Exposed: the ugly truth behind Manchester’s interfaith promises

In November 2024, the then-mayor of Manchester, Andy Burnham, signed the Faith, Belief and Interfaith Covenant, alongside representatives of different communities in the city.

In his statement alongside the signing, the mayor – now prime minister – said: “Greater Manchester prides itself on the cohesion between our different communities – we’re our strongest when we work together…. Greater Manchester is a place where everyone belongs; there is no room for discrimination anywhere. The joint signing sends the clearest of messages throughout our ten boroughs that this is what our city-region is about.”

Eleven months later, a terrorist attacked Heaton Park Synagogue on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year.

Raphi Bloom was on his way to the synagogue when the attack occurred. As a management board member of the Jewish Representative Council of Greater Manchester, he is well aware that despite the warm words for the cameras and press releases, dialogue between Manchester’s Jewish and Muslim communities has to a large extent broken down. Jewish community representatives had been reaching out to Muslim organisations since 7 October in an effort to prevent the war in Israel and Gaza from fracturing relations at home – but had been consistently rebuffed.

He described how “for years, we’ve been reaching out to the Muslim community in Greater Manchester to ask for dialogue”, with the aim of finding a way for the two communities to acknowledge each other’s concerns despite profound disagreements over the conflict. But those approaches, Bloom said, were met with “resounding rejection and refusal.”

The meetings that did take place were only in secret, as those involved on the Muslim side did not want their contact with Jewish representatives to become public.

“It cannot come out,” Bloom recalled being told.

Jewish community representatives also publicly sought meetings with Muslim representative bodies in Greater Manchester, according to Bloom. He said one such request was rejected because the Jewish representatives were regarded as “Ultra Zionists.”

For Bloom, that refusal raised a broader question about whether mainstream Jewish organisations could participate in interfaith dialogue while remaining openly Zionist.

“What does that mean?” Bloom said. “That means that the representative Muslim bodies in Greater Manchester will not meet with 95 per cent of British Jews who are Zionists because we believe in the right of Israel to exist as the nation state of the Jewish people and for Jews to have self-determination in their ancestral homeland.”

He likened the expectation that Jews pass an ideological threshold before being accepted in certain spaces to undergoing a “purity test.”

Part of the issue, Bloom suggested, was that “The moderate Muslims, of which I believe there are many — and I will say that loudly — there are,” were receiving intra-communal pressure. According to him, some of those who had spoken privately with Jewish representatives feared publicly engaging with them because of the potential reaction from more extreme elements within their own communities.

For Bloom, the failure of dialogue sits alongside what he sees as a wider failure to confront Islamist extremism and antisemitic incitement. He said Jewish community leaders had repeatedly warned that rhetoric on Manchester’s streets and in some mosques risked translating into violence.

“If they continue to let hate marches up and down our street every week, if you continue to have people scream ‘globalise the intifada’ every week for two years, then somebody will — and somebody did at Heaton Park synagogue,” Bloom said.

He also pointed to antisemitic rhetoric he said he had seen in recordings of sermons, including references to Jews as “sons of monkeys” and “usurpers” and calls for Zionists to be “smashed.”

Bloom cited the case of Kuwaiti cleric Sheikh Mishary Alafasy, who appeared at Manchester’s Bridgewater Hall in January 2025 despite objections from Jewish community representatives over his previous statements about Jews.

“We begged and we pleaded with the city council, with the Bridgewater Hall, to cancel this man from coming and they refused,” Bloom said.

Alafasy’s social-media account was subsequently

found to be among the small number followed by Al-Shamie, according to reports after the synagogue attack. If Al-Shamie attended the Bridgewater Hall event, Bloom speculated it would be “entirely possible” that he could have been further radicalised by what he heard.

Bloom also pointed to the case of Mohammad Bashir, who plotted an attack on the UK Defence Academy with al-Shamie before the latter went on to attack the synagogue. The pair had met at a Manchester mosque, according to evidence subsequently heard in court.

For Bloom, such cases underline his argument that the response to the threat facing British Jews cannot end with physical security.

“There is an absolute lack of desire on behalf of the government, both national and local, to tackle Islamist extremists, to identify hate preachers in these mosques, to kick them out of the country, to remove them from the posts, to sanction these organisations as charities for spreading hate and inciting murder and violence,  and to acknowledge the problem of Islamic extremism” he said.

“We’ve been saying this for three years and still nobody is listening to us, and yet again and again people are planning to attack us and do us grave harm.”

Asked why he believed politicians had failed to respond, Bloom questioned whether the relatively small size of the Jewish community affected the political attention its concerns received.

“Are we not electorally valuable to them?” he asked. “Are we politically expedient to them? I don’t know. It makes you wonder, are we not valued?”

He acknowledged the substantial government funding allocated to protecting Jewish institutions, but argued that greater spending on security could not substitute for confronting the causes of the threat.

“I think politicians go where the votes are,” Bloom said.

Bloom’s advocacy on the safety of British Jews has extended to Westminster. As a representative of Manchester’s Jewish community, he has been involved in meetings with the Prime Minister in which Jewish representatives raised concerns about the domestic consequences of growing hostility towards Israel and British Jews.

But Bloom argues that neither meetings with senior politicians nor increased physical protection address what he sees as the deeper problem.

A year after the attack, he draws a distinction between what he describes as the “acute” problem of physically protecting Jewish institutions and the “chronic” problem of extremism and deteriorating relations between communities.

“At the moment all we’re doing is, with more gates and more cameras and more guards, is tackling the acute nature of the problem,” Bloom said. “We’re not tackling the chronic nature.”

“And until we do that, we will never get a grip of it.”

For Bloom, restoring meaningful dialogue between Manchester’s Jewish and Muslim communities forms part of that wider challenge.

His original proposition is relatively simple: people with profoundly different views of the Middle East should still be capable of sitting together in Manchester, acknowledging each other’s suffering and preventing the conflict from being reproduced on the city’s streets.

For Bloom, confronting extremism and rebuilding dialogue between Manchester’s Jewish and Muslim communities are connected parts of the same problem. A year after the Heaton Park attack, he is uncertain whether that divide can be repaired.

“Can we ever get to grips with it?” he asked. “Have we let the genie out of the bottle? “I don’t know the answer to that.”

Anna Stanley is an open-source investigator specialising in extremism. She previously worked in intelligence roles for the UK Foreign Office and police