According to ‘The Montreal Gazette’ – which is also published in ‘The National Post’ – there has been a so-called ‘hate crime’ in the French Canadian city of Montreal. This has to do with a historic synagogue on Bagg Street in Plateau-Mont-Royal, Montreal that is commonly referred to as the ‘Bagg Street Shul’ but whose actual name is Congregation Temple Solomon.
To quote ‘The Monteal Gazette’:
‘The son of a Holocaust survivor, Sam Sheraton thought of 1930s Germany when he first saw the antisemitic desecration of the historic Bagg Street Synagogue in Plateau-Mont-Royal.
Vandals spray-painted multiple black swastikas on the front of the 102-year-old synagogue over the weekend, including the glass on the front door.
For Sheraton, whose Hungarian-born mother survived the Auschwitz concentration camp, the defaced glass recalled Kristallnacht, a wave of anti-Jewish violence in 1938 that marked the beginning of the Holocaust.
“The Nazis went around breaking all the glass, and painting all the synagogues with swastikas, so it’s very, very symbolic,” said Sheraton, one of about 20 people who attend service at the synagogue.
The swastikas were discovered Monday morning by synagogue president Michael Kaplan.
“I interpreted it as being the work of a beanbag with a spray can. An antisemitic low-life, someone with not too much between the ears — nothing more than that,” he said.’
In summary the Bagg Street Shul had black swastikas spray painted on it and for the sake of transparency you can see this on the photos published of the graffiti:
Now obviously this isn’t entirely a hoax, but let’s do some critical thinking shall we?
Firstly buried in the text of the CBC article on the graffiti is synagogue president Michael Kaplan’s actual opinion which is simply left out by ‘The Montreal Gazette’, ‘The National Post’ as well as ‘The Jewish Daily Forward’ articles.
We read that:
‘Though offensive, this particular vandalism is getting blown out of proportion, Kaplan said. He compared the spray-painted swastika to illegal graffiti on the side of the building or the trash left on the building's front steps.’
And Corey Fleischer of ‘Erasing Hate’ further testified that:
‘"The season is starting for graffiti so it's starting to pop up more," Fleischer said.’
So despite the kvetching of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, the Anti-Defamation League and its Canadian subsidiary B’nai Brith Canada as well as the invoking of the ‘Holocaust’ via the ‘Holocaust Survivor’ Sam Sheraton. The synagogue’s president Michael Kaplan and Corey Fleischer seem remarkably unconcerned about it and just see it as typical graffiti that they deal with on a regular basis.
The reason for this is buried on the Bagg Street Shul’s website when we read how:
‘The building, beneficiary of a vigorous programme of renovation and renewal that began in the fall of 2009 and continues unabated today, is sparkling clean, compliant with all municipal codes and insurance regulations, and more beautiful than ever. There are new light fixtures, new kitchens, new furnishings. The garden in front, previously the neighborhood dump, in the summertime lifts the heart.’
This confirms Kaplan’s testimony that significant littering, the illegal dumping of waste and illegal graffiti is common on/in and around the Bagg Street Shul and also explains why he is relatively relaxed about it and also explains Fleischer’s similarly indifferent attitude. It also demonstrates the massive disconnect between - for lack of a better term - ‘professional jews’ and regular jews with the latter more inclined to see the context where-as the ‘professional jews’ shriek about ‘rising anti-Semitism’ in Canada and seek both relevance and increased funding on that basis.
Secondly, we have to consider the possibility this is a jew-on-jew bit of graffiti – for example a similar incident with black swastikas spraypainted on the doors of a Conservative Synagogue by Orthodox jews is mentioned by Alan Dershowitz in his book ‘The Vanishing American Jew’ – or is a deliberate hoax committed by one or more jews.
The former seems unlikely since the Bagg Street Shul is an Orthodox synagogue and is viewed as a ‘museum-in-waiting’ by what remains of the local jewish population and only has an ‘active’ congregation of a mere 20 which is barely at the level of required minyan (i.e. 10 jews) for services to be performed and all the other synagogues in the area have long since closed.
The latter possibility is far more likely given that if you but look at the photos of the graffiti the ‘pretty canopy over the front door’ is in a state of significant and obvious disrepair, the Bagg Street Shul was heavily renovated back in 1998 by the Government of Quebec but has no source of income other than voluntary donations and government grants which are obviously not very forthcoming at present while the community is so tiny that the Bagg Street Shul doesn’t even charge membership dues or fund raise any more because it simply can’t afford to do so.
In other words: the Bagg Street Shul has no money and needs a significant injection of cash.
How is a barely used jewish institution to get cash in this day and age?
Anti-Semitism.
As I have stated before governments won’t fund jewish institutions just because they are jewish – and jews tend to be too cheap to fund their own institutions unless forced as a general rule of thumb - but they will if there is a ‘doubt’ about security. To give an example; the Adath Israel Synagogue in Toronto getting a whopping ‘$95,112 for security upgrades under the federal Security Infrastructure Program (SIP)’ in August 2019 .
It wouldn’t be unreasonable to argue that the Bagg Street Shul has tried to tap into the same source of government funding in order to conduct renovations to its façade and sure up its finances for the next few years. However what mitigates against this is synagogue president Michael Kaplan’s lack of hysterics about the graffiti and suggests instead that this isn’t likely to be yet another a case of ‘jewish lightning’ but rather a case of the misrepresentation of common place vandalism towards a largely unused synagogue as being a ‘Nazi conspiracy’ to up the ‘anti-Semitism’ statistics published by ‘jewish defence’ organizations like B’nai Brith Canada and by so doing ‘make the case’ for more donations and government funding to further bloat their already ridiculous financing.
At the end of the day, I suspect the loser in all this will be the Bagg Street Shul since B’nai Brith Canada care much less about its existence and condition and much more about how much money they can wring from the Canadian taxpayers to ‘combat anti-Semitism’.