OPINION: Why every Jew must go to synagogue this weekend

The journey we’ve been on since 7 October has been one of inevitability, but also intent. On Succot 2023, Hamas launched its brutal, attempted genocide against the Jewish people, murdering, torturing, raping, and kidnapping more than 1,200 innocents. Now, on Yom Kippur 2025, Britain has witnessed its exported version: two Jews mowed down and stabbed to death outside a synagogue in Manchester.

This was not a random act in a random place. The choice of a synagogue – a house of prayer, a place of refuge, the most sacred of civic spaces for Jews – was conscious and calculated. The attackers chose the holiest day of the year because they wanted to sow fear where we should feel safest. They wanted to command the most terror with the starkest symbolism: to make British Jews believe that nowhere is safe, not even the sanctuary.

The only surprise to British Jewry is not that it happened but that it took this long. It was never a question of if. It was always a question of when. And when, on our holiest day, it came, the message was clear: they want to silence us through terror.

They did not strike by chance. They struck where we pray because they intended to make fear our new ritual.

We knew this day was coming because the signs were written in capital letters across Britain’s streets. On 8 October 2023 — while Jews were still being massacred in Israel — the Palestine Solidarity Campaign submitted its application for a “pro-Palestinian” march.

That day was the alarm clock. Hamas’s so-called “act of glorious resistance” woke up antisemites everywhere. It woke up the woke. It created, in a single instant, a generation of useful idiots and performative virtue-signalers.

Tens of thousands suddenly found their cause célèbre. Sudan? No. Yemen? No. Syria? No. None of those actual genocides ticked the right ideological boxes. But Israel — Jews — that always does.

Antisemitic tropes repackaged and rebranded for another generation, but always ending in the same place: dead Jews.

And so here we are. Two Jews killed in Manchester on the holiest day of the Jewish calendar.

And in response we have a Prime Minister who dares stand in front of us — the same tone, the same face that only last week announced unconditional recognition of a Palestinian state, a reward for the murder of Jews — and tell us that he will “do everything in his power” to protect us.

Too late, Sir Keir. Far too late.

We told you when they promised to “globalise the intifada.” We told you when they chanted “from the river to the sea”. We told you when they marched with banners comparing us to Nazis. We told you when our shop windows were smashed and daubed with red paint, when our children were attacked at train stations, when our synagogues were smeared with faeces, when Jews were told to hide their identities in the centres of British cities.

You didn’t listen. Instead you rewarded terror. And now this is your legacy.

Recognition without responsibility is the politics of appeasement. It ends with dead Jews.

Where was Starmer three weeks ago when thousands marched against antisemitism in London?

Not only did he not come. He didn’t even think it important enough to send a single member of his government.

Meanwhile, as pro-terror celebrations — dressed up as demonstrations — erupt across the UK in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Leeds, London and even Manchester, British Jews are left to ask: what now?

In the long term? I don’t yet have an answer. Perhaps one day we will pack our bags and admit that our time in this country has come to an end. Perhaps.

But this weekend I do know what we must do — and why this action must close the circle on their intent.

They chose a synagogue to terrorise us because they wanted to make fear our default behaviour: to shrink, to hide, to stop wearing our identities openly. Their strategy depends on silence. They rely on us withdrawing, dimming our lights, concealing our Magen Davids and our pride.

So we will do the exact opposite.

Every British Jew — regardless of level of observance, regardless of belief — must go to synagogue tomorrow night. Not primarily to pray, though many will. But to be visible. To be loud. To be unbowed.

Chest puffed out.

Magen David on display.

Hostage ribbon pinned to breast.

We will turn the attackers’ intention against them. Their goal was to make us afraid at the one place we should not be afraid. Our answer must be to fill that place with people: a tide of bodies and faces and badges and prayers that say, plainly and forcibly, you will not silence us.

They struck at our sanctuary to steal our courage; we will return to that sanctuary to reclaim it.

“They struck where we worship because they wanted silence. So tomorrow night we will fill those sanctuaries until silence is impossible.”

We will not let fear become our ritual. We will make our ritual one of presence. Because it is precisely because they sought to silence us that we must, in our droves, turn up and be impossible to silence.

Tomorrow, go to synagogue not only to remember and to mourn, but to make the most unambiguous statement possible: that British Jews will not be terrorised into invisibility. That our places of worship remain our sanctuaries because we make them so — together, proud, loud, and defiant.

Tomorrow, let every Jew in Britain make the simplest, loudest statement: Am Yisrael Chai. The people of Israel live. And we live here, unafraid.

#StandUpSpeakOutBeProud