OPINION: The innocence of Anglo-Jewry ended this Yom Kippur

After the shofar was blown, stewards rushed us out of synagogue last night. No hanging around gossiping outside. No lingering. For once we didn’t grumble. It used to be one of the nicest moments of Yom Kippur: your fast complete, the marathon of Neilah over, catching up with old faces from childhood. Now we all hurry home. And we don’t need to be told why.

This was the strangest Yom Kippur in my lifetime. Each prayer said in the knowledge that it had finally happened. Our worst fear had been realised. Britain, for so long blessedly immune from the kind of murderous antisemitic violence we’ve seen in France, America, Germany; but no longer. Adrian Daulby and Melvin Cravitz slaughtered at shul. They could have been any of us. This was an attack on every Jew in this country, on our holiest day, perfectly calibrated to shatter our sense of safety and wellbeing.

I felt many emotions across the day. Tears pricked at my eyes during kaddish. Fear gnawed at me, as I imagined knife-wielding malice bursting through the doors to slay us in our pews. I also felt a swelling of pride at the dignity and defiance of our prayer. No one stayed home. We held on to our ancient and most essential rituals, no matter the grim circumstances.

But I cannot pretend something hasn’t just changed. The innocence of Anglo-Jewry, which escaped martyrdom at the Tredegar riots and the Battle of Cable Street and many other bitter moments since we returned to this country under Oliver Cromwell, was destroyed on Yom Kippur 5786.

What comes next? I did manage to catch one conversation last night, as I hurried out of shul. A middle-aged man, a pillar of the British establishment, congratulated another on his imminent move to Israel. “We’ll all end up there soon,” he added.

It may seem bizarre that, in response to a violent antisemitic rampage, people will decide to move to a country where such incidents are a daily reality. But they will. Some will now accelerate plans to move to Israel. Because in Israel they won’t feel alone.

Two years since October 7. Two years of this exhausting, awful, agonising war drawing us into its maw. Israel is far more present in our lives as a result. In my shul, on these high holy days, there were yellow ribbons for the hostages hanging from every railing. We ended our Yom Kippur service this year by singing a sombre Hatikvah, even though we didn’t feel very hopeful.

Some who wish us ill will claim that this somehow makes us de facto Israelis, valid targets for protest or even violence. This is insidious and wrong and wilfully obliterates the complex nature of Jewish peoplehood.

But it is certainly the case that, for many British Jews, the carefully constructed barriers of our diaspora identity are being steadily overrun. This unsettling process began well before October 7 but has entered a new and far more acute phase since that day. Shortly after the attack, I wrote a Jewish News column about how a flood of fierce hatred had washed away the ambiguity of our identity as diaspora Jews. That happened again yesterday.

Will we all end up in Israel? Perhaps that is the eventual fate of the Jewish people. Perhaps the demands of our fraught national project will ultimately force us all to make a binary choice. I hope not.

Throughout this war, amid the antisemitic placards and mounting toxicity online, I’ve maintained that Britain has long been a sanctuary for Jews, its innate moderation inoculating it from violent antisemitism. Is that now changing, I’ve wondered aloud. Many will conclude that it already has and I was naive to hope it might be otherwise. Just look at Heaton Park.

It’s true that even when this war somehow ends and takes the temperature of life down a few degrees, the long-term trends in this country (and elsewhere) are all heading the wrong way. Online life is making us stupider and angrier. The post-Holocaust taboo on public antisemitism is crumbling. Our cities are home to large Muslim communities in which Israel has acquired a demonic status and a common corollary of this view, Jew hatred, is sadly all too present. It is understandable that many in these communities feel outraged by what has happened in Gaza, but there’s also no getting away from the fact that the character and particular vehemence of this outrage makes life deeply uncomfortable for many British Jews.

Every trend is going in the wrong direction. But it is also worth noting that the vast majority of people in Britain were utterly sickened by what they saw in Manchester. Many simply will not tolerate what happened yesterday. Some British Jews are furious with Keir Starmer over the recognition of Palestine, but I was still moved to see the prime minister and his chancellor and foreign secretary sitting in shul last night. Every senior politician of every stripe expressed similar sentiments. We are not alone in this country, even if we sometimes feel ourselves to be.

The legacy of Heaton Park will stay with us for decades. It will change us but it need not define us. It must be an alarm call, but it does not necessarily mean that such incidents will become a regular part of Jewish life in Britain. It is not the end. I hope it is also not the beginning of the end. But mostly today I pray for Adrian and Melvin, may their memories forever be a blessing. They were the first. May they also be the last.