Is the Metropolitan Police fit for purpose? The question haunts the minds of many Londoners, particularly women, despite the resignation of Cressida Dick. But it haunts one community in particular: ultra-orthodox Jews.
The Met’s list of recent failures is almost as long as it is shameful. Sarah Everard, killed by an officer who kidnapped her in a mock arrest. Serving policemen jailed for sharing ghoulish pictures of two murdered sisters. The bungled VIP paedophile ring inquiry. The list of incompetence, corruption, moral degeneration and cover-ups goes on.
But the plight of ultra-orthodox Jews in north London continues to pass unnoticed. Theirs is an archaic way of life, insulated from the modern world, which values religion and tradition above everything else. They are often invisible to mainstream British culture, and have no desire to attract attention. Yet they should not be invisible to police.
The plight of ultra-orthodox Jews in north London continues to pass unnoticed
In May, during the Gaza conflict, a ‘hate convoy’ of vehicles from Bradford drove through Jewish areas of north London, with passengers shouting threats of rape and death through a megaphone at Jewish passers-by. That event made national news. But to many in the community, it was a case of business as usual.
Last week, the Jewish Chronicle reported on ‘seven days of hate’ that hit the community hard. In an entirely unprovoked attack on the eve of Holocaust Memorial Day, two orthodox men were brutally punched to the ground as they left a shop. The police took 40 minutes to attend the scene.
Days later, a five-year-old boy was spat at in a playground – allegedly by the same gang who had carried off another child in the street and dumped him in a local garden (‘at first my legs were stiff and then they felt like jelly and I started crying,’ the boy said). The perpetrators have not been apprehended.
Windows have been smashed. People have been regularly subjected to taunts of ‘free Palestine’ and ‘Yiddos go home’ as they go about their business. This week, CCTV emerged of a particularly shocking assault on an orthodox man, who was elbowed and punched repeatedly while having his phone stolen in the doorway to a block of flats.
For years, ultra-orthodox Jews have been living with this sort of abuse, under the noses of the Metropolitan police. The community has taken the step of setting up its own neighbourhood watch group, Shomrim, which regularly posts CCTV of attacks on Twitter.
In one incident last week, captured by Shomrim cameras, a woman shouted ‘you Jews are so bad’ and ‘I wish I had a gun to shoot you’ at young children as they left school. An orthodox man can be seen trying to shield the youngsters from the stranger, who was gesticulating wildly. The children – some as young as six – have been left scared to go to school. As a result, 19 Jewish schoolgirls wrote to the Met to beg for action. To date, there has been no adequate response.
Rabbi Hersh Gluck, president of Shomrim, told our reporter: ‘The police don’t feel motivated to take these cases seriously.’ And Priti Patel, the Home Secretary, wrote in a column last week: ‘It is deeply troubling to me that the very real concerns of a minority community who have been subjected to repeated physical and verbal assaults their streets and in there schools, their places of work and worship have been ignored.’
A report last week by the Community Security Trust, Britain’s main Jewish security organisation, made for sober reading. It showed that anti-Semitic hate incidents reached record highs in Britain this year, rising by 34 per cent. There were 2,255 reported incidents in total, including a surge in people shouting abuse from cars and 173 violent assaults.
It would be a mistake to be hyperbolic, but it is hard not to compare all this with old memories of Germany of the 1930s, or Tsarist Russia, or the Polish pogroms, or even 13th Century York or Winchester. Helpless Jews in traditional garb, set upon in the street by grinning thugs who appear to act with impunity.
We’ve seen it all before. But this is 2022, and it’s not good enough.
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