It is the middle of an ordinary weekday in Toronto and Paul Rosen is fieldside, looking on proudly as one of his six grandchildren plays in an inter-school soccer game. Someone asks Rosen about his own playing days, when he starred as a one-legged goaltender with Canada's gold-medal-winning Paralympic hockey team. And then the conversation shifts to what is perhaps foremost on his mind these days: the rampant rise of antisemitism.
Rosen is proudly Jewish, and profoundly worried. He worries that the Canadian government has done little if anything to try to protect Jews from the heinous attacks and assaults aimed at them. He worries that police forces are turning the other cheek at open antisemitism on Canadian streets. He worries about the safety of his grandchildren.
"Actually, I'm terrified," he says with detectible fear in his raspy voice. "When I grew up, there was antisemitism, sure, but we handled it. Nowadays, in the past couple of years, the antisemitism is evident in ways I never dreamed of – with shootings at Jewish schools and institutions. My grandkids go to Jewish schools. So, yes, I worry about them a great deal."
Rosen knows first-hand just how sick and how hurtful antisemitic targeting can be. "I would lose it when it was aimed at me during the three Paralympics I played in and the many international tournaments," he recalls. "I mean, here we were in the middle of high-level competition, and in the Paralympics for crying out loud, and this is the kind of thing that comes to their minds. It was devastating. Heck, it still is."
On more than one occasion during his netminding days, Rosen's immediate reaction was to react with fisticuffs. It was hockey, after all. "A German player was in my crease during the Paralympics and was pushing in a scrum after a whistle, so I routinely I shoved him back," Rosen remembers. "Then he looked straight at me and said, 'Hitler should've killed all you Jews.' That obviously crossed the line and my immediate reaction was to start swinging away at him. I broke his jaw. Some of the guys with the United States team were antisemites as well. I made a save off one of them and his reaction was to yell 'You dirty f—–g Jew' at me. I didn't go after him there, but I did in the post-game handshake and that started a wild brawl."
The on-ice antisemitism followed him off the ice; he had trouble letting these incidents go. "The hate, the disgusting slurs, they haunted me, especially when I'd be in bed at home, and they still do," he says. "They depressed me. I am a proud Jew and I simply find it unfathomable that people in this world despise us for one thing – our religion."
Rosen, who competed in three Paralympic Games and earned a gold medal in Torino, Italy, in 2006, is the oldest rookie in Paralympic hockey history. He sometimes faced hate on the ice, but nothing like what he's now seeing on Canada's streets. The rise in antisemitic incidents, including shootings at Jewish schools and institutions, has left him deeply concerned for the future of his grandchildren and the Jewish community in Canada.
