Why do Jews’ warnings keep falling on deaf ears?

The other week, on an ordinary school run in Edgware in London, my four-year-old daughter tugged my hand. ‘That’s the Star of David’, she said proudly, pointing to some graffiti that had appeared on the wall outside her school. She then asked about the shape next to it. Sharp and angry, it looked like a cross with twisted legs. ‘What’s that one?’

Most people first encounter a swastika in a textbook, relegated safely to the pages of history. It is usually found wedged between words such as ‘Kristallnacht’ and ‘never again’. Yet here I was, observing one with my four-year-old on a residential north London street.

My daughter expresses no such curiosity about why her synagogue is guarded by security officers. She doesn’t ask why the man who smiles at her in passing every Shabbat wears an earpiece, or why Jewish schools have gates and cameras and staff trained in emergency protocols. This is, sadly, her ‘normal’. Security around British Jews has long been framed as a sad but necessary precaution.

This Yom Kippur evening, as I turned my phone back on after 25 hours of prayer, fasting and reflection, news of a terror attack on a synagogue began to flood in. Shockingly, these reports were not coming from Israel, Paris or Pittsburgh. The synagogue in question was in Manchester.

It is difficult to describe the feeling of reading those headlines. Last year, I spent two days in a coma following a cardiac arrest. When I woke up, I recognised my family, but felt disoriented and panicked. Everything looked familiar but felt different. Wrong. I knew where I was, but I didn’t understand why. This Yom Kippur, I experienced something similar: not just fear, but dislocation. A sense that the Britain I grew up in – the one my grandparents fought for, the one that taught me to trust in the rule of law – had shifted beneath my feet. This wasn’t just a hate crime. It was a vicious attack targeting Jews in Britain, on the most sacred day in the Jewish calendar.

The attack on the Heaton Park synagogue did not occur in isolation. For the past three years, being openly Jewish in Britain has become a quietly radical act. Being shouted at by people in the street is now a regular occurrence for our community. On the bus, school pupils in uniform have shoved and hissed at my children, even thrown things at them. We don’t consider reporting it anymore – we just pass the stories along like weather reports.

Looking at that swastika scrawled on the school wall beside the Star of David, I thought I had reached the most demanding task of Jewish parenting in 2025 – that figuring out how to explain the symbol of the Holocaust to my child on our walk to school would be the worst the UK could throw at me. Manchester showed me how tragically wrong I was.

For a long time, we’ve spoken about rising anti-Semitism in Britain in terms of ‘slippery slopes’. But when Jews are attacked in a major British city on the holiest day of the year, the slope pretty quickly becomes a sheer drop. Still, perhaps even more chilling than the violence itself is what follows: the caveats, the equivocations, the silence. We saw our own prime minister – who did not send any Labour representation to the March Against Anti-Semitism last month – acting shocked and surprised on TV. There is a sense that we are somehow meant to explain ourselves.

Jews are tired of explaining. We are exhausted from defending our right to be visible. We don’t want special protection. We want to gather in worship without guards. To live Jewish lives of dignity and devotion that aren’t framed by security protocols and news alerts. To walk our children to school without fear.

The writing is on the wall. It’s been there for years. Except now, it’s not written in ink – it’s scrawled in blood. The question is whether Britain will finally look up and take notice, or carry on pretending it never existed at all.

Chana Hughes is a family psychotherapist, working for the NHS and privately. She is also a Jewish educator and mother of five.