As British Jews celebrate the High Holy Days, security measures reflect the reality of antisemitism at record levels

2 October 2024, 13:57

The High Holy Day festivals are the most important time in the Jewish calendar, and are usually amongst the happiest.

It is a period when families gather to eat together to mark Jewish New Year, when synagogues are full and the community is at its most vibrant.

Unfortunately, it is also a time when the need for security is paramount, and never more so than this year.

The past 12 months have seen an unprecedented and sustained increase in anti-Jewish hatred in the UK, since that awful morning on 7 October 2023 when Hamas launched its terrorist attack on Israel, killing 1,200 Israelis and kidnapping over 250 hostages. Since then the Community Security Trust has recorded 5,583 antisemitic hate incidents here in Britain – more than in any other 12 month period.

The  Jewish community has long needed security at synagogues, schools and other Jewish premises, because there is an equally long history of extremists trying, and sometimes succeeding, to carry out terrorist attacks against Jews, simply because they are Jewish.

This includes a neo-Nazi shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018, and an attempted shooting at a synagogue in Halle, Germany, on the festival of Yom Kippur the following year.

More recently, jihadist terrorists and other extremists have been responsible for shootings, stabbings and arson attacks targeting Jewish people and buildings around the world. They use the conflict in Israel and Gaza as an excuse to act out their anti-Jewish hatred, as if Jews thousands of miles from the Middle East are somehow responsible for Israel. Iran and Hizbollah, too, have a long record of using terrorism overseas as part of their proxy campaign against Israel.

Over the next month there will be security guards outside every synagogue, often alongside police officers, simply to enable British Jews to celebrate and observe their festivals in peace and safety. Many of those guards are paid for by the Home Office, and the support of government and police in this endeavour is invaluable. This kind of security has become the norm across the Jewish community, so much so that it is now taken for granted that it is needed: but it is surely unacceptable that any minority should face this kind of threat in modern Britain.

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Dr Dave Rich is Director of Policy at the Community Security Trust

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