Jewish Londoners hope for change after 'horrible' year

It's a Friday morning at the Karma Bread Bakery in north London and Tami Isaacs Pearce and her team are "mad busy", rolling, kneading and braiding dough in preparation for the Jewish New Year holiday of Rosh Hashanah.

"My bakers will be working around the clock for about four days," she says cheerfully, as yet another batch of challah is carried to the oven.

"We fill it with apple and cinnamon for a sweet, abundant new year because that's what we wish for.

"It's really a time for family and for our loved ones to come together, which is becoming more and more important to the Jewish community every year at the moment."

That's because, she explains, even as Jewish Londoners are looking forward to the year ahead, many will also be thinking of the troubles of the year that has passed, including a series of antisemitic attacks in the capital.

Now, with the High Holy Days approaching, of Rosh Hashanah this weekend and Yom Kippur later this month, for some there is a sense of heightened vulnerability.

It was on Yom Kippur last October, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, when two men were killed and three others injured as they tried to defend their synagogue in Manchester against an attacker.

In the spring came a series of arson attacks in London targeting Jewish people and property, including on the ambulances belonging to the Hatzola emergency medical service.

In April, two Orthodox Jewish men were stabbed as they left their morning prayers in Golders Green, and the national terror threat level was raised from substantial to severe for the first time in more than four years.

"It's been devastating and shocking," says Isaacs Pearce. "We've had attacks in Golders Green, there were stabbings. We've had our Hatzola ambulances set on fire.

"It's been really, really hard. Really, really hard. And we are just hoping that things will change, we really are."

She adds that she has felt uneasy herself, concerned that Jewish businesses have been targeted.

Phil Rosenberg, president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, says many Jewish Londoners will view the past 12 months as an "annus horribilis" - a horrible year.

"That's really been felt: the dangers that we've long feared coming, unfortunately, to reality, and the community feels anxious about that."

He also criticised the timing of the government's announcement on sanctions against Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, which he said would leave some British Jews feeling "very anxious".

On Tuesday, the Chief Rabbi Sir Ephraim Mirvis said the announcement could lead to increased antisemitism, and called it a "truly dark day for British Jews".

The Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband rejected this, saying antisemitism was "a scourge and an evil" and that the government and society had a responsibility to counter it.

He has insisted the UK had to act against illegal settlements before "it was too late" to save the two-state solution.

The Movement for Progressive Judaism said "while the vulnerability of British Jews must not be ignored", measures directed at Israeli settlements "are not the same as an attack on Jews".

Matt Jukes, Deputy Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, says antisemitism in London is at a two-year high and the force is receiving "three to four reports" a day of antisemitic hate crime.

"Everything from people getting antisemitic slurs shouted at them from cars, to being harassed in the streets."

According to figures on the Metropolitan Police's website, 1,379 antisemitic offences were reported in the 12 months to the end of July, a rise of 25% on the previous year.

The Community Security Trust, a charity which protects against antisemitism, said it had recorded sharp spikes in antisemitic incidents in the weeks following several of the more high-profile attacks in London.

Jukes says the threat to the Jewish community was "threefold", from extreme right‑wing groups, Islamist terrorists and hostile states.

He said counter-terrorism police had made 35 arrests as part of 11 investigations.

"But we shouldn't forget, just because those most serious incidents have dropped out the headlines, that there is a daily reality for a community here that deserve protection and should be living their life freely and without those fears."

In July, the government announced the Met would receive £86m to recruit extra officers to increase the police presence in Jewish neighbourhoods, and around synagogues, schools and community centres.

It followed calls from the force's Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley for an extra 300 dedicated officers.

Although the funding fell short of allowing this, Jukes previously told BBC London it would enable the force to build up three teams across the capital, with a total of more than 250 officers.

The Met says it currently has 36 dedicated officers based in north-west London and Stamford Hill.

"I'm hugely grateful that the Met are stepping up their game because it's absolutely necessary," Isaacs Pearce says. "As a community we need to feel free, and we need to feel safe just to be ourselves."

Joining a community patrol in Golders Green last Friday, Jukes said the extra government support had allowed the force to focus resources, at a time when the Met is "shrinking".

"It's important to set this team up in a way which means we're not bringing in officers from all over London, without knowledge of the community, but also [taking them] away from other communities. We're able to actually build a team here for the long term."

The Met has faced criticism over cuts to some front-line services, including the removal of dedicated faith officers, which the force says have been drawn into neighbourhood policing roles.

Jukes insists that "absolutely central" to the work of the new community protection teams is their partnership with the Community Security Trust and the volunteer Jewish civilian patrol group Shomrim who he says have "the confidence and trust" of the community.

The Met has said it wants the new team to be "a blueprint for how policing responds when tensions rise" when other communities face spikes in hate crime.

In July, Sir Mark said the Met had increased the police presence around mosques in London, after two mosques in Sutton were the focus of an alleged terror plot.

Rabbi Gabriel Botnick from the Belsize Square Synagogue said the extra police presence was "always welcome and appreciated".

Although he acknowledges that some Jews will be concerned about security, he believes that it is "nothing particularly new".

"It's always just this little bit of background noise that we've not only had to learn to live with in more recent years, but really that we as Jewish people have been living with for millennia."

He said this could be seen in the way some people will change their appearance, or the words they use, to hide their Jewish identity.

"There are many people, all throughout the year, who either take off their head covering, or will wear a hat, to cover their head covering.

"If they have ritual fringes that they normally would have hanging out of their shirt, they'll tuck it in so that people don't see them."

However, he hopes that when people come to the synagogue over the High Holidays they will feel comfortable and trust in the security that is in place.

"A lot of people are just really excited. There's something really comforting and reassuring about being in a community, being with other people who maybe go through the same experiences that you go through."

Botnick adds that the synagogue has also seen a number of non-Jewish people joining its services in order to show their support.

"Just the idea of being with the community is, I think, what most people, whether they're Jewish or not, that's really what people are longing for, that sense of connection.

"And so they're not going to let the possibility of something happening to them stop them from coming to enjoy that thing that they need so deeply."

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