Yom Kippur: Anti-Semitism is flourishing, but one man can no longer ignore his Jewish identity

The bigotry that Grant Feller faced as a boy made him turn his back and flee from his Jewishness. But a remark muttered at a dinner party changed all that….

foto: Independet

On Friday, I shall be shuffling down the north London streets of my childhood, helping my 86-year-old father to take a seat at the synagogue that welcomes us, in truth, only a couple of times a year. He has trouble getting around these days but Yom Kippur – the Day of Atonement – is still to him the most important day of the year, and he insists that we walk rather than break the rules by parking the car nearby.

Aside from being the dutiful if slightly more sceptical son, I shall spend the day thinking not only about the many sins I have committed this past year and asking for some kind of forgiveness from a God whom I’m not sure is really there, but thinking also about two women –the Chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, and the ambitious young British politician Vicki Kirby.

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Merkel has just announced that all German synagogues should have an armed guard during the imminent Yom Kippur holy day, for fear of attacks from anti-Israeli and pro-Muslim demonstrators. I’m pretty sure there will be just such a guard at my own synagogue in Finchley, as there is every year. Perhaps more than one this time.

But it’s Merkel’s “pro-Muslim” reasoning about the alarming rise of anti-Semitic attacks that makes me think of poor Vicki, a leading figure in Labour’s youth movement who has just been suspended by her party for claiming that Hitler might be the “Zionist God”. Labour’s candidate for Woking posted a series of vile anti-Israeli comments on the internet, including this astonishing political deduction: “We invented Israel when saving them from Hitler, who now seems to be their teacher… I will make sure my kids teach their children how evil Israel is.” Not the sort of sentiment that will endear her to her Jewish party leader, one imagines.

But it is the sort of anti-Semitic sentiment – though I’m sure Vicki herself is not an anti-Semite, merely astonishingly stupid – that is fairly par for the course in a Europe which is markedly more nationalistic and intolerant of minorities. These kinds of expressions are not, as Merkel and other leaders would like to think, expressed by agitated Muslims, but by pretty normal white, middle-class people.

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