In my son’s reception class, where they are only four and five years old, it is called a game of “hide and seek”. Except it’s not a game, is it.
December 19, 2025 13:50
Have you ever played “sleeping lions”? That game where you have to lie really still and quiet? My children have played it. In fact, my children play it regularly at their Jewish primary school, and it was my four-year-old’s first ever experience of it yesterday. Except it’s not a party game, where the reward is a lollipop or a yoyo. It’s a way of protecting them from the possibility that the school will be attacked by terrorists who hate Jews. It’s otherwise known as a lockdown drill.
I wonder, sometimes, how many people know this. Do they know how anxious we feel when we drop off our children at school in the aftermath of a horrific massacre of innocent Jewish people? How scared my husband admitted to feeling on the school run on Monday, in the wake of the horrors of Sunday’s shooting at Sydney’s Bondi Beach? That I asked him to do the drop off while I sat in the car in case I cried at the sight of police outside the school, and in turn upset our children?
Do they realise the shock waves that spread across the diaspora community around the world, not least among the UK’s 300,000 Jews who already experienced this fear in October after people were murdered at a Manchester synagogue on Yom Kippur?
Well, I’m now telling them.
I was reminded just how abnormal and tragic it is that security is needed for our synagogues and schools when the Manchester attack shook our community.
It’s too easy to get used to the fact that we have security at our sweet little community school. And not just staff from a professional company in stab-proof vests – two men I smile at and thank daily for their dedication – but also a rota of parents who patrol the environs of the grounds to provide extra surveillance.
Every time there is another attack on Jews, anywhere around the world, you can tell by the multiplication of those security staff overnight. After Manchester, there were police outside. Then, too, security and policing at events are ramped up.
Every now and then, friends visiting us in London have asked why there are security staff on the street. "Oh, just guarding the synagogue,” I'd say casually, wondering how they didn’t already know the answer. What privilege!
You know the way parents congregate outside a primary school, snaffling the opportunity for a little socialising? That doesn’t happen at Jewish schools. This remains a generally unspoken rule, until another horror unfolds, when we are reminded to avoid congregating and to disperse quickly when leaving the school premises. We must be cautious not to allow anyone to enter the school gate after us – they must press the buzzer themselves.
But back to “sleeping lions”, which was part of our school’s lockdown drill – scheduled before Sunday, but feeling painfully necessary after it. Our children heard an alarm and the words “sleeping lions”, at which point they needed to be silent and calm, breathe to help focus, and then listen to an adult. Staff closed doors and covered windows, then staff and children hid together in the classrooms and kept quiet until they heard the "all-clear" code words. The children were well-prepared and told on the day of the drill, so they were not taken by surprise.
In my son’s reception class, where they are only four and five years old, it is called a game of “hide and seek”. Except it’s not a game, is it. This is innocent Jewish children going to primary school in Britain today. And everyone should know about it.
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