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A large group of Jewish mothers, grandmothers and rabbis packed a courtroom on Tuesday for the appearance of a Montreal man who threatened to kill girls at a Jewish girls’ school.

Robert Gosselin, 55, has been charged with inciting hatred toward Jewish people and threatening to cause death and bodily harm to Jews after anti-Semitic posts were written on the Facebook page of Le Journal de Montréal.

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Gosselin sat in the courtroom for about an hour, often with his eyes closed, before telling a judge that he still doesn’t have a lawyer. The judge instructed him to make an appointment with legal aid and return to court on Dec. 17.

Julie Gniwisch, who has many grandchildren in Jewish schools, said the fact that Gosselin has not been detained pending his trial shows that the justice system does not take anti-Semitic threats seriously enough.

“When something serious happens, everyone wakes up and says: ‘Hey, why didn’t we do something,'” said Gniwisch, president of Beth Rivkah, a Jewish girls’ school in Côte-des-Neiges.