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A profile of Canadian Jews who moved to Tulsa through the Tulsa Tomorrow program, seeking affordability, close-knit communities and greater security amid rising antisemitism in Canada. Michael Sachs and Joe Roberts represent the first two families to relocate through the initiative, which hosts Jewish families considering a move from larger cities.
Marsha Lederman is a Vancouver-based columnist for The Globe and Mail. Her latest book is October 7th: Searching for the Humanitarian Middle Michael Sachs pulled into the synagogue parking lot in his GMC Sierra Elevation, took off his Stetson and picked up his transparent tallit bag, containing his Jewish prayer shawl.
On his way into B’nai Emunah, also called “The Synagogue,” he fist-bumped the armed security guard, and once inside, replaced the cowboy hat with a kippa. It was the second day of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and the Tulsa synagogue service was a musical affair, led by clergy wearing headset mics, along with musicians on flute, mandolin, double bass and keyboards. And in the rabbi’s hands, were those? – yes, drumsticks.
A drum kit was set up next to his lectern. The previous day, the congregation sang Dolly Parton’s Clear Blue Morning . When we returned to the truck after services and a community lunch, the dashboard read 104 degrees. Not exactly the High Holy Days weather Canadian Jews are used to, I joked.
It’s newish to Mr. Sachs too, who, just over a year ago, decamped here from Canada, where he had lived for nearly 30 years, most recently leading the Jewish National Fund of Canada’s Pacific Region in Vancouver.
“Jews have been unfortunately targeted in Canada for three years now,” said Mr. Sachs, who is now senior director for the Jewish Federation of Tulsa, or Jewish Tulsa, as it’s known. At synagogue sitting next to him was another transplant from Canada, Joe Roberts. The men represent the first and second families to have moved here from Canada after participating in a program called Tulsa Tomorrow.
The initiative, which launched in 2017, flies Jews into town to show them what Tulsa has to offer. The target is bigger-city Jews looking for a more affordable, tight-knit community – maybe from New York or nearby Dallas. But over the last year something else has happened: a surge of inquiries from Canadians who want to escape the rising antisemitism they feel has gone unchecked. They learn that things are different in Tulsa.
“I never have any concern about wearing a Mogen David here, I don’t worry about people wearing a kippa on the street,” said Mr. Roberts, Jewish Tulsa’s executive director. “You don’t have to be on guard. ” After the service, I met Jeremy Freedman, a retired lawyer and finance professional visiting from Toronto. His wife Judith is from Tulsa; they met in this very synagogue at a wedding 36 years ago.
They are also thinking about leaving Canada – probably for Florida, where they already spend their winters. He told me that “literally every time we are with friends, the topic is how do you know when it’s time to leave? ” They wonder if these are the kinds of conversations their grandparents or great-grandparents had in 1930s Germany.
“We’re sure a lot of people said, ‘This will pass. These are our neighbours, these are our friends. This is just a phase, things will get better. ’” “Some people left and some people decided to stay.
And we know how that turned out. ” That same weekend, back home in Ontario, Jewish students at Wilfrid Laurier University returned to residence after Rosh Hashanah to find mezuzahs on their doorposts smashed and torn down . One week later, on Erev Yom Kippur, the holiest night on the Jewish calendar, a man opened fire outside the Sons of Jacob synagogue in Belleville, Ont.
A chilling video released by police captured what he screamed at the officer he shot: “You are going to die for the Jews. ” Everywhere, life has changed for Jews since Oct. 7, 2023. Canada has been no exception - or, even, exceptional. At a Toronto mayoral forum on antisemitism – which incumbent Olivia Chow declined to attend – candidate Brad Bradford said “Toronto is now in the race for being one of the most antisemitic cities in the world.
” Canadian Jews have experienced it in schools , universities and workplaces, including the federal civil service.
“Antisemitism in Canada has reached an inflection point,” declared an April 2026 report of the Standing Senate Committee on Human Rights. In a June speech , Prime Minster Mark Carney said “Canada’s civic compact is failing Jewish Canadians. ” The Canadian Jewish Barometer 2026 reported that “Canadian Jews are considerably more fearful of their position in Canadian society than they were in 2024 and believe that the situation will grow worse in the near future.
” Hate crimes against Jews in Canada have soared since the attacks by Hamas and Israel’s subsequent war on Gaza. Jews make up a tiny percentage of the Canadian population – just over 1 per cent. Yet in 2024, nearly 19 per cent of all reported hate crimes were motivated by antisemitism and 68 per cent of all religiously motivated hate crimes targeted Jews.
