Do you know someone Jewish? Then they were probably at synagogue yesterday. I was there with my husband. My parents and my sister were at another one. Almost all of my Jewish friends will have been in attendance at their synagogues. Yom Kippur, or the Day of Atonement, is the solemnest day in the Jewish calendar and one of the holiest. Jews fast for 25 hours and they go to synagogue to repent for their sins of the past year in an attempt to do better in the new one. Even the Jews who don’t attend on the other 364 days of the year make a visit on this day.
While Yom Kippur certainly isn’t a fun day in the Jewish calendar, it still has its own special appeal. I have always found that the temporary rejection of our physical needs to focus instead on the spiritual, together as a community, to be enlightening. And there is something profound about realising that the vast majority of Jews across the world are doing the exact same thing as you, continuing an age-old tradition. As the day wears on and your physical strength wanes, conversely the prayers sung together ring louder and more fervent. It can be electric.
It can’t only come from the country’s leaders. Every non-Jew bears responsibility for this
I found out about the Manchester synagogue attack while getting ready for Yom Kippur services yesterday morning, and watched with horror as the updates kept coming. Grim nods of hello from our security guards on the way in told us they knew too.
The murderous attack on the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation in Crumpsall on Yom Kippur is a knife to the heart of the entire Jewish community. But we knew it was coming. We are sickened, shocked and heartbroken; but we are not surprised.
For two years now, ever since Hamas’s barbaric attack on 7 October, the situation for Jews here (and around the world) has gotten progressively worse. The red flags just kept coming. The regular Palestine marches where anti-Semitic rhetoric through placards, support for anti-Semitic terrorists and chants of ‘Globalise the intifada’ have become commonplace; the unprecedented rise of anti-Semitic incidents recorded by the Community Security Trust; the upsurge in anti-Semitic feeling among the public highlighted in a recent poll; the attempts to remove Jewish artists from cultural life; and public services infected with this most ancient of hatreds – even, tragically, in primary schools.
So when Keir Starmer flies in from hobnobbing in Denmark to condemn the Manchester attack, claiming to understand our ‘fear’, offering solidarity and promising to ‘do everything in my power to guarantee you the security that you deserve’, it is laughable.
What has he done? Oh yes, last week on Rosh Hashana, the Jewish new year, another one of our holiest days, he recognised the Palestinian state. A move that won him applause from Hamas, the terrorist outfit keen to rid the world of all Jews. This shouldn’t need saying, but when you offer rewards for pogroms against the Jewish people, then Jews don’t believe you when you say you intend to protect them.
In any case, as usual Starmer misses the point. Jewish schools, synagogues and cultural centres already have high security – borne through necessity as we witnessed with brutal clarity yesterday. What needs addressing is the reason for the security. What is needed is a serious nationwide plan of action to tackle the rot of anti-Semitism.
As a teenager at school, I experienced verbal anti-Semitism from a male peer. The school took it extremely seriously; the boy’s punishment was severe and I was never bothered by him or anyone else again. In this way, the school made it clear that it would not stand for anti-Semitism in its midst. That is how you stamp out this hatred. You make it clear that anti-Semitism does not align with British values and you punish those who enact it. We need a zero-tolerance approach.
And it can’t only come from the country’s leaders. Every non-Jew bears responsibility for this. If you truly believe that Britain is a country that should be a safe and welcoming place for the Jewish community then you need to start speaking up. Call out anti-Semitism where you see it, take action, and, please, call your Jewish friends now. We need you.
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