On the morning of October 2, 2025, Jewish families across Manchester gathered for Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, when a car was driven into pedestrians outside the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation before the attacker launched a stabbing assault that left Melvin Cravitz and Adrian Daulby dead and three other men seriously injured. Counter-terrorism investigators treated it as terrorism, and CST said it was the first fatal antisemitic terrorist attack in the UK since it began recording antisemitic incidents in 1984.

Seven months later, Britain is again confronting the same truth. In Golders Green this week, two Jewish men were stabbed and police declared the attack a terrorism incident, while Prime Minister Keir Starmer described it as “deeply concerning” and said there had been too many similar incidents of late. Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis responded with a sentence that should shame every institution in the country: words of condemnation, he said, are “no longer sufficient.”

That is the heart of the matter. British Jews are rarely denied sympathy. What they are too often denied is the confidence that the sympathy will be matched by forceful, durable protection. The gap between language and lived reality has become too wide to ignore.

According to CST’s Antisemitic Incidents Report 2025, there were 3,700 recorded antisemitic incidents in the United Kingdom last year, the second-highest annual total it has ever recorded. CST also found that 2025 averaged 308 antisemitic incidents per month, exactly double the monthly average in the year before 7 October 2023, and that for the first time ever it recorded more than 200 anti-Jewish incidents in every month of the year. This is not a passing surge. It is a condition of public life.

That condition is visible not only in headline violence but in the accumulation of smaller humiliations and threats that wear a community down. CST recorded sharp levels of abusive behaviour, desecration, and damage to Jewish property in 2025, including incidents aimed at synagogues, homes, cars and community institutions. Over recent weeks in London, Jewish neighbourhoods have also faced arson attacks and attempted arson against Jewish sites, including Hatzola ambulances and synagogues, while investigators have examined possible Iranian links to at least some of the activity. No government can claim that such a pattern is under control simply because it knows how to condemn it.

Sir Keir Starmer has tried saying some of the right things. After Manchester, he acknowledged the fear felt by British Jews and promised to do everything in his power to guarantee their security. After Golders Green, he said that attacks on the Jewish community are attacks on Britain. Those statements matter. They are not worthless. However and I emphasize this, they cannot be the main substance of policy when Jewish families are making everyday calculations about where they can walk, what they can wear, and whether visibly Jewish life is still defensible in British streets and institutions.

That is why the emotional reality of this moment matters as much as the statistical one. Fear is not measured only by incident counts. It is measured by the exhaustion of living with them, by the constant requirement to explain why antisemitism is serious, and by the suspicion that Jewish vulnerability is still treated in too much of British public life as a regrettable minority concern rather than as a test of national integrity. The Chief Rabbi’s intervention was so powerful precisely because it captured that exhaustion.

I became British around 10 years ago, and I did so with pride. Britain represented something substantial to me: seriousness, decency, institutional restraint, and the promise that a Jew could belong here without qualification. I did not become less Jewish by becoming British. On the contrary, I believed Britain was a place where Jewish life could be lived with confidence, dignity and ordinary civic trust.

That confidence has been damaged. I am still proudly Jewish, but I no longer feel the same uncomplicated pride in the British part of that identity. I say that with sadness, not melodrama. That sadness comes from the sense that British Jews are increasingly expected to absorb intimidation, hostility and isolation — and then needed to be grateful when Britain offers just the correct words not the appropriate actions afterwards. I have had enough of feeling afraid to be visibly Jewish: wearing my kippah and tzitzit in the centre of London, where ten years ago I felt much safer doing so. I have had enough of walking in Golders Green and still feeling the need to be aware of my surroundings, looking over my shoulder and wondering whether I could be attacked. I have had enough of worrying not about the quality of education my children receive in Jewish schools, but about the level of security those schools must provide. I have had enough. Jews in the UK have had enough.

This is where Israel enters the argument, and it has to be stated carefully. Israel is not free of danger. It is a country surrounded by enemies, repeatedly targeted by terror, and burdened with profound regional insecurity. No serious person imagines otherwise, especially non-jews and outsiders. But safety is not only about the statistical risk of violence. It is also about whether the society around you understands your vulnerability as its own problem.

That is why many Jews can feel safer in Israel than in Britain, even while fully recognising the intensity of Israel’s security environment. In Israel, Jewish vulnerability is not treated as awkward or marginal. An attack on Jews is understood immediately as an attack on the country itself. The state, the police, the security services, and the public culture all begin from the assumption that Jewish life is normal, legitimate, and worth defending without embarrassment. That does not remove danger. It removes ambiguity.

Britain, by contrast, increasingly feels ambiguous. It is not that there are no decent people, no police officers doing serious work, or no ministers who understand the scale of the problem. It is that the country too often appears politically hesitant at precisely the moment clarity is required. A Jew in Britain can hear solidarity from a lectern and still feel that visible Jewish life in the street, on campus, or outside a synagogue has become politically inconvenient. That is a very particular kind of insecurity. It is not only fear of attack. It is fear of abandonment.

The latest numbers on aliyah from Britain are significant for that reason. The Institute for Jewish Policy Research found that 742 British Jews moved to Israel in 2025, the highest annual figure in forty years. That does not amount to an exodus, and it should not be exaggerated. But it does reveal something serious: more British Jews are contemplating whether the country in which they built their lives still sees them as fully and instinctively its own.

To say that some Jews feel safer in Israel is therefore not to romanticise war, nor to deny the enormous risks Israelis live with. It is to make a more painful point about national belonging. People feel safer where they believe the state will act as though their lives are part of its own moral fabric. They feel less safe where they suspect they will be mourned after the fact, but not defended with sufficient seriousness before it.

Britain can still change course. It is not condemned to this failure. But that would require more than periodic outrage and better phrased statements. It would require even more visible enforcement, more consistent prosecutions, stronger protection for Jewish institutions, moral clarity about antisemitism when it appears under fashionable political disguises, and leadership prepared to treat anti-Jewish hatred as a central democratic challenge rather than a niche communal grievance.

I once thought of Britain as a place where a Jew could belong without explanation. I would like to be able to think that again. But belonging is not secured by speeches. It is secured when a country proves, through action, that Jewish safety, Jewish dignity and Jewish continuity matter to it not as a favour to a minority, but as part of its own honour.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)