On the day of the Islamic atrocity in Sydney, Australia, I went with my wife and son to a building somewhere in the West of England that for Shabbat and Jewish festivals becomes a synagogue for the surprisingly large number of rural Jews that live in that area. Despite the horror that had taken place half a world away we gathered to light the Channuka lights and tell the story of how the Jews reclaimed their country from the oppression of the ancient Greeks and gained self government for a while until the Romans came to take self government away from the Jews again.
It was for me an imperative that we turned up in order to defy the murderous arseholes who had taken Jewish lives for no other reason than that they were Jewish and therefore a target for the followers of a deranged and dangerous ideology. We had an impromptu play about the story of Channuka which went really really well and after the play the Rabbi asked for any questions about the play and about the Channuka story.
My ten year old son, quite surprisingly for him as he’s not normally one to first put his hand up to ask questions, put his hand high in the air and asked the Rabbi ‘Why is there a police car outside?’ We’d already told him about the Jihadist attack in Sydney but he obviously had not taken in the enormity of it. It was clearly not normal for there to be a police car outside of the building we use as a synagogue and he noticed this difference.
The Rabbi when she replied gave an answer that was both admirable and sad. She said something along the lines that the police are ‘always outside but not always noticed’. The reply that the Rabbi gave was admirably age and child appropriate, but it was also sad that such a reply needed to be given and that my child had to ask such a question.
As my child likes to run around the circumference of the building when he arrives as we have a long car journey to get to the ersatz synagogue (approx 90 mile round trip) and he needs to let off steam he also noticed the big beefy guys standing outside the door and checking people in and checking people out. The need for beefy guys standing outside a synagogue is not and should not be normal in the UK. Sadly it is getting far too normal now what with the rise in Islamic and Far Left derived Jew hatred in Britain.
When we went to Israel for a holiday back in 2024 we went to thank Hashem for our child’s existence (we prayed for a miracle baby at the Western Wall when we were there on our honeymoon a few years previously) he accepted the fact that there were soldiers and police everywhere in Israel as being something normal for Israel and no more unsettling for him than the fact that there were different foods in Israel from what he is used to. But is not and should not be normal for police to be stationed outside a synagogue in the UK in order to allow Jews to worship freely.
We are in this position because the political classes didn’t listen to the copious warnings from both Jews and non-Jews about radical Islam and this ideology’s handmaidens on the Far Left. A police car outside of a synagogue or a building used as a synagogue because of the potential danger from nutcase Moslems and equally mad Far Leftists is a terrible thing to see and have to experience. It is an indictment on just how badly successive government’s policies regarding top down and centrally imposed multiculturalism and the collective naivetyof those in authority about the nature of the cultures that have been imported, has failed and failed in such a dismal manner.
‘Why is there a police car outside’ is not a question I ever wanted my child or any child to ask at a synagogue service in Britain and the fact that he felt he had to ask such a question is indicative on how badly things are getting for Jews in the United Kingdom and a portent of how bad things could get. Jews in Britain are not yet at the stage which my wife’s grandmother found herself in which was having to flee Paris by the North as the Germans came in from the East in 1940, but there are certainly signs and portents that indicate that such an awful situation as she experienced might be closer around the corner for British Jews than we might like to think they are.