For two Jews in Manchester, going to synagogue on Yom Kippur to pray to be inscribed in the Book of Life cost them their lives at the hands of a terrorist. The Gaza war is accelerating the danger to Jews around the world
2 October 2025 – Yom Kippur is, for Jews across the world, a day of quiet and solemn reflection. Observant Jews spend the entire day in synagogue, dedicated to fasting and prayer. Even less observant Jews do a minimum to respect the day’s peace, whether or not they fast or attend synagogue. In Israel, there are no formal laws requiring that the roads remain closed – yet there is an unspoken social norm not to drive, leaving the roads to pedestrians and cyclists.
But this year, as in too many other years, peaceful observance was elusive – if not impossible, especially for Jews in the United Kingdom. Just after nine in the morning, on the holiest of days in the Jewish year, a man drove a car into congregants outside the Heaton Park Synagogue in Crumpsall, a Manchester suburb, and began stabbing them, killing two and seriously wounding three, before he was surrounded and shot dead by police.
For the rest of the day, across the UK and surely across the Jewish world, as the news spread, rabbis and communal leaders concerned themselves less with prayers and more about intensifying the already high level of protection in place to protect Jews who simply want to worship.
There is something horrifically absurd about the idea of trying to go to synagogue to pray to be inscribed in the Book of Life for another year – and risking one’s life to do it. In Manchester, it cost at least two Jewish congregants their lives.
As a Heaton Park synagogue member and community leader Raphi Bloom told the U.K. media, the attack was “the culmination of something that the Jewish community has been fearing for two years” after facing a “tsunami of Jew hatred since October 7.”
“Every Jew in this community knew this day would come,” Bloom declared. This was indeed the first deadly attack on a U.K. synagogue for decades.
Across the airwaves and online, in very non-Yom Kippur fashion, fingers were pointed, insults hurled, and blame generously spread around over the attack, from vitriol directed at the U.K. authorities for failing to sufficiently protect its embattled Jewish community, with a parallel pile-on on Israel and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the ferocity of Israel’s two-year war on Gaza in response to the October 7 massacre.
Israel is obviously not responsible for the historic or contemporary presence of antisemitism in Great Britain – or Europe, or the United States. As the U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer noted on Thursday, Manchester was a “vile terrorist attack that attacked Jews, because they are Jews.”
But, as Irish writer Conor Cruise O’Brien famously observed, “antisemitism is a very light sleeper.”
As Israel’s government has failed to aggressively pursue a way to end the Gaza conflict and construct a vision for a better future with as much determination as it has waged the war, it has provided a relentless bullhorn that has woken the beast of antisemitism, pouring accelerant on that light-sleeping Jew hatred. At the same time, pro-Palestinian protests in the U.S. and elsewhere have mutated into violence against Jews.
The Gaza war must end for a long list of reasons: to free the hostages, to stop the death and suffering in Gaza, to relieve Israel’s rapidly growing alarming diplomatic isolation and give its exhausted citizens hope for their future.
Ending the war won’t be a magic pill that ends antisemitic terror around the world. But as France’s President Emmanuel Macron wrote in an August letter to Netanyahu, the war “emboldens” those who use Israel’s actions “as a pretext for antisemitism,” thus further endangering Jewish communities whose synagogues already require fortress-like security. Not ending the war means the campaign against Jews worldwide will depressingly, but inevitably, accelerate.