This Yom Kippur should have been a day of quiet reckoning. Instead, outside Manchester’s Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation, a man used a car and a knife to turn worship into carnage.
Two congregants — Adrian Daulby, 53, and Melvin Cravitz, 66, were killed; three others were grievously wounded. Security volunteers and armed officers kept the massacre from becoming worse, yet the sanctity of the day was shattered.
For British Jews, the comparison is not the 1973 Yom Kippur War. That was an attack by states on a state. This was targeted murder of citizens at prayer.
It revealed not a distant conflict but a domestic failure: two years of escalating rhetoric and intimidation indulged, normalized and excused until words hardened into weapons.
The atmosphere did not appear overnight. Since Oct. 7, marches, sermons and social media have glamorized violence, laundered slogans into moral postures and blurred the line between criticism of Israeli policy and hostility toward Jews.
Synagogues were vandalized, children told to hide their uniforms and conspiracy threads cast Jews as global villains. When such cues saturate public space, someone eventually acts on them.
The message to Jews in the United Kingdom is painful. The country long proud of protecting minority worship has left a small community feeling exposed. Politicians offered condolences; police cited guidelines.
But guidance without enforcement is abdication. If the law does not restrain glorification of terror, street intimidation and harassment of visibly Jewish citizens, the law is performative.
The message to the wider diaspora is stark. What surfaced in Manchester mirrors patterns in Paris, Berlin and New York — tolerated defamation, then assaults, then normalized fear.
Community resilience cannot substitute for state resolve. Jewish institutions can harden targets; they cannot police squares or platforms where incitement metastasizes.
For Israelis, the episode confirms a hard truth. The hostility manifested in Great Britain echoes an ideology insisting Jewish sovereignty is illegitimate anywhere, not only in Gaza or the West Bank.
It is why voices that won’t condemn Hamas’ atrocities view Jewish vulnerability as deserved consequence. That animus is unrepentant; it feeds on confusion, cowardice and fashionable certainty.
Where do we go from here?
Government must focus on moral clarity. That begins with the enforcement of laws against terror support, proscription of groups that glorify violence and explicit directions to police to prioritize the safety of threatened minorities over the convenience of march organizers.
Prosecutors should treat stalking of synagogues, intimidation of Jewish students and calls for “intifada everywhere” as what they are — menaces, not metaphors. Social media companies should act on coordinated abuse with the energy they devote to spam and fraud.
Education matters, too. Institutions should affirm that while Israeli policy is contestable, Jewish personhood is not. Civic leaders must explain that pluralism means refusing the importation of other people’s totalizing wars into local neighborhoods. Universities should defend inquiry by disciplining harassment disguised as activism.
Finally, Jews must not retreat. Vigilance is necessary, but withdrawal grants bigots a victory they have not earned. The answer is confident presence: prayer that continues, schools that thrive and cultural life that allies with neighbors who know that protecting one minority protects all.
Manchester was an upsetting funeral bell and a significant fork in the road for the U.K. and everyone else. Choose denial, and we will hear that bell again. Choose decision, and a liberal nation can still prove worthy of the trust its Jews place in it.