The federal government’s recent report on Campus Antisemitism and Student Experiences found that Canadian post-secondary students have faced insults, threats, graffiti, classroom hostility, exclusion and online abuse. One student shared that, during a lecture, a professor told the class that “Jews belong in Poland and need to go back. ” As a University of Alberta student told the Senate committee, Jewish students wonder whether Canada will remain a safe place for them in the future.
Some people are done enduring even the current climate and contemplate leaving.
“Almost every Jewish dinner table has had this conversation, whether for or against, in Canada since October 7th,” said Mr. Sachs. The Barometer found that 26 per cent of respondents agreed with this statement: “I have thought seriously about moving to another country or I have made plans to move to another country because of antisemitism in Canada. ” One in four.
“Jews are leaving Canada in droves” announced a headline on The Free Press this summer. The article followed attacks at two locations of the Jewish bakery, Kiva’s, in Toronto. This one really hit home; I often ate at the Bathurst St. and Steeles Ave. spot with my mother, who lived in a condo a few blocks away, and is now buried nearby. I mean, they all hit home.
But sometimes the proximity to my own life adds an extra hit, including the ongoing protests at Bathurst and Sheppard. I grew up in that neighbourhood; I used to get ice cream and Chinese food at the plaza on the corner. It’s blocks from the synagogues my parents’ devastated communities established after the Holocaust, Beth Radom and the Lodzer Centre. It has been unsettling, maddening, terrifying for Canadian Jews.
Disgusting. I could go on with the adjectives. But – droves? It’s impossible to find the data to support this – not because the pronouncement is necessarily inaccurate, but because it doesn’t exist.
Statistics Canada does not marry religion or ethnicity with departures and the U.S. Census Bureau doesn’t ask about religious affiliation. There have been a couple of high-profile defections, if I can use that term, from Canada to the U.S. that have caused a stir, including the decision by the outspoken author and thinker Gad Saad to move away from Concordia University in Montreal, which he has called “the most Jew-hating city in North America.
” Then Emmanuel Moss, the chief of cardiac surgery at Montreal’s Jewish General Hospital, left for Atlanta – not just because of antisemitism, but that made the decision less difficult than it should have been, wrote Dr. Moss in the Montreal Gazette.
“I have watched with growing alarm as incidents have multiplied and the response from authorities has fallen short. ” The Senate committee report notes that the medical community and academia have been areas of particular concern for Canadian Jews. Unpublished data from a 2024 survey by the Canadian Federation of Jewish Medical Associations found that 31 per cent of Jewish doctors across the country were considering leaving Canada.
This figure seems unrealistically high, but to lose even 5 per cent of Jewish doctors would be a tremendous blow for an already-fragile health-care system. Tulsa Tomorrow has fielded applications from more than 200 Canadian families in the past 10 months. On its last organized trip at the end of February, 48 of the 54 people were Canadian. There’s a trip planned for later this month.
All Canadians, except for two people.
“I would say 98 per cent of our applicant pool are Canadians right now,” Rebekah Kantor-Wunsch, the program’s sole employee, told me. Everyone comes with a story. Mr. Sachs says his son was Sieg Hieled by a classmate. Another student at his Richmond, B.C.
, public school told him, “I want to kill Israel. ” When his son said his mother is from Israel, the boy responded, “So I want to kill half of you. ” Mr. Roberts was visiting a skate park in Cobourg, Ont. , where he lived with his wife and two children, when he and his son encountered antisemitic graffiti.
Later, his son was trying on a new backpack for junior kindergarten.
“And it just hit me,” Mr. Roberts recalls. “I don’t know if we can stay here. I want this kid to be proud of who he is and grow up in a world where he feels empowered to be who he is. ” The cost of living is also a factor; the real estate here is shockingly affordable.
Both men have bought suburban houses with pools. For Mr. Sachs, the airy home backing onto a green space was a sweet trade from his family’s aging three-bedroom, one-and-a-half bath townhouse back in B.C. He arrived in town on July 3, 2025. The next night, he watched the Fourth of July fireworks from his new, large backyard.
It felt like a welcome, and a metaphor – light and celebration. Jessica and Justin Shulman are looking into leaving Ottawa, where both work in public education, for Tulsa. They have two children, 12 and 13. Their experience since Oct. 7 reflects that of many Canadian Jews: shock, betrayal, fear.
