Chief heart surgeon at Jewish General Hospital quits province amid rising antisemitism in Montreal

Dr. Emmanuel Moss, chief of cardiac surgery at the Jewish General Hospital, plans to move to Atlanta in September. (Source: Institut de cardiologie de Montréal)

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The chief of cardiac surgery at the Jewish General Hospital has tendered his resignation and plans to move to Atlanta in September, citing rising antisemitism in Montreal and worsening problems with the province’s health-care system, The Gazette can reveal.

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Dr. Emmanuel Moss, who has worked at the Jewish General for the past 10 years, has already informed his patients and his synagogue of his imminent move to the United States. Moss’s departure from Montreal marks the second high-profile Montreal Jew — after Concordia University professor Gad Saad — to decide this spring to quit the city amid a sharp increase in documented antisemitic incidents in the past three years.

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During a May 12 appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, Saad announced he accepted a post at the University of Mississippi, where he had already worked as a scholar during a two-year leave of absence from Concordia. He spoke of death threats he received while at Concordia, saying, “I’m now leaving in large part because it became difficult for me, if not impossible, to be a high-profile Jewish professor who supports the right of Israel to exist.”

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In a post on social media platform X linked to The Gazette’s article about his departure, Saad nonetheless thanked Concordia “for the complete freedom that I was granted to pursue any research stream and any professional endeavour that I desired.”

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Reached by phone, Moss declined to give an interview or to explain his reasons for leaving Montreal. But sources close to Moss confirmed that he and his family had grown disillusioned with growing antisemitism in Montreal and what they viewed as a failure by authorities to crack down on incidents of Jew hatred — from physical assaults on Jews to vandalism of Jewish-owned businesses and the firebombing of synagogue entrances, as well as the firing of bullets at a yeshiva.

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Sources noted Moss was particularly offended by images circulating last week of anti-Zionist protesters, some of them masked, staging the mock hanging of the effigy of a man wearing a kippah on his head. That effigy appeared to depict Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.

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