Anti-Semitic violence reached its deadliest level in more than three decades last year, according to a report covering seven of the world’s largest Jewish communities outside Israel – with France recording a rise in physical assaults despite a decline in the overall number of incidents.
The J7 Large Communities’ Task Force Against Antisemitism report released on Wednesday shows that 20 people were murdered in anti-Semitic attacks in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States in 2025.
Last year was the deadliest for such violence in the Jewish diaspora since the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires, which killed 85 people.
In France, 1,320 anti-Semitic incidents were recorded. While that represented a 16 percent fall from the 2024 figure of 1,570, it was still more than three times the 436 incidents reported in 2022.
Anti-Semitic incidents represented 53 percent of all anti-religious incidents recorded in the country in 2025.
The report examined anti-Semitic incidents in Argentina, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States. Together, the seven countries are home to more than 90 percent of Jewish people living outside Israel. France is home to Europe’s largest Jewish community.
‘No longer a surge’
Across the seven countries, the task force documented more than 23,000 anti-Semitic incidents in 2025, compared with around 9,800 in 2022.
That amounted to an overall rise of 136 percent over three years, while the number of violent incidents increased by 97 percent.
Although the combined number of reported incidents fell between 2024 and 2025, the J7 said the figures remained far above the levels recorded before the Hamas-led attacks in October 2023, which triggered the Gaza war
“Anti-Semitism in our seven countries is no longer a surge, it is our new normal,” the task force said.
It called on governments to move beyond responding to attacks after they occur and instead strengthen preventative measures, including security funding, legislation and enforcement of rules governing social media platforms.
The deadliest attack recorded in the report took place in December 2025, when 15 people were killed in a mass shooting at a Hanukkah festival near Bondi Beach in Australia. Australia experienced the sharpest increase compared with 2022, with 1,654 incidents recorded in 2025 – a rise of 246 percent – despite a decline from the previous year.
Two people were killed in October 2025 during an attack on a crowded synagogue in Manchester, UK, on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar.
Germany recorded the largest number of incidents among the countries studied, with more than 8,700 cases.
The US reported more than 6,200 incidents, with three people killed.
The J7 report also highlighted the situation in Ireland, although it was not among the seven countries studied. Ireland’s Jewish community, numbering just 2,200 people, reported 143 incidents over a six-month period.
Anti-Zionism
The report identified hostility towards Zionism or Israel as a major motivating factor in incidents classified as anti-Semitic by its authors, accounting for 48 percent of recorded cases in the UK and 45 percent in the US.
The task force warned that political arguments surrounding Israel and the Gaza war were increasingly being used to target Jewish individuals, institutions and communities, rather than remaining focused on the actions of governments.
It also highlighted the role of social media in spreading anti-Semitic rhetoric, accusing platforms of failing to apply their own rules consistently or act quickly enough against threatening and abusive material.
Jewish organisations have reported that some people are avoiding displaying religious symbols or revealing their identity in public because of fears of harassment.
(with newswires)
