The King in Golders Green marked a special moment for British Jews

Sometimes you see a picture and immediately feel a shudder of history, knowing that the snap of a photographer’s shutter has captured a moment that will outlive the camera, and quite likely the photographer. 

So it was for me with a photo of King Charles’s impromptu visit to Golders Green on Thursday. For obvious security reasons, the good burghers of north London were not given advanced warning of his majesty’s visit to the site of the recent terror attack. Yet within minutes, as the royal journalist Robert Hardman posted online, hundreds of onlookers had rushed to the scene, bringing traffic to a standstill.

The picture that Hardman posted of the King surrounded by a crowd, tells the story of this moment better than I ever could. The gnawing fear and anxiety, replaced for just a moment by admiration and excitement and gratitude. It should go straight into the annals of Anglo-Jewish history.

There is a timelessness to the backdrop of this picture: Gross Butchers, Leon’s fruit shop, the red brick flats of Russell Parade beneath the mottled London sky. It could have been taken on Brick Lane in the 1930s, with the petty bourgeois merchants and their customers pouring out of the shops to glimpse their king. On the balconies above the shops, frum schoolgirls are lined up two or three deep. One young boy hangs eagerly from a lamppost, another from a silver birch. The tableau is dotted by black velvet kipot and sheitels, thrusting iPhones and admiring grins.

In the bottom right, Charles Rex makes his progress, his hair receding, his body tired from its long struggle with cancer, his willingness to walk unguarded through a large and excitable crowd a testament to his determination to be there. And also the affection with which he knew he would be is received. Charles’s mother Elizabeth famously said that a monarch must be seen to be believed. Here the king was not only seen by his subjects but touched, snapped, filmed, a tangible and very human presence in their midst.

“You’re all amazing, you’re all volunteers.”

A special moment as His Majesty The King stopped to meet our Shomrim volunteers in the crowd, thanking them personally for the work they do for the community. pic.twitter.com/w4W4rGK9hm

— Shomrim (North West London) (@shomrimlondon) May 14, 2026

There are two similar flags visible in the picture, each freighted with symbolism. On a lamppost is a small Union Jack, an outgrowth of the Raise the Colours campaign. The couple responsible for raising these flags on Golders Green High Street were interviewed on television after the recent stabbing, explaining their patriotism and their unease at how Britain has “changed”. The flag on the lamppost embodies that unease, making an unsettling statement about immigration and ethnic change and what that has done to alter and threaten the Jewish place in British society.

One young boy hangs eagerly from a lamppost, another from a silver birch. The tableau is dotted by black velvet kipot and sheitels, thrusting iPhones and admiring grins

Directly above Charles is another, larger, flag, the Union Jack/Magen David hybrid that seeks to bind Britain and its Jews in symbolic unity. I don’t know how long that flag has been around but I only started noticing it cropping up regularly at events post October 7.

This flag makes its own statement, in a way reminiscent of another famous Anglo-Jewish photo, which was taken outside the offices of The Jewish Chronicle in 1914. That picture showed a recruiting poster that sought to rally Jews to sign up for the First World War. “England”, it said, “has been all she could to the Jews. The Jews will be all they can to England.” This hybrid flag seeks to say something similar: we are you, you are us, we fight together.

Implicitly, because it looks like an Israel flag too, to me at least this new hybrid flag also suggests another, subtler story: the Israelification of British Jewish life since October 7, as the struggles of the Jewish state come to define and dominate the diaspora; as men come to stab us on our high streets and in our shuls because they cannot or do not want to distinguish between diasporic Jewish peoplehood and the actions of the IDF in Gaza. It is a relationship that grows ever more complex.

Recent attacks in places like Heaton Park and Golders Green have been compared to the pogroms of Tsarist Russia. This is hyperbole, but you can see why people are drawing the analogy. The list of atrocities grows longer.

Of the many differences between then and now, however, one leaps out from this picture. The pogroms of the 1880s, which led so many Jews to leave Russia and end up in places such as Golders Green, were at least partially state sponsored. In 1882, Tsar Alexander III introduced the May Laws that banned Jews from living in the countryside and barred them from certain occupations.

Today, in response to a series of smaller attacks on Jews, our British monarch has just taken on a role as patron of the Community Security Trust. He has visited this site of an attempted massacre to shake hands with a traumatised and fearful Jewish community. He has, in short, behaved like a mensch. His visit tells a different story about how British institutions and leaders relate to this country’s Jewish community.

During every Shabbat service in the United Synagogue, we ask that God puts a spirit of wisdom and understanding into the heart of our ruling monarch, so that he may advance the welfare of the nation and deal kindly and justly with the Jewish people.

On Thursday May 14, 2026, Charles III did just that. In that same prayer, we also ask that the supreme King of kings preserve Charles in life and deliver him from all trouble and sorrow.

To which I say, Amen.