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British Authorities Allowed Antisemitism to Fester. Now Two Jews Are Dead in Manchester.

Jonathan Sacerdoti

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People react near the scene, after an attack in which a car was driven at pedestrians and stabbings were reported at a synagogue in north Manchester, Britain, on Yom Kippur, Oct. 2, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Phil Noble

As Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, draws to its close, we Jews plead: “Open the gates for us, even as they close.” It is the cry of a people who know that time is short, that chances to change are finite. And as I joined in that call myself, surrounded by those I’ve known my whole life at synagogue in London, I thought how Britain too should act before it is too late — to repent, to rectify, to make good — before the closing of the gate. For Britain has had a decade or more of warnings about jihadist terror and rising antisemitism.

And yet, on the morning of Yom Kippur on Thursday, two Jews were killed outside their synagogue in Manchester, and the gates are fast closing on illusion and denial.

A decade ago, in the aftermath of the Hypercacher supermarket massacre in Paris, I said what should have been obvious: the ideology that sent Amedy Coulibaly to murder Jews in cold blood would not remain contained to France. I warned then, in a Sky News interview, that Islamic extremists who had returned from Syria with training, weapons, and a genocidal worldview posed a direct and specific threat to Jewish communities in Britain. That warning was not cryptic, nor was it speculative. It was grounded in fact and in history. But it was dismissed.

Now, in Manchester, it has come to pass again.

On Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, worshippers at Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation were attacked in a manner grimly familiar to anyone who has studied Islamist terror. At 9:31 in the morning, a man rammed his vehicle into congregants before attacking with a knife. Two men, Adrian Daulby, 53, and Melvin Cravitz, 66, were killed. Three others remain in hospital with serious injuries. The suspect, named by police as Jihad Al-Shamie, a 35-year-old British citizen of Syrian descent, was shot dead by armed officers.

We should dwell on the symbolism. A synagogue targeted on Yom Kippur. British Jews once again forced to barricade their sanctuary. A suspect literally named Jihad, when only a year ago Londoners watched Hizb ut-Tahrir demonstrators chanting that very word in open calls for holy war. Then, the Metropolitan Police reassured us that “jihad has a number of meanings.” Today, two Jews lie dead.

This was foreseeable. British Jews have lived under extraordinary security for years. Synagogues, schools, and communal centers rely on cameras, fences, guards, and the vigilance of CST volunteers. Families tell their children not to wear uniforms on buses, not to speak Hebrew in public, not to appear recognizably Jewish. We knew something like this would happen. The only surprise is that it has taken until 2025 for such a day to arrive in Britain.

And yet, the official response has been one of ritual platitudes. The Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, has spoken of deploying more police to synagogues and expressed his horror that Jews were attacked at prayer. Words are necessary, but words cannot obscure reality. His government, like its predecessors, has chosen to ignore warning after warning. It emboldened extremism with the hasty recognition of a Palestinian state, long before any credible peace plan existed. It indulged weekly marches in central London where chants about the “army of Muhammad” killing Jews were not fringe but center-stage. It failed to act against hate preachers, failed to prosecute violent demonstrators, failed to confront the hostility to Jews that has bled into British institutions and media.

The BBC and other broadcasters have, for years, twisted their reporting on Israel to such an extent that Jewish safety in Britain has become collateral damage in the narrative war. When synagogues were daubed with “Free Gaza” graffiti, when schoolgirls were struck with bottles, when buildings in Golders Green were smeared with feces, when radical clerics called for Jews to be killed, the media’s instinct was to frame Jewish alarm as a lobbying effort, as if security itself were a political demand.

But this is not political. It is existential. And it is not only a Jewish problem. Britain has already bled from the hands of Islamist terrorism at Westminster Bridge, at London Bridge, in the Tube, in Manchester Arena. MPs have been murdered, commuters blown apart, children incinerated at a concert. The ideology is not selective. It does not merely menace Jews, though Jews remain its perennial and symbolic target. It menaces the fabric of our entire civic life.

That is why the protests that followed the Manchester killings were so grotesque. Hours after two Jews were murdered outside their synagogue, thousands gathered in central London waving Palestinian flags, clashing with police, chanting slogans, some dismissing the attack altogether. One campaigner told a journalist she did not “care about the Jewish community.” This is the climate we have allowed to fester. When hatred marches so brazenly, it ceases to be protest and becomes license.

The historical parallels are not abstract. England was the cradle of the first blood libel in Norwich in 1144, where Jews were accused of murdering a Christian boy for ritual purposes. By 1290, Edward I expelled the entire Jewish population. Centuries later, Kristallnacht in Germany turned synagogues into smouldering ruins. Each time, antisemitism was permitted to grow, ignored by authorities, rationalized by elites, until violence erupted. What happened in Manchester is not the same in scale, but it is the same in kind.

Two men from Crumpsall are now dead. Their synagogue, where generations have gathered in faith, is a crime scene. Rabbi Daniel Walker had to barricade his congregants inside and continue leading Yom Kippur prayers in bloodstained robes. This is Britain in 2025.

The lesson is not complicated. Where Jew-hatred is tolerated, civilization is corroded. A society that cannot keep its synagogues safe cannot keep itself safe. The victims are Jewish today, but the target is Britain itself.

On Yom Kippur, Jews confess: “For the sin we have committed by silence … by cowardice … by hardening the heart.” These are not only our sins; they are Britain’s. For years, leaders silenced themselves in the face of hate, institutions cowered before extremists, and the media hardened its heart against Jewish suffering. Adrian Daulby and Melvin Cravitz are dead at least in part because this nation’s guardians chose inaction when it could have chosen to prevent the climate of Jew-hatred from growing. If Britain does not confront this hatred with justice and resolve, then it is complicit in its return.

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Editor’s note: British police said on Friday they may have accidentally shot a victim who died in the Manchester attack, as well as one of the survivors, as they attempted to stop the perpetrator. Greater Manchester Police chief constable Steve Watson said in a statement that one of those killed suffered a gunshot wound but that the assailant, shot dead by officers at the scene, was not carrying a firearm.

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