late. Had that not been so, Rabbi Oded Peles said, a bullet would have hit right where he was supposed to be standing in the sanctuary. Beside the beautiful old stained glass windows, under a Canadian flag.

He’s a slender man, with friendly eyes and a bit of an Israeli accent, which is where he was born. When he shakes your hand, he does not let go. He looks around, where his tired congregants are waiting to be interviewed by Belleville police officers.

“Coming from Israel,” he says, “I am used to rockets and missiles coming from Gaza, coming from Iran. But here?” He shakes his head.

Yes, here. Here, in Belleville, which actually calls itself the Friendly City. Until Sunday night, when a twenty-something madman showed up in a truck with a rifle and started shooting, the big news in Belleville was about fixing up County Road 49, or the latest on municipal elections.

But not this. Not this. Not someone coming to hunt Belleville Jews when they were at prayer, when they were at their most vulnerable. Rabbi Peles watches them, quietly. Then he starts speaking about what his father - “my dear Dad,” he says, who is a survivor of the Bergen Belsen Nazi concentration camp - used to say to him.

“Why do people want to kill me, since I was five years old?” his father would say to him. “What have I done wrong? Throughout history, people have tried to kill us. Why? Why?”

Why, indeed. The Rabbi pauses and looks around. Not all of Canada is here at the Belleville police headquarters on Sidney Street late on this Sunday night, but Rabbi Peles seems to be addressing every Canadian. “People need to wake up,” he says. “We need to make this world into a better world.”

The congregants mill about, waiting to be interviewed. All of them have the same story to tell police, more or less. They were about start services, which would have seen them enter the sanctuary, and take out the Torah scrolls, which is the Bible. There were grandparents there, parents, kids.

Then, there was a commotion outside the walls of Sons of Jacob. It sounded, a few said, like someone was trying to kick in the doors at the synagogue. And then the shooting started. Over and over and over, for what seemed like forever - but what was just two or three minutes. Big gun sounds, and then the sound of a smaller-calibre gun, perhaps. This, they thought, was the single police officer who had been there on Sunday night. To protect them.  Their hero, they said.

Said one congregant, Irina: “We all were inside the synagogue. Just starting to go to our seats to start the service. We were approximately 10 minutes late for the start - and I believe that saved the Rabbi’s life because the bullets that came through the window hit the spot where he would usually stand during that part of the service.” The congregant gives thanks for the presence of the Belleville police officer who risked his life to save them.

There are questions. Why would people going to pray in Canada need an armed police officer is one of the questions, of course. But Jews, in Canada in 2026, do. A firebombing at a synagogue in Vancouver. A Montreal synagogue firebombed. A school for little Jewish kids in Toronto shot up once, twice, three times.  It’s been going on for years, now, and Canada is considered to have one of the worst antisemitism problems in the civilized world.

Our politicians, meanwhile, post the usual thoughts and prayers on social media, signifying nothing. All of them did that, last night, and the congregants of Sons of Jacob sat in chairs at the police station, looking at their devices, shaking their heads in disgust.

Someone even noted that Toronto mayor Olivia Chow, who has presided over one of the biggest explosions in antisemitism in the world, actually tweeted about the attack on Belleville Jews when she was literally in New York City - meeting with that city’s pro-Intifada mayor, whose wife had famously reposted statements celebrating the slaughter of Jews in Israel on October 7, 2023. Chow said her “thoughts” with Belleville Jews.

CBC, meanwhile, reported that shots were fired “near” Sons of Jacob synagogue - like it was all a coincidence. But it wasn’t “near” the synagogue, CBC, someone said. It was bullets fired at the synagogue. Right at it. When Jews were inside it.

One woman stood by a wall, her arms crossed. She was shaking with fury. “I am so, so angry,” she said. “I am so fed up with our so-called leaders. They do nothing. Nothing changes for us. It just gets worse.”

Some officers arrive with coffee and doughnuts from Tim Horton’s for the congregants - and the assembled congregants smile, a bit. They tell the bewildered police officers that their Yom Kippur fast was underway, and they cannot take anything but water. They thank the officers anyway.

Some of the congregants start talking about setting up a Go Fund Me page for the officer was shot, the one who saved them. There is talk of yet more fundraising to pay for extra security.  Rabbi Peles stands off to one side, comforting a tall boy with red hair, one who was there on Sunday night. The boy looks so, so sad.

After the shooting had stopped, the congregants of Sons of Jacob synagogue were all on or close to the floor, waiting for police to tell them they could come out, where a city bus would take them to the police station. They talked, they prayed. And then, someone just started to sing.  This is some of what they sang. Psalm 133.1, the Hinei Man Tov.

“Make a time of peace. Make peace for all of Israel…

How beautiful it is, for brothers and sisters to be together.”

Their singing can’t be heard outside, because there are too many sirens, now.