Robert Rinder has asked for all Britons to stand by the Jewish people following the ‘awful’ attack on a Manchester synagogue today, declaring: ‘A community this small cannot stand alone’.
The broadcaster and barrister, 47, has said that ‘many Jews cannot imagine a future here and history tells us what follows when that happens’.
Mr Rinder told the Daily Mail today that the attack was truly ‘awful’.
In a tweet he criticised those who still allowed anti-Semitism to cloud their view on a horrific attack that left two worshippers stabbed to death on Yom Kippur – the most sacred and solemn day in the Jewish calendar.
‘Some still answer this atrocity with “what about…”’, he said.
In a moving tweet in the aftermath of the attack, he urged: ‘If you believe in Britain (wherever you’re from & whatever your faith) you must stand with us’.
Mr Rinder’s grandfather fled to Britain after his family was wiped out in the Holocaust.
He said: ‘On the holiest day of the year we are attacked at a Manchester synagogue.
‘Our children walk to school behind barbed wire protected by guns. Yet some still answer this atrocity with “what about…”
‘This is my country, the sanctuary my grandfather found after surviving the Holocaust, promising freedom under the rule of law. Today I pray for the victims, thank the brave who responded and wonder if that promise is fading. A community this small cannot stand alone. Many Jews cannot imagine a future here and history tells us what follows when that happens.
‘Many Jews cannot imagine a future here and history tells us what follows when that happens’.
He spoke out after a man with a suspected suicide belt killed at least two people outside a Manchester synagogue before being shot by police.
A car was driven into a crowd and a man stabbed at 9.31am on Yom Kippur – the holiest day in the Jewish calendar.
Greater Manchester Police (GMP) said three other victims are in a serious condition after the attack outside Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation Synagogue in Crumpsall.
The force has now confirmed the suspect is also dead, after previously being unable to approach his body due to ‘suspicious items on his person’.
Bomb disposal experts are at the scene, but GMP said a loud noise heard earlier in the day was officers gaining entry to his vehicle as a precaution.
Earlier, hero rabbi Daniel Walker barricaded worshippers inside the building after the suspect crashed into the gate and began stabbing ‘anyone and everyone’.
One witness described him moving from victim to victim in a ‘robotic’ manner ‘like he had a job to do’ – targeting ‘anyone’ wearing a kippah.
He then tried to force his way inside before being shot dead by armed police at 9.38am.
A senior security source, who worked in armed policing for decades, told the Daily Mail that the man’s suicide belt looked real.
Mr Rinder learned just seven years ago how seven of his relatives were slaughtered in Nazi concentration camps in the Second World War while delving into his family history on the BBC show Who Do You Think You Are?
He learned how his great-grandparents and five of their children were killed in the Holocaust, with his grandfather, Morris Malenicky, the only member of the family to survive the war.
Morris’ parents, his four sisters and his brother all died at the Treblinka Camp in Poland in 1940, six months after war broke out.
Morris, who passed away in London in 2001 at the age of 78, was a teenager at the time, and escaped the same fate as the rest of his family after being deemed strong enough to work and put into forced labour at a glass factory in Piotrkow.
He was later sent to the Buchenwald and Schlieben camps in Germany, and finally to Theresienstadt in German-occupied Czechoslovakia, which was liberated by the Russian Army in 1945 three weeks after Morris arrived.
After being brought to the UK by a Jewish charity, Morris met and fell in love with Rob Rinder’s grandmother, Lottie.
As his grandfather’s ‘staggering’ tale was recounted on the show, the emotional TV star said it was ‘impossible to fathom’ how alone Morris would have felt after his entire family was wiped out.
In 1942 Morris registered his family’s deaths in the Holocaust three years earlier, a document Rinder saw for the first time during filming for the show.
The document reads: ”’Malenicky”. Place of birth: ”’Piotrkow, Poland”. Circumstances of death: ”Four sisters, a brother, parents, Treblinka Camp. Gas chambers, crematorium.”’
During filming Rinder travelled to Morris’s birthplace of Piotrkow, Poland to discover more about his relatives.
He had visited the country with his grandfather while Morris was still alive, but admits he wasn’t ready at the time to learn the truth about what happened to the rest of his family.
On the sixth of September 1939 – five days after the start of World War Two – German troops marched into Piotrkow, and within a month they’d created the first ghetto in Nazi-occupied Europe, which housed Morris and his family.
Five months later everyone but Morris was taken to their deaths at Treblinka, among the six million Jewish people murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust.
In the documentary, an emotional Rinder imagined how Morris must have felt to be the only one left behind.
He said: ‘[It’s] just the most staggering thing that passing on a speeding train – your family gone.
‘And then you go back to your house and you’re alone.
‘I mean. It’s impossible to fathom for my grandfather what that must have been like, to come back to nothing.’
