A Toronto Model Lost an Agency for Posting About Israel

The Canadian-Slovakian model Miriam Mattova said she lost a large part of her Instagram following and was dropped by one of her public-relations agencies after she began posting in support of Israel in the aftermath of the Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023. The agency warned her she was being “too political”, she told The Press Service of Israel in an interview in Jerusalem. “They told me to delete the hashtags and stay neutral,” said Mattova, who is 33.

She said she refused because of what her grandmother had told her about the Holocaust (that “everyone stayed quiet”) and instead rebuilt her profile around the “bring them home” hashtag and posts about Judaism. “I risked my career, and it paid off,” she said. “I found an agency that shares my values.” Mattova, a former Miss Slovakia who won the Miss Universe Bikini title in 2013 and now lives in Toronto, was making her first visit to Israel, travelling to the south of the country this month with the non-profit organisation Israel Friends. She spent three hours at the site of the Nova music festival massacre, walking among burned cars and memorial photographs.

Why the Nova site has become a fixed stop for visitors

The open-air festival was held near Kibbutz Re'im, an agricultural community in the western Negev desert a few kilometres from the Gaza border. It was the single deadliest location of the 7 October attacks: the Times of Israel reported that more than 360 people were killed there, close to a third of the roughly 1,200 killed across Israel that day, and that at least 40 people were taken hostage from the site.

Mattova said what affected her most was not the wreckage but the soldiers who thanked her for coming. “They thanked me for two minutes of my time while risking their lives daily,” she said. “They are the heroes; I am just a voice advocating for them.” Her grandmother and great-grandmother survived the Holocaust, she said; the rest of the family did not. “When I saw what happened here, I heard my grandmother's story all over again, in the 21st century.”

The trauma bill Israel is still counting

Mattova's advocacy is aimed at post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, among young soldiers, work she called “not political: it's about healing”. The Press Service of Israel report said more than 3,700 soldiers had been diagnosed with PTSD over two years of war and a further 9,000 had applied for recognition, and that a full treatment programme costs about $1,200 and cuts the wait for therapy from months to days. It gave no source for those numbers.

Those are the figures as published. The official picture is counted differently and is larger. Israel's Defence Ministry rehabilitation department said in September 2025 that it had treated more than 20,000 wounded personnel since 7 October 2023, of whom roughly 35% were being treated for PTSD and other mental-health conditions and a further 20% for both physical and psychological injuries, according to the Times of Israel. Defence data reported by the Jerusalem Post showed 1,135 conscripts, reservists and career personnel removed from their posts because of combat-related psychological trauma between October 2023 and July 2025, and a rise in reservists seeking psychological help from about 270 a year before the war to roughly 3,000.

What Israel Friends does

Israel Friends was founded by a group of entrepreneurs after 7 October 2023 and runs on very low overheads, eJewishPhilanthropy reported in May 2025, when its cumulative aid stood at about $50 million in first-aid kits, vehicle protection and mental-health funding. By December 2025 the Jewish Journal put the total at $55 million, and described its partnership with the teletherapy service Healthy Mind and its funding of Matanya Farm, a nature-based recovery centre in northern Israel. The farm's own description presents it as a working farm in the northern hills treating soldiers, survivors and families. The report said the organisation had delivered more than 40,000 hours of therapy, that the farm had treated more than 5,500 people since May 2024, and that it received Defence Ministry approval to treat soldiers in October 2025.

What Jewish life in Canada looks like to her

Mattova said antisemitism had followed her to Toronto: anti-Israel protests on her street every Friday, and a man who shouted “dirty Jews” at her in a bar days before her trip. “If I had shown fear, he would have felt powerful. So I laughed,” she said. Canadian monitoring supports the broad trend. B'nai Brith Canada's annual audit counted 6,219 antisemitic incidents in 2024 (then a record) and 6,800 in 2025, an average of 18.6 a day and the highest since the audit began in 1982, the Times of Israel reported when the 2025 count was published in April 2026. About 92% of the 2025 incidents were online.

Modelling, and the schooling that came first

Mattova said she was offered a seven-year modelling contract at 14, but her mother insisted she finish school first and allowed international travel only after she turned 17, and only while her grades held. She credits her father, a chemist and pharmacist, for the academic push, and holds a doctorate in political science. She now works deliberately with Jewish photographers and Israeli designers, among them Ronnie Kobo. “Modelling used to be just about money and magazine covers,” she said. “Now it has meaning.”

What the interview did not establish

Mattova did not name the agency that dropped her or the one that replaced her, and the PTSD and treatment-cost figures published alongside the interview carried no source. The account of the Toronto bar incident is hers alone, and no police complaint was mentioned. The interview also did not say how long she stayed in Israel or whether she intends to return.