Yom Kippur is a day of atonement. It is a day for reflecting on one’s sins, asking God for forgiveness and vowing to do better. Since Jews take atonement seriously, that makes it the holiest day of the year.
If you have the slightest relationship to Jewish religious tradition – you’ve got a lurking sense that God might exist, or you just want to keep your mother-in-law happy – it is the one day of the year you will still show up at a synagogue. It’s like Good Friday in terms of solemnity, and Christmas in terms of collective rite.
All of which means that this Yom Kippur morning, when a terrorist attempted to breach the security barrier at Manchester’s Heaton Park synagogue, the building will have been packed. Like many synagogues, it even had a children’s service. At synagogues across the country, other British Jews were clustering together for prayer in large groups.
The friends and family I spoke to after morning services all had the same feeling: “It could have been us”. But not a single one was surprised. As one said to me: “It is the news we have all been dreading.”
Jewish community events have always taken place behind tight security, run by a volunteer organisation known as the Community Security Trust. My partner’s children attend a Jewish school, which means they walk through anti-terror security every single morning – this is their norm. But there is no denying that the threat to Jewish people in the UK has deepened in recent years, especially since 7 October, 2023.
And however tight your security, the greatest vulnerability at any gathering will be the spot where worshippers cluster on the streets outside the secure entrance – exactly where today’s attacker arrived with a car used as a weapon, a knife which he used to kill at least two people, and a vest which police said “had the appearance of an explosive device”.
At other synagogues today, this meant that worshippers leaving were told not to linger chatting with friends as they left. The less openly you can gather, the less of a community you can be.
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Over the past two years, civilians leaving synagogues and Jewish schools have been physically attacked, even hospitalised, often by people shouting “Free Palestine” (as if attacking British children makes the slightest difference to the Middle East).
We also know the resurgent far right remains a major threat to Jewish life in this country: in April 2024, a 19-year-old named Mason Reynolds was jailed after creating a detailed plan to attack a synagogue in Hove, while acting as the administrator of a Telegram channel which co-ordinated far-right hatred.
There is an elephant in the room: Gaza. While my Jewish family scrambled to see if relatives in Manchester had been affected, I was scrolling through social media comments, like “what do you expect if your people support a genocide?” or “Jews shoot Palestinians every day in Gaza; why is Starmer only concerned when Jews get shot?”
It used to be a basic tenet of civilised British discourse that no conflict overseas justifies attacking civilians on British soil. Those days seem to be over, at least where Jews are concerned.
The truth is, of course, that those who seek to take the lives of Jews at random can have no idea of where exactly their victim stood on the conflict in the Middle East. Yet we are all affected. One friend I spoke to today, a human rights activist who is second to none in her criticisms of Israel’s government, says she will no longer take her children to synagogue services for their own safety.
Yom Kippur starts at sunset, so I spent Wednesday evening observing its opening hours at a Kol Nidre service at the New North London synagogue. It’s a truly moving service, which teaches Jews to be self-critical, while also reflecting on the world’s shared humanity and capacity for redemption. It demands we ask ourselves hard questions.
The rabbi, Jonathan Wittenberg, has been a consistent critic of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government in Israel. So it was no surprise that he delivered a powerful sermon, reminding us of Judaism’s obligations to people outside our community, and arguing that British Jews do in fact have a duty to condemn atrocities committed in the name of a Jewish state. Many in the congregation agreed; some disagreed – that’s Jewish diversity of opinion for you.
But whatever our views on Israel, we all came through the same security check; we all thanked the security volunteers who lined the exit as we left; we all looked over our shoulder as we left. Like the victims in Manchester’s Heaton Park, we could have been attacked simply for attending a Jewish house of worship.
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