“I have legitimately asked people, ‘Would you hide us? ’” says Justin, a principal with the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board. In August 2025, not long after the National Holocaust Memorial in Ottawa was vandalized , an elderly Jewish woman was stabbed at a local grocery store in what police called a hate-motivated crime.
Then in February, Justin was visiting his mother at the Jewish long-term care home Hillel Lodge with his son when a man approached their car and said: “Fuck the Jews. ” “We have a very strong connection to Ottawa, yet we have come to the conclusion that we’d better have a plan B,” he told me during a recent interview alongside Jessica, a school psychologist.
“We need to know what options are out there because at some point, just like many of our ancestors throughout time, we will need to run from this. ” Shortly after the Hillel Lodge incident, the Shulmans spent spring break in Oklahoma, with Tulsa Tomorrow.
“We fell in love,” says Jessica. I know this might sound alarmist, this reflex to pick up stakes and run for our lives. It’s only the odd shooting, right? Along with vandalism and social shunning, sure.
A few threats. The examples pile up. Amid this turmoil, my own family’s history is sounding alarm bells. Before the Second World War, my maternal grandparents obtained visas to leave Poland for Palestine.
They, like many other persecuted Jews of Eastern Europe, dreamed of returning to their ancestral homeland. Zionists. They agonized, but ultimately decided not to go. They were murdered at Treblinka in August 1942, with their youngest son.
So when people say it’s time to get out, Canada is no longer safe for Jews, I can’t help but hear echoes of my own story. The roots of Tulsa Tomorrow are in David Finer’s family history. His father Joe’s family escaped Germany before the war, Joe enlisted in the U.S. army and returned on D-Day, where his perfect German landed him a position as a counterintelligence captain interrogating Nazis.
After the war, Joe eventually settled in Tulsa and set up a company with a business partner: a Holocaust survivor from Poland he helped in Germany after liberation. David Finer didn’t want to lose that Jewish community; young people were leaving for college and not returning. Jewish Tulsa says there are 7,500 Jews in its catchment, but only about 2,500 are known to the community. Tulsa’s metropolitan area population overall is over a million.
The program offers two heavily subsidized group trips per year . In the past, it has typically hosted one to five Canadians per year. This year, more than 100 Canadians will come through.
In addition to real estate and Jewish sites, the tours also show off local highlights, including a huge green space called Gathering Place , created by the George Kaiser Family Foundation. The Jewish philanthropist also backed another top Tulsa attraction, the Bob Dylan Center. Here, an early photo shows Dylan at 16, then still Bobby Zimmerman, at Wisconsin’s Herzl Camp, named for the father of Zionism, Theodor Herzl.
On another wall, a Dylan quote: “I try to live within that line between despondency and hope. ” In my head, while visiting, his lyrics played on repeat. How does it feel to be without a home? The songwriter’s collection ended up in Tulsa because of the Woodie Guthrie Center next door.
Outside, a giant mural of the folk icon includes his most famous lyric: “This land is your land. ” Another local must-see on the Tulsa Tomorrow itinerary is the Greenwood Rising museum. It tells the story of the neighbourhood often called Black Wall Street, and its destruction in a horrific race massacre in 1921 that killed as many as 300 people. This is what hate can do.
The incongruity of Tulsa as a flourishing Jewish community brings to mind Michael Chabon’s novel The Yiddish Policemen’s Union , in which the state of Israel collapsed in 1948 and Jews seek refuge in a safe haven created in Sitka, Alaska. But for someone who wants to escape Canada, the U.S. makes sense: it’s next door, they speak the same language, we are familiar with the culture.
Still, American streets and university campuses have also become hostile places for Jews – and politicians like New York mayor Zohran Mamdani and Michigan Democratic senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed have made some nervous. Some American Jews are also wondering if they should leave.
“I have spoken with many Jews who shared with me that they and their friends are exploring foreign citizenship,” New York rabbi Ammiel Hirsch said in his Yom Kippur sermon . Not to mention what’s happening more broadly during Trump 2.0: ICE raids, the censorship of journalists, medical and climate science denial, the setback of reproductive rights, the targeting of Canada. There are academics fleeing Donald Trump’s America for positions in Canada.
When I ask people about choosing the U.S. over Canada given all of this, they tell me the decision is apolitical. And that unlike Canada, the U.S. offers pockets of respite that feel safe for Jews. They mention parts of Florida, Texas – and Tulsa.
