Exclusive: Chief heart surgeon at Jewish General Hospital quits province amid rising
The chief of cardiac surgery at the Jewish General Hospital has tendered his resignation and plans to move to Atlanta in September, citing rising antisemitism in Montreal and worsening problems with the province’s health-care system, The Gazette can reveal.
Dr. Emmanuel Moss, who has worked at the Jewish General for the past 10 years, has already informed his patients and his synagogue of his imminent move to the United States. Moss’s departure makes him the second high-profile Montreal Jew — after Concordia University professor Gad Saad — to decide this spring to quit the city amid a sharp increase in documented antisemitic incidents in the past three years.
During a May 12 appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, Saad announced he accepted a post at the University of Mississippi, where he had already worked as a scholar during a two-year leave of absence from Concordia. He spoke of death threats he received while at Concordia, saying: “I’m now leaving in large part because it became difficult for me, if not impossible, to be a high-profile Jewish professor who supports the right of Israel to exist.”
In a post on the social media platform X linked to The Gazette’s article about his departure, Saad nonetheless thanked Concordia “for the complete freedom that I was granted to pursue any research stream and any professional endeavour that I desired.”
(Dr. Moss is) in the prime of his career and he’s leaving.”
President of the Association des chirurgiens cardio-vasculaires et thoraciques du Québec
Reached by phone, Moss declined to give an interview or to explain his reasons for leaving Montreal. But sources close to Moss confirmed that he and his family had grown disillusioned with growing antisemitism in Montreal and what they viewed as a failure by authorities to crack down on incidents of Jew hatred — from physical assaults on Jews to vandalism of Jewish-owned businesses and the firebombing of synagogue entrances, as well as the firing of bullets at a yeshiva.
Sources noted Moss was particularly offended by images circulating last week of anti-Zionist protesters, some of them masked, staging the mock hanging of an effigy of a man wearing a kippah on his head. That effigy appeared to depict Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.
At the same time, Moss has grown frustrated with the limited resources for patients in desperate need of heart surgery in Quebec. In fact, in April, Moss sounded the alarm about a shortage of perfusionists at the Jewish General, warning that the lack of technicians running heart-lung machines was placing the cardiac surgery program in jeopardy.
Still, a source suggested that antisemitism was probably the tipping point for Moss, who is soft-spoken and avoids the spotlight.
“The health system issues that may have played a role in Manny Moss deciding to leave, they didn’t just arise last week or last month or last year,” said the source, who declined to have their name published so they could speak candidly about the issue.
“The problems with the health system have existed for years, and he could have left at any time before. So what it comes down to is the antisemitism and the feeling that this (city) has become an increasingly dangerous or unrecognizable place to live.”
Moss implemented robotic cardiac surgery at the Jewish General
Since Moss broke the news to the Jewish General, the Côte-des-Neiges hospital has scrambled to find a short-term solution to ensure that all of Moss’s patients do not face unnecessary delays.
Dr. Lawrence Rosenberg, chief executive officer of the west-central Montreal health authority, said the Jewish General will partner with another institution in the city to ensure that Moss’s patients are covered.
“From a strategic planning perspective, we have been aware that Dr. Moss could leave at a time of his choosing, for personal reasons, and we have been working on contingencies for some time,” Rosenberg said in a statement. “When he departs, we will have a plan in place to offset any potential negative impact to our cardiac surgery program, with a view of maintaining timely access to high-quality care.”
Dr. Louis Perrault, president of the Association des chirurgiens cardio-vasculaires et thoraciques du Québec, described Moss’s departure as a blow to the already perilous state of cardiac surgery in the province.
“He’s 45 and he’s ultra-specialized in robotic surgery,” Perrault said of Moss. “He’s in the prime of his career and he’s leaving for personal reasons and obviously for resources reasons.”
Perrault acknowledged that although the Jewish General is likely to find a solution to Moss’s departure in the short term, lengthy wait times for heart surgery across Quebec will remain a problem in the long run. That’s because authorities did not foresee an exodus of heart surgeons from Quebec to the U.S. and other provinces over the past decade.
In addition to his role at the Jewish General, Moss has served as the director of McGill University’s cardiac surgery residency training program since 2019. A graduate of McGill’s medical school, Moss completed an advanced fellowship in minimally invasive and robotic cardiac surgery at Emory University in Atlanta, and he spearheaded robotic cardiac surgery at the Jewish General.
McGill’s website notes Moss “is one of the only surgeons in Canada routinely performing both robotic mitral valve and coronary bypass surgeries.” In addition to robotic surgery, his sub-specialties include aortic and cardiovascular surgery.