The other day I was telling a non-Jewish friend that my vague thoughts that one day we might move to Manchester – my husband’s birthplace, a city where we have friends and family, somewhere we like a lot – had now been abandoned forever.
“Why?” she asked.
“Well, Heaton Park,” I replied.
“What do you mean?”
She remembered – just about – that there had been an attack on a synagogue there, when I reminded her. “I’m so sorry – I don’t watch the news,” she said.
But it underlined for me the difference between me and her, the way that my life has been changed forever by what happened on Yom Kippur last year, while others have been hardly affected at all.
The news that yet another planned attack in Manchester was foiled on the holiest day of the Jewish year did not surprise me at all, nor did it especially make me more frightened, or feel any safer. Thank goodness it was averted – of course it won’t be the last time and no doubt this will happen again and again. Thank goodness for CST, for the police and intelligence services, for everyone who works to keep us safe.
But it adds to my sense of alienation. Because I know that this won’t register with most Brits, and a whole load more will shrug and think, “What do they expect?”, or even “That’s what they deserve.” Attacks on Jews going to synagogue, school, social occasions or work are now what we must expect.
Very unusually, I was not at shul last year when the attack happened. I was ill with Covid, lying in bed, and listening in horror to the radio. My family were in shul – and yet not actually in a shul building. Like many people, we often attend services in a building that is not a synagogue – I’m not giving more details for obvious reasons – and the police patrols and extra security that surround our synagogue buildings are not so evident.
I lay there and worried, but also felt immense pride that my husband and kids, not regular shul goers at all, had turned up and were not deterred by the awful news. It was important to show up and support our community, to demonstrate that we were undaunted in the face of terror. It was for the same reason that when the news broke about Bondi, my husband missed a family party to attend a Chanukah candle-lighting in torrential rain.
Last year I was struck by the solidarity that the community showed with the worshippers of Heaton Park. “We can’t find anyone in the Jewish community to talk to us,” said the radio presenter, seemingly baffled that they couldn’t find anyone who would break the sanctity of Yom Kippur to rush to a microphone. How unlikely was that in the modern day? By the next day, the BBC was calling it an attack on a mosque. When I complained, they told me that “mistakes happen”.
This year, at Rosh Hashanah, walking towards the service in the building that isn’t a shul, I encountered a man holding a long, black box. The sort of box that could – my imagination leapt to conclusions – hold a gun or a knife. “What’s that?” I said, without hesitating.
“I’m looking for the wedding,” he said.
“Well, it’s not here,” I answered, and directed him, probably wrongly, far from our prayers.
The next day, I went back to my childhood shul. The street outside was busy with security guards – some of them my friends – and I felt very grateful to them.
But strangely, once I was inside, I forgot all the worries about security. Every service I went to was lovely, and it was surprisingly easy to concentrate on the service and the songs. During the year, my family joined New West End synagogue, which is blessed with a wonderful choir, and I am looking forward to Succot there.
Somehow, in this awful year since the attack on Heaton Park I have rediscovered the joy that can come from going to shul, and found several different communities where I feel at home. Talking to colleagues today at work, I realise I am not alone. “Shul was absolutely beautiful this year,” said one. “I felt really proud of our community,” said another.
Thirty years ago, I was working in the Canary Wharf tower when an IRA bomb exploded just across the water from us. We didn't evacuate but carried on working, eventually walking down 18 flights of stairs before being shuttled to a pub on the Isle of Dogs. I was pregnant at the time, and when the bomb went off and I felt the building shake, I also felt my daughter kick for the very first time.
I learned two things from that experience. One is that you don’t ever let terrorists stop you living your life as long as you are still alive. But the other is that an attack on your way of life is an opportunity to stop and think about your priorities.
The IRA attack made me more determined to be a very hands-on mum to my children, and Heaton Park has made me more of a proud, shul-going Jew. If the intention of the haters is to scare us away from the full experience of being Jewish, then they will fail. We're stubborn, we're resilient and we're extremely contrary.
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