While police in cities across Canada investigate reports of bomb threats sent to Jewish organizations, Vancouver police say they’re “unaware of anything” in the city.
This is despite B’nai Brith telling 1130 NewsRadio that a number of locations in B.C., including 13 in Vancouver, were also targeted. The threat reportedly came in via “one mass email” from an anonymous sender.
“To the best of my knowledge, all the targeted organizations, institutions across the country received the exact same email. It was one mass email to dozens of Jewish institutions across the country and to the hospitals in the Ottawa area,” Richard Robertson, director of research and advocacy, B’nai Brith Canada, said in an interview.
Initially, the group did not share which locations specifically received threats. However, a follow up email noted more than a dozen facilities and organizations in the province, including over a dozen in Vancouver and two in Richmond. Robertson says the delay was due to the “evolving situation,” adding the group had to “go through the email to locate” all of the institutions.
Robertson says B’nai Brith “reached out immediately to the police departments where we have physical offices at B’nai Brith, as is our policy and procedure.”
“And we made local law enforcement here aware of the threat and the gravity of the threat. And the institutions across the country, they took down all this information, and it’s our understanding that they are going to be liaising with or working with law enforcement acorss the country,” he explaiend.
However, as of 8:45 a.m., the VPD said it had not “heard anything.”
“I’m not aware of anything….I haven’t heard anything about this here,” VPD Const. Tania Visintin said in an email to 1130.
We have reached out to the Richmond RCMP and BC RCMP for comment.
B’nai Brith Canada said previously that more than 100 Jewish institutions received an email at 5 a.m. ET threatening explosions, including at their offices in Toronto and Montreal.
“This is not just an attack on our safety — it’s an attack on the fabric of Canadian society,” B’nai Brith wrote on X.
Synagogues, Jewish community centres, and hospitals in Toronto, Montreal, and Ottawa are among those which confirmed they have received the threat.
“Given the scope of the institutions targeted from coast to coast, Jewish institutions, as well as hospitals and medical facilities in the Ottawa area, I think that we can say that the intention of whoever is responsible for this threat was to intimidate and harass the Jewish community. That’s made very clear by the sheer number of Jewish institutions across the country that were the focus and the target of this threat,” said Robertson.
He says the Jewish community is increasingly being targeted by hate, adding it’s up to “stakeholders from all levels” to stand up.
–With files from Dean Recksiedler