Michael Sachs, a Jewish community professional from Vancouver, witnessed a surge in antisemitic incidents in Canada in recent years — on school boards, in teachers’ unions, in public sector workplaces. In his son’s elementary school class, some of the other children made Nazi “Sieg Heil” salutes.

Sachs and his wife, a teacher in a Jewish school, feared for their children’s future ability to express their Jewish identity, in addition to having preexisting concerns such as high housing prices and the country’s fentanyl crisis.

The couple weighed options for relocating, and followed up on an invitation to an unlikely destination: Tulsa, Oklahoma, a mid-sized city in the American Bible Belt whose downtown boasts an eight-story-tall gold-colored statue of an oil driller. Sachs had to look up where Tulsa was located on the map.

“When we first were on the flight down, we were like, ‘Maybe. Let’s see,’” Sachs said. “By the time we got on the plane to head back, we had made the decision we’re going to move.”

The family’s move helped kick off Tulsa’s Jewish community’s new program called Lech L’Tulsa — a play on the biblical phrase Lech Lecha, or “Go forth” — that is attempting to lure Canadian Jews to the city.

The project has found an unexpected level of interest ahead of its inaugural tour for Canadian Jews this month. It comes amid a wider shuffling of Jewish populations after the bloody Hamas-led invasion of southern Israel on October 7, 2023, which sparked the Gaza war and caused an unprecedented spike in antisemitism and turmoil for Jewish communities worldwide.

“It’s a reflection of a sorting of North American Jews in general into political tribes, geographically relocating in order to be with people who are more of their own political ilk,” said David Koffman, the chair of the Study of Canadian Jewry at York University in Toronto, Canada.

Jews are targeted in hate crimes more than any other group in Canada, a figure that surged following the start of the Gaza war. Recent incidents include gunfire at synagogues, violent chants at a Holocaust museum, antisemitic bullying of schoolchildren, support for terrorism on college campuses and attempted kidnappings of Jewish women.

Sachs has heard about antisemitism from Lech L’Tulsa applicants. One woman, wearing a Star of David in downtown Toronto, said she had been spit on and called a “baby killer.” Another applicant’s child was accosted at knifepoint by an antisemitic assailant, Sachs said.

For most of the applicants, though, antisemitism is only the “tipping point” for a potential move to the US. The other top concerns are the economy, cost of living and health care.

“These topics, which are topics that every community is facing, then on top of it, you add the lens of antisemitism. I think that that lens is what has triggered such a big response, but no one is leaving just because of antisemitism,” Sachs said.

Lech L’Tulsa is an outgrowth of Tulsa Tomorrow, a program launched by members of the Tulsa Jewish community in 2017. David Finer, a Tulsa businessman, had noticed that even as the city was on the upswing, young Jews were leaving and the Jewish population was declining. Finer and a group of friends decided to market Tulsa to young Jewish professionals to stem the outflow.

“People don’t know about Tulsa. When people from big cities say, ‘Let’s move somewhere, let’s go to Nashville, let’s go to Austin,’ they have an idea what those places are. Tulsa, no one knew,” Finer said. “When they come here, they say, ‘Good grief. What a place.’ After October 7, it became even more pronounced that people should consider coming to a place where there’s not that kind of antisemitism.”

Tulsa’s Jewish community is small, with around 2,500 active members, and Tulsa Tomorrow seeks to expand that cohort, said Rebekah Kantor-Wunsch, the group’s executive director and an........

© The Times of Israel