Aedan O’Connor: I fled Toronto’s antisemitism for a life of Jewish pride in Miami

Pictured is the article's author, Aedan O'Connor, during her batmiztvah at Holy Blossom Temple, in Toronto. Photo used with permission of Aedan O'Connor.

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Sitting in a cafe in Miami, I check my phone. I see a friend has sent me a video of my childhood synagogue, Holy Blossom Temple, in Toronto, at Passover. That’s where I grew up, going to services, attending Hebrew school, and proudly chanting from the Torah as a Bat Mitzvah as a Jewish-Canadian girl. The video showed what, sadly, is necessary to celebrate Passover in Toronto — no fewer than eight police vehicles, including a K-9 unit and two SWAT teams.

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I am then interrupted, hearing a thick Cuban accent complimenting my necklace, an enormous Star of David, the Jewish star.

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The juxtaposition of the two realities makes me see, in 2026, that was life in Toronto, and this is life in Miami. Moving to Florida was the best decision of my life.

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I was born in 1996 in the seemingly idyllic Toronto. Being Jewish then was neither stigmatized nor venerated. My parents gave me an intentionally non-Jewish name to obscure my Judaism, as they hoped it would protect me if widespread antisemitism ever returned.

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There were occasional incidents of bigotry, some uncomfortable comments about Jews made by members of a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant family that married into my own. I once heard “Jew” used as a pejorative verb, and some of my friends told me about incidents where coins were thrown at them at school, evoking the hateful “money-hungry Jew” stereotype. But these were not frequent incidents. Perhaps through ignorance, I would have described antisemitism as a relative non-issue in Toronto, until my university days.

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At Ryerson University (later changed to Toronto Metropolitan University or TMU), my friend led a motion at the Ryerson Student Union meeting to establish a Holocaust education week. The Student Union President, Obaid Ullah, led a protest walkout so the meeting would lose quorum, getting members of the Muslim Students’ Association and Students for Justice in Palestine to leave. Jewish students in the meeting were harassed, maligned and threatened into leaving. The quorum was lost, so the motion could not pass.

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The author, Aedan O’Connor, at TMU (formerly Ryerson) circa 2016.

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Armed with the confidence that outside the Canadian university milieu, people tended to support Holocaust education, I spent all that night reaching out to reporters and managed to help get the story out. A (now defunct) neo-Nazi online publication doxed my name and photo and said I ought to be made into a lampshade, evoking what was done with the skin of some Holocaust victims.

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Ryerson University, perhaps mortified or perhaps anxious to maintain donor relations, quickly instituted the Holocaust education week and proclaimed their support of the Jewish community. But the student union president was not fired nor forced to resign.

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Months later, it came out that one of Ryerson’s teaching assistants, Ayman Elkasrawy, who was also a part-time imam, preached ‘Death to Jews’ in his sermons. A friend and I printed out posters with his face and with his quotes, then plastered them around the school. Ryerson security took them down, asserting that they were too controversial. Fresh off Ryerson’s previous Jew-hatred scandal, Elkasrawy was promptly terminated by the university.