Toronto-area man found guilty of assault for spitting on Jewish couple

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Amid a wave of antisemitic attacks in the wake of October 7, a Vaughan, Ont., man who spat at a group of Jewish congregants leaving a local synagogue has been found guilty of assault.

“The proximity has shattered the illusion that you’re safe in your home, you’re safe in your neighbourhood, you’re safe on Shabbath. It’s shattered and destroyed,” Tilda Roll told National Post on Monday. “It was a wake-up call. I do things differently now than I did prior to January 6. That January 6 was my October 7 on a much smaller scale. I think of things pre-January 6 and post-January 6.”

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On Jan. 6, 2024, Roll left Saturday morning services at Chabad Flamingo synagogue alongside her husband, Malcolm Roll, and two other parishioners. While they were walking home, Kenneth Gobin was riding his e-bike. He mounted the curb and rode at the group of congregants, nearly hitting them, according to a ruling by Justice Michael Alexander Townsend of the Ontario Court of Justice.

One of the men in the group yelled at him for driving erratically on the sidewalk. Gobin rode away, but then returned and shouted: “Hitler should have killed you all,” and, “You should have died in the Holocaust!” He then got within a few feet of Tilda Roll and spit on her while her husband tried to shield her, Roll testified, according to the court documents obtained by National Post.

Another witness told police that Gobin “raised his arm above a 45-degree angle,” referring to a Nazi salute. The broad strokes of the incident were corroborated by the other witnesses.

Gobin was found guilty of two counts of assault for spitting on the couple.

He will be sentenced on May 8, the same date as Waisuddin Akbari, a Toronto shop owner, who Global News reported on Tuesday was arrested three months after Roll’s incident for telling someone he was planning a suicide mission. He was convicted in November 2024 of threatening death and property damage for threatening to damage synagogues and “threatening death against the Jewish people.”

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Roll told the Post that when she spoke with Victim Services following the spitting incident, her experience as a civil lawyer underscored the “element of self-advocacy because a lot of this happens in the hallway.” She recalled insisting that the case go to trial so she could testify.

Gobin, who was on probation at the time of the assault, testified that he was riding his e-bike and sought to avoid the group by driving on the grass when Roll’s husband blocked his path and called him a “dirty paki.” Malcolm Roll “vehemently denied” using that term, the judge said in his ruling.

Gobin said he never spat on the group. During cross-examination, however, Gobin contradicted himself on this point. He also contradicted himself when claiming he was unaware the group was Jewish.

“I am prepared to find beyond a reasonable doubt that the Crown has proven Mr. Gobin said words to the effect ‘Hitler should have killed you all,’ ‘Hitler was right,’ ‘Hitler should have taken you out,’ or some variation thereof,” Justice Townsend wrote in his March 12 judgement.

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“I am also prepared to find that Mr. Gobin made a ‘salute’ often associated with the Nazi movement, and something like ‘heil Hitler.’ All of these words were proximate to the intentional assault on Mr. and Ms. Roll by spitting.”

Roll, who considers the assault a hate crime, told the Post her forthcoming victim impact statement includes a request that the judge impose a “mandatory Holocaust education program” as part of Gobin’s sentencing in early May.

“He’s also an ignorant person, right?” Roll said. “Maybe it’s malicious, but part of me thinks that because there was no Holocaust mandatory education when he was in school, and he really doesn’t know that much. So the question is, what do we do to educate these people?”

Akbari, an Afghani immigrant who arrived in 2007 after spending his early years in Pakistan, took his car into an Aurora dealership for an oil change last year and noticed the salesperson had a Pakistani last name. Thinking the man likely shared his views, Akbari told the associate about his thoughts that the Jews controlled global markets and that Palestinians had been slaughtered by “the Israeli state and the Jewish people should be subjected to a genocide in retaliation.”

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“He (Akbari) stated that Israel sought to turn the world into slaves and to poison the world. He expressed a belief that Israel was not a real state or a country,” the judge said last November. “He went on to equate Israeli and Jewish people to roaches or insects who should be exterminated and to a cancer that needed to be eliminated.”

Before leaving, Akbari confided his plans to plant “a bomb in every synagogue in Toronto and blow them up to kill as many Jews as possible.” The following day, the salesperson reported the incident to York Regional Police.

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