2025 toll of Diaspora Jews killed in antisemitic attacks was highest in three decades

"The year 2025 saw an alarming surge in violent attacks against Jews in a year when more Diaspora Jews were murdered in antisemitic incidents than in any other year in the previous three decades, a report published Monday by Tel Aviv University said.

While total counts of antisemitic activity, including vandalism, verbal threats, and harassment, fell in many countries during 2025 compared to 2024, violent incidents, such as beatings or stone-throwing, became more commonplace, according to the annual report on antisemitism in the world published by TAU’s Center for the Study of Contemporary European Jewry and the Irwin Cotler Institute for Democracy, Human Rights and Justice.

In every Western country, the total number of antisemitic incidents remained dozens of percentage points higher than in 2022, the year preceding the October 7, 2023, massacre that sparked the war in Gaza, the report noted.

Twenty Jews were murdered in four incidents across three continents during the year as Jew hatred became a ‘normalized reality,’ said Prof. Uriya Shavit, the study’s editor-in-chief.

The last year that more Jews were killed in the diaspora was 1994, when a suicide bomber drove a bomb-laden van into the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina building in Argentina, killing 85 people and injuring hundreds more.

Australia and Canada saw their highest yearly numbers of antisemitic incidents ever. ‘The steep increase in the number of cases of severe violence is not surprising,’ Shavit said. ‘The rule that applies to all types of crime applies here as well: when law-enforcement authorities are indifferent to small crimes, the result is big crimes.’

Part of the reason it is so difficult to prevent antisemitic attacks is that many antisemitic attacks are carried out by ‘lone wolf’ attackers who are not operating within any organizational framework, a separate study published alongside the report found.

The TAU report is based on data originating from dozens of law-enforcement authorities around the world, as well as specialized commissions, Jewish communities, reports in the media, and interviews and fieldwork by the researchers, it said.

Increasing violence

Australia had some of the most alarming data, the report found, with a total of 1,750 attacks during 2025, compared to 1,727 in 2024, culminating in the Hanukkah massacre at Bondi Beach in which 15 Jews were murdered. This compares with 1,200 incidents in 2023 and 472 in 2022. Attacks continued to rise even after Israel and Hamas agreed to a ceasefire in October: There were 588 incidents recorded in October–December 2025, compared to 492 in the same period of 2024, the study said.

In Canada, the total number of incidents grew from 6,219 in 2024 to 6,800 in 2025, more than three times the number in 2022. The year’s most serious physical assaults included the August 27 stabbing of a Jewish woman in her seventies while she was shopping at an Ottawa grocery store, and the August 8 beating of a 32-year-old Hasidic Jewish father in front of his children in a park in Montreal. There were also numerous attacks on synagogues.

In the United States, reported incidents varied across regions. In New York, the largest Jewish city in the world, the number of incidents declined from 344 in 2024 to 324 in 2025. Los Angeles, home to the country’s second-largest Jewish population, was the only major city in the US unable to produce data on anti-Jewish hate crimes for the second straight year. The worst attacks of the year included the May 21, 2025, killing of two Israeli Embassy staff members, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, DC, and the killing of Karen Diamond on June 1 in Boulder, Colorado, after a man shouting ‘Free Palestine’ threw incendiary devices at participants in a pro-Israel march.

In Britain, the total number of incidents increased from 3,556 in 2024 to 3,700 in 2025, compared with 4,298 in 2023 and 1,662 in 2022. Four incidents of extreme violence were recorded during the year, the most grievous being the October 2025 terror attack on the Heaton Park Synagogue in Manchester on Yom Kippur in which two people were killed. As in Australia, a rise in incidents was recorded post-ceasefire, from 741 in October-December 2024 to 1,078 in the parallel period of 2025..."