Mr. Sachs in his office with his framed Pavel Bure Canucks jersey, as well as a hockey stick signed by members of the Tulsa Oilers, which hosted a Jewish Heritage Game in March that was part of the Tulsa Tomorrow itinerary. On Mr. Sachs' desk, below the selection of cowboy hats, is a framed letter from Oklahoma's Governor to Mr. Trump to say his state would proudly welcome Jewish families lawfully escaping antisemitism.
Mr. Roberts, left, and Mr. Sachs outside the Jewish Federation of Tulsa in September. The men both said their families experienced antisemitism when they lived in Canada. Both Mr. Sachs and Mr. Roberts were born in the U.S., so moving here was far less complicated than for other Canadians. For couples like the Shulmans, obtaining the necessary permissions is challenging.
“There is a pathway, but it’s a sliver,” says Mr. Finer. So when Mr. Trump shared a post by the National Association of Christian Lawmakers calling for an expedited method of entry into the U.S. for Jewish Canadians “experiencing persecution or who credibly fear for their safety because they are Jewish” there was excitement in certain circles, even if the repost may have been more about Mr. Trump trying to stick it to Canada amid the trade war.
Still, advocacy for such a pathway is happening. Mr. Sachs has a framed letter in his office from Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt to Mr. Trump, saying his state would proudly welcome Jewish families lawfully escaping antisemitism.
“It is especially disturbing to see such ugly hostility in western nations that otherwise hold themselves out as bastions of tolerance and civility, such as Canada,” he wrote. I am a daughter of Jacob. It was my father’s name. I am also a mother of Jacob; I named my son for my late father.
Incredibly, both of my Jacob Ledermans were born on Erev Yom Kippur, 89 years apart. This past Yom Kippur eve, as Jews were about to atone for our sins and ask to be inscribed into the Book of Life, what happened at the Sons of Jacob synagogue in Belleville could have been a massacre. In this climate, some Jews feel like they are being erased from the story of Canada – or worry they will need to edit themselves out.
They are not doing it lightly. They are as Canadian as they are Jewish. Look around: Leonard Cohen, Irwin Cotler, Barbara Frum, Honest Ed Mirvish, Mordecai Richler, Geddy Lee. Jews have helped make Canada what it is – going back more than 250 years, to even the Plains of Abraham, as I learned from Len Pearl’s upcoming documentary Search Out the Land .
“Canada seems to have forgotten how much we’ve built here,” says veteran Canadian antisemitism fighter Bernie Farber in one scene. Today’s situation is the worst he’s ever seen. But, he adds, “there are a lot more good Canadians that are sick of seeing this antisemitism and I believe we will survive it together. ” Mr. Freedman, who is in knots about his decision, says it will be a disaster for Canada if more Jews leave.
For him, a prime consideration is that his children all live in the U.S. with no intention of returning.
“They’ll never pay a nickel of tax over the rest of their lives in Canada, they’ll never create a job in Canada. They’ve taken all of those talents, all of their future taxes, all of their future potential as contributors to society … to another country.
” In a thread about encountering protesters outside his Yom Kippur service in Toronto , CBC journalist Neil Herland revealed that he has obtained an Austrian passport – his Holocaust-surviving father was from there – “in case Canada becomes unsafe for me as a Jew. ” Is that my next move: a Polish passport? Go back to Poland? Give the chanters what they wish?
Of course not. I’m not going anywhere. But if you had told me three years ago me that I would even be asking these questions; that I would travel to Oklahoma of all places to see how former Canadian Jews are living there, and where more want to join, I would have said: you’re crazy. Or you’re joking.
We’re good at that, joking. And wandering.
“A line of decency has been crossed in our province,” said Ontario Solicitor General Michael Kerzner at the Belleville news conference about the synagogue attack. Antisemitism is not simply a Jewish problem. It is a global problem, and right now, it is a serious Canadian problem. I knew the fallout from Oct. 7, 2023 would be bad, and it has been – catastrophic for Gazans, first and foremost.
But this, in Canada, I did not expect. I understand the impulse to leave. I don’t cast judgment on anyone trying to carve out better, safer lives for their families. But I’m with Mr. Farber.
This country built us and we helped build this country. I’m going to fight for it. Despite the despondency, I hang onto the hope. I am not without a home. This land is my land.
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