Days after the atrocities unleashed by Hamas terrorists on October 7, when our minds were still reeling from that darkest day, I remember clutching my young son’s hand as we walked through the doors of our local supermarket.
I didn’t notice he was still wearing his kippah, which he wears every day at his Jewish primary school – but someone else had.
‘Why don’t you f*** off and go back to your own country?’ the man shouted at us.
But I am in my country, I whispered fearfully under my breath.
My son didn’t need to be told twice either. He whipped that kippah off his head, the clips still attached to his hair, and stuffed it into his pocket.
Apart from with my husband, I have seldom spoken of that story until now. Because in my heart I believed Britain was and still is the tolerant country I had grown up in. This man was a racist, but an anomaly.
In all my years, I had been very thankful not to have ever personally experienced any incidents of anti-Semitism. Britain has been good to the Jews, my parents and grandparents constantly told me, and I had no reason to believe otherwise.
But the events of the last two years have shown a series of disquieting incidents that have increasingly led British Jews to believe they are no longer as safe as they were.
And if you can’t be safe in your own home, where can you be?
The sickening truth is that it’s not just in Britain but around the world that Jewish communities are feeling alarmed, fearful, on edge.
This week’s horrific antisemitic attack in Bondi Beach that left 15 dead and more than 40 injured was just the latest in a spate of hate-driven killings targeting Jewish people.
It matters little that events took place more than 10,000 miles away. The sight of Jewish families gathering together to light candles on the first night of the Chanukah festival was one repeated thousands of times over within Jewish communities around the world.
The shootings happened in Australia, but many were thinking this could have been the UK.
In fact two men are on trial right now in Britain charged with plotting a large-scale terrorist attack in Manchester, having been found with ‘two assault rifles, a semi-automatic pistol and almost 200 rounds of ammunition’.
The pair – who have been described as Islamist extremists – planned to ‘kill as many Jewish people as they could’, prosecutors have alleged.
This trial is entirely separate to October’s terror attack on Heaton Park synagogue on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, which killed two worshippers and left a third seriously injured.
In light of these incidents, security measures – which were already considered high in comparison to other communities – have been ramped up even further.
Professional security guards, crash-proof metal fencing and CCTV were all par for the course before October 7, because of fears of synagogues and schools being targeted.
Now youngsters also undergo specialist terror training, where a codeword will trigger them all to immediately lie on the ground, under tables, or crouched beneath windows. They must stay silent and still until they are given the all-clear.
As a parent I should feel reassured by such measures, which have become normalised in our life as Jews in Britain today.
But just because it is normalised, does not mean I will ever accept this as normal.
Neither is it normal to have to go through security barriers before attending a communal gathering for Chanukah, which was additionally flanked by police officers and volunteers from Community Security Trust (CST), a dedicated charity aimed at keeping British Jewry safe.
Even with all these reassurances, the emotional toll has been high. I’ve done my best to shield my children from the stark reality of these terror incidents, but such things always have a way of filtering through to young ears.
In the weeks after October 7, I will never forget how my son would cry himself to sleep because of a recurring nightmare.
‘Is a bad man going to come through the window and get me?’ he would ask.
Of course not, I would tell him. We are safe here. I said the words even as I began to doubt them for myself.
Amid the background of such stark moments, these troubling times have led me to consider whether there really is a future for my children in Britain.
My mind thinks of the disquieting correlation between what we are experiencing now – and what my great-grandparents must have been going through more than 130 years ago.
They lived in the shtetls, small Jewish communities sprinkled around the Pale of Settlement, for centuries until the surging viciousness of pogroms led them to pack their bags and leave for a better life in Britain.
They saw the UK as their sanctuary, their haven. A place where they were finally safe.
Britain again came to the rescue for my husband’s family – his grandmother escaping from her home on the German-Polish border just before the war; his Polish grandfather, liberated from a Soviet labour camp by the British, before going on to join their army and proudly serve as a paratrooper.
He was the sole survivor of his family, all of whom were murdered at Auschwitz. But Britain gave him a new life when everything else had been taken from him.
Now two generations on, we are aghast at sitting round the kitchen table and having the same conversations again.
The sad, petrifying truth is our tolerant country has been too tolerant to hatred also. Pandora’s antisemitic box has been opened and we don’t know how or even if we can close it.
Many will not realise that the Jewish population, numbering 270,000 people, makes up just 0.4 per cent of the UK population. My greatest fear is anti-Jewish hatred will begin driving thousands away – and within the blink of an eye this country will change beyond recognition.
My family fled their homes to come to Britain because of antisemitism.
It should be a source of national shame that Jewish people would consider leaving Britain for the same reason decades later.
