New documentary exposes antisemitism in the NHS experienced by Jewish staff and patients

A new investigation into antisemitism in the NHS features examples of hatred from medical staff, including a Jewish nurse being subjected to a Nazi salute, and a doctor telling a patient in the middle of a surgery that Jews killed Palestinian children “for fun”.

Malignant: Anti-Semitism in the NHS, a documentary produced by Campaign Against Antisemitism, features a series of Jewish NHS staff and patients, some of whom have chosen not to share their identities in public.

However, among those who decided to speak out publicly in the CAA report was Shelley Lipman, a registered nurse at a hospital in Cambridge, who has tattoos in Hebrew calligraphy.

“One of my colleagues, a healthcare assistant, asked me what they meant. So then it came out that I was Jewish”, she said.

“I went on lunch, and when I came back and walked round the curtain, the nurse was there, literally holding a Nazi salute. I just felt…my jaw dropped for what felt like an hour. I was absolutely gobsmacked – right next to a patient’s bed as well.

More in UK News

1 hour ago

Jury discharged in trial of alleged Downing Street pro-Hamas protester

By JN Reporter

2 hours ago

NHS Surgeon suspended for social media posts about ‘Zionists’

By JN Reporter

Board of Deputies President Phil Rosenberg (c-l) with the Archbishop of Canterbury (c-r). Karen Newman (l), Vice President of the Board, was also present

6 hours ago

Board of Deputies meets Archbishop of Canterbury to discuss UK Jewish-Christian ties

By JN Reporter

“I just said, ‘do you know that is the Nazi salute – that is Hitler’. He said ‘yeah’.

“He’s still there. I hate it. I absolutely hate it.”

Malignant: Antisemitism in the NHS

Watch our full documentary on hate in healthcare now – and see just how widely this cancer has spread in the UK’s national health provider. pic.twitter.com/P3vFinVyoy

— Campaign Against Antisemitism (@antisemitism) September 14, 2026

Among a number of unnamed NHS staffers who commented for the documentary was an individual working within NHS dentistry who has experienced antisemitism from dentists, who said: “I don’t think people want to report because we’re very scared of intimidation, retribution and repercussions. I think if they are reported, there’s a feeling that it won’t go anywhere and it will be rejected because it’s not taken seriously; and also because if it is reported and it does go somewhere, it’s going to be a slap on the wrist.

“The GDC [General Dental Council] has been publicly mocked by the dentists in question in the Facebook groups, mocking the fact that the GDC can’t do anything.”

Among Jewish patients, Saul Freeman described his experience of hearing a surgeon describe Jews as killing children “for fun” at the same time as the man was using a knife to remove a potentially cancerous cell from his forehead.

“My wife had noticed a mark on my forehead, I eventually went to see a consultant dermatologist at the hospital, who confirmed the view that it was likely one of two potential types of skin cancer, and would need to be removed”, he told the documentary.

“The surgeon started working; the first part of the operation was to give…injections of local anaesthetic into the area that was going to be operated on” when he started discussing the war in Iran.

“At this point I’m in the middle of an operation, the surgeon is cutting areas of skin out from my forehead, I did not want to have a political discussion. He went on to say ‘and the war’s still going on in Gaza, they are still killing children in Gaza’. And he said, ‘you would think they would know better, given what happened to them in Europe’.”

Freeman then described how “In my tone of trying to keep things sort of light…I said, ‘who’s they’. And his response to that, the consultant surgeon, as he’s making an incision in my head, was ‘the Jews. The Jews should know better. The Jews do it just for fun. They shoot children in the head or the leg for fun. They do it differently for their own amusement each day’.

“And at this point, I was very aware that when I’d first lain down on the table, at some point, I can’t remember when, I realised that my Magen David was visible, and I tucked it away. The guy has a knife, he’s working on me – it’s about as vulnerable as you can be in terms of a patient and a doctor interaction. I was panicking…I didn’t know if he was going to intentionally cause me harm.”

The documentary went on to say that Mr Freeman complained to the Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust about his experience, the trust responded that it would be “unable to provide details of any employment investigations, decisions or outcomes relating to individual members of staff.”

In an article for The Telegraph, the chief executive of Campaign Against Antisemitism, Gideon Falter, wrote that “The NHS touches each of us, from the moment of our birth to the days before we die. It touches us throughout our lives at our most vulnerable.

That is why the revelations in the Campaign Against Antisemitism’s groundbreaking documentary on antisemitism in the healthcare sector are shocking on a visceral level. This is not a tale of occasional lapses, but of a malignant hatred in the very NHS that should be a bastion of compassion.”