A Canadian kosher restaurant was vandalized on Feb. 1 with the word “Jew” being spray-painted on it.
The Winnipeg restaurant, BerMax Caffe and Bistro, is run by Orthodox Jews and serves Italian and Middle Eastern food. The vandalism is being investigated as a hate crime and is the second time in recent weeks that the restaurant has been vandalized with anti-Semitic graffiti.
“Just less than a week ago, we commemorated the International Holocaust Day: A day where no matter your background, we say, ‘never again, never again, never again,’” BerMax Caffe owner Maxim Berent told Canadian Broadcast Corp. in an email. “Yet, it is 2019 and we are still not educated on our past and incidents of such kind bring harm our Canadian society.”
Berent also told Canadian Jewish News that the prior instance of graffiti was too ambiguous to determine its meaning, but this instance is particularly troubling because of the clear anti-Semitic overtones in the graffiti.
“We aren’t sure who did this, but it is a very scary thing,” Berent said.
According to B’nai Brith, there was a 107 percent increase of anti-Semitic incidents from 2016 to 2017 in Canada.
