‘Community support walk’ held in Toronto for bullied Jewish student

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An Israeli mother in Toronto says two of her children have experienced repeated bullying and antisemitic threats at a local school, and the Toronto District School Board has failed to take adequate action.

Adi Cohen and her husband have four children, in grades 8, 5, and 3 and the youngest is in senior kindergarten.

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Cohen said her two older children have been the subject of repeated bullying at North York’s Faywood Arts-Based Curriculum School, in incidents that predate Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel but have escalated since then.

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She said there have been death threats against her children, and she has filed three police reports following what she describes as a failure on the school’s part to create a safe environment for Jewish students.

The incidents prompted a “community support walk” on Friday morning, at Cohen and her husband’s request, allowing her son to safely walk to school.

In one incident, Cohen said her second oldest child was targeted when his older brother was at lunch and a group of students uttered death threats and told him his older brother wasn’t there to protect him.

“They told him, we need to kill you. They started shoving and kicking him. And he was really vulnerable and by himself in that situation, the vice principal who was outside in the playground, she was standing probably far away, so she couldn’t hear what was transpiring, but when it started to become physical, she went to defuse the situation. And when my son told her, ‘Can I please share with you what happened?’ She told him ‘I don’t have time for this’,” Cohen said.

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Cohen said her oldest child later approached the group after learning what happened and it resulted in a physical altercation.

Cohen said she and her husband, who are Israeli doctors who came to Canada in July 2022 on a fellowship, were only made aware of the most recent incidents when they returned home from work, around 6 p.m., and their children explained what happened.

“We were at a bit of loss. But that same evening, a parent knocked on our door saying, ‘I’ve heard so and so happened from my child. I want to just make sure that you’re all OK,” she said, adding that their experience is just one of many similar incidents that Jewish students have faced.

After attending the school the following day to speak with the vice principal and principal, Cohen said an investigation was launched and later concluded that “comments were made on both sides.”

Cohen said when she pressed for details about what her son said, she was told her son told the group to “go back to their homeland.” But her son denies that accusation, stating he said “go to your room lunch.”

“He has a pretty heavy accent,” she said. “And they took the aggressors’ words for what happened without even asking and the aggressors denied everything that happened.”

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Cohen said the investigation was reopened following another meeting with parents and representatives of the TDSB. She said she was told by another principal that the second investigation found that the incidents happened as her son described them, but she has no idea if the other children involved faced any consequences for their actions due to privacy laws.

In another incident, Cohen said her son was bullied on video and the video was shared among students on social media. She said a substitute teacher did little to intervene and eventually her son was provoked into trying to grab the phone away from the other students.

“The school is doing nothing, the teacher was doing nothing, they just let it happen. At some point, he got so frustrated, he tried to physically take the phone away and then they wanted to suspend him for violence,” she said.

Cohen said in the latest incident, which happened earlier this week, students threw sticks, stones and a water bottle at her son as he walked to school. Cohen said she has filed a police report, her third, about the incident.

In addition to death threats, she said her son has been told by other students that they will “do to him what Hamas did to Israel.”

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Ahead of Friday’s support walk, which Cohen said was organized via a community WhatsApp group, a flyer was circulated to garner support.

It reads, in part, “Our community must act. If school can’t keep our kids safe, we will.” The flyer also urged “no megaphones, no flags, this is about our children’s safety.”

Cohen said the walk, and the support offered by other families, was “very helpful.”

“I do believe that he feels that he’s not alone,” she said. “And it gives him the courage and the strength to keep on standing up for himself and for others.”

She adds that the family will soon be returning to Israel, and with about a month left in the school year, she just wants her “child to be safe.”

“They need to do something,” she said of the school. “They’re doing literally nothing. They say they’re doing stuff but nobody knows what they’re doing.”

A request for comment to the TDSB was not returned by deadline.

Cohen said other students at the school are “terrified” and families have thanked her for speaking out about what’s happening.

“I just need this to stop,” she said. “I need to know that my son is going to school and that he’s safe and that he’s been taken care of. And that I won’t get a phone call from the hospital saying something happened.”

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