After another Golders Green attack, British Jews need more than just words

Dear Prime Minister,

This morning, a man ran down Golders Green Road with a knife. He stabbed a man in his seventies at a bus stop, repeatedly, in the face. He stabbed a man in his thirties outside a synagogue. The neighbourhood you patrol with high-visibility officers, the one you assured us was protected, is the same neighbourhood whose ambulances were firebombed in March, whose memorial wall was set alight earlier this week, and whose synagogues have become the safest of dangerous places.

You have already condemned the attack, and I believe you mean it. I am writing because condemnation is the only thing your government has produced at the scale this moment requires.

Last October, Melvin Cravitz and Adrian Daulby were murdered at Heaton Park Synagogue on Yom Kippur. The first fatal antisemitic terror attack on British soil since the Community Security Trust began counting in 1984. You stood in front of the country and addressed every Jewish person directly. You said, “I know how much fear you will be holding inside of you. I really do.” It was the most human thing a British prime minister has said to British Jews in my lifetime.

Then the months passed.

Three thousand seven hundred antisemitic incidents in 2025. The second-highest annual total this country has ever recorded. For the first time since the CST began monitoring, every single calendar month broke two hundred. The monthly average has doubled compared to the year before 7 October. Today, two more victims were added to a ledger that does not stop.

You have provided some funds for the Community Security Trust. You have proscribed organisations. You have deployed visible police to synagogues during the high holy days. Those things matter. They are also not enough.

This is what your country looks like when you are not watching, Prime Minister.

Children leave school and remove their kippahs at the gate. Mothers in Stamford Hill walk the long way around to avoid the corner where, on Saturdays, you can hear chants for their deaths. Eighty-one percent of British Jews told the Jewish Landscape Report last year that they conceal their Jewishness in public. Eighty-one percent. There is no other minority in this country of whom such a finding would be reported and absorbed as background noise.

Jews are the only community in Britain expected to fund and staff the security of our own places of worship through a charity. The CST is volunteer-led because the state has decided that this arrangement is acceptable. It is the symptom of a country which has accepted a level of risk for Jews it would never accept for anyone else.

Your Crime and Policing The bill contains a clause that would let police restrict protests near places of worship. The opposition to it has been instructive. A section of the British left has framed protecting Jews at prayer as an attack on civil liberties. I need you to refuse to lose that argument. I need you to stand up in the Commons and say plainly that when a march chants “from the river to the sea” as it passes a synagogue on a Saturday morning, the children inside hear it as a message addressed to them, whatever the chant’s defenders insist it means in seminar rooms.

You recognised a Palestinian state in September. Your Home Secretary has called certain protests “un-British” and “dishonourable”. These are not symmetrical signals. One you delivered to allies abroad. The other you was delivered to a specific street in north London. You cannot send both and pretend the second has nothing to do with the first. British Jews live in both contexts at once. The community you are entrusted to protect is British, and it is also Jewish. This country asks them to leave one of those at the door more often than you may realise.

Late last year, the Campaign Against Antisemitism asked four and a half thousand British Jews whether they could see a future for themselves here. Six in ten said they had considered leaving in the past two years. Half said they could not see a long-term future for themselves in this country. Those numbers are not a forecast, Prime Minister. They are a calculation already underway.

I am thirty-five. My grandparents fled Baghdad after the Farhud in 1941, when Iraqi mobs murdered Jews in the street while the British presence stood and watched. I grew up on their stories. I grew up doing the calculation every Jewish child learns to do: how long does a Jewish community have when the country starts to lose its will?

I am asking you to refuse the British version of that question.

Here is what I would like from you in the next month.

One. Stop calling this “all hate”. Antisemitism is a form of hate in Britain with a rising body count. Name it specifically in every press conference and every line of every bill.

Two. Take the funding and the running of synagogue security off the Jewish community. The CST should not exist in its current form. Britain has no business requiring its Jews to police themselves. Treat synagogue security as the national security duty it has become.

Three. Prosecute. Where chants cross into incitement and where online accounts coordinate threats against identifiable Jews, prosecute. Your government has shown it can move fast on Palestine Action. Move with the same speed when the target is a Jewish family in Hendon.

Four. Speak to the British public the way you spoke to us in October. Tell them what is happening to Jews here is a domestic crime wave with its own logic, and it is being permitted by the silence of your government, which has the power to break.

Five. Meet with the Jewish community. Not only the official bodies. Talk to the Jewish women who run mother-and-baby groups in north Manchester. Talk to the rabbis in Hendon who lock the synagogue door at night and check the windows again at three in the morning. Talk to my husband, who watched me write this and asked, quietly, whether we should be thinking about where we go next.

Prime Minister, you said in October that British Jews would see “the other Britain, the Britain of compassion, of decency, of love”. They have seen flashes of it. Christian neighbours standing outside synagogues during Shabbat. Officers running toward men with knives. They have also seen the country that lets the Sabbath become a calculation. The country that teaches Jewish parents which streets to avoid, which symbols to hide, and which name to give if the conversation turns. That country is also Britain. You preside over both.

Decide which one you intend to leave behind.

Yours sincerely,

Hen Mazzig

• Hen Mazzig is an Israeli writer, speaker, and social media influencer