Safety fears among British Jews leapt after October 7 Hamas attack, new data reveals

More than a half of strictly Orthodox Jews – 53 per cent – had encountered antisemitism.

Overall, nearly a third – 32 per cent – of UK Jews reported experiencing an antisemitic incident in 2024, the same proportion as in 2021 after another round of conflict between Israel and Hamas.

The results, the report stated, “begin to point to an increasingly deteriorating climate for Jews collectively since that time, at least in terms of how secure they feel.”

in 2021, after the brief conflict in Gaza,  “a relatively high proportion of British Jews felt unsafe” – 18 per cent.

But the situation had “clearly improved somewhat” by the time JPR next surveyed the Jewish community the following year in  2022, the author of the report, JPR chief executive Dr Jonathan Boyd, noted.

“Yet one of the questions – and indeed anxieties – of British Jews today is whether their sense of insecurity will dwindle again when the war in Gaza finally ends, as it did after 2021, or whether it will remain or even extend further into the Jewish population in the longer-term as a result of a fundamental change that may have occurred concerning the place of Jews in Britain,” he said.

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The latest survey also shows declining trust in institutions with only the legal system and parliament rating above 5 on a 10-point scale.

Trust in the legal system remained at a score of 6.1 – the same as last year – while that in Parliament was slightly up from 5.1 to 5.5.

Trust in the police was fractionally up from 4.9 last year to 5 this year.

But trust in the Labour Party fell from 4.2 to 3.6 this year. For the Conservatives, it rose from 3.3 to 3.5.

But it was well below either for Reform, which scored only 1.9 out of 10 on the trust index.

And the BBC’s trust rating slipped further from 3.8 to 3.6.