LONDON — Since the terrorist attack on a Manchester, England, synagogue on Yom Kippur that left two congregants dead, British politicians have redoubled their efforts to reassure the country’s Jewish community, which has been increasingly concerned about security issues amid widespread anti-Israel sentiment that has grown in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terror attacks and ensuing war in Gaza. 

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer promised to do “everything” in his power to protect the Jewish community, including the recent approval of £10 million ($13 million) in emergency funds to provide greater security.

But while the added financial resources for more guards and extra security has been welcomed by the U.K.’s Jewish community, there remains considerable unease and hostility toward the government, something that became starkly apparent the day after Yom Kippur.

When David Lammy, the country’s deputy prime minister, attended a vigil close to Heaton Park synagogue the day after the attack, he was booed and heckled with cries of “Shame on you” and “Blood on your hands.” 

Lammy was foreign secretary when Britain said it intended to recognize a Palestinian state earlier this year. The move was formally announced by Starmer last month, alongside similar action taken by countries including France, Australia and Canada. 

In his previous role, Lammy imposed restrictions on British arms sales to Israel and twice summoned Israel’s ambassador to the U.K. to criticize him over Israel’s handling of the Gaza war. Lammy and his parliamentary colleagues have also been criticized by the Jewish community for not doing enough to protect them by allowing hostile anti-Israel marches to proceed week after week in British cities. 

“What David Lammy and his government have done has allowed this to happen,” Melanie, who asked only to be identified by her first name, told Jewish Insider. The 42-year-old nurse, who was among those who booed Lammy, attended the vigil with her husband and three children, all of whom attend a Jewish school close to the targeted synagogue.  

The angry outburst included cries of “Go to Palestine, leave us alone,” and “You have allowed Jew hatred in Manchester.” 

“What right did that man have to be there? That was probably the worst person they [the government] could have sent,” said Melanie. “I don’t know who made that decision but it was the wrong decision.”

As in many Western European countries, incidents of antisemitism in the U.K. have skyrocketed over the last two years. In its latest report, the Community Security Trust (CST), a charity that works towards Britain’s Jewish communal safety and monitors antisemitism, revealed that 1,521 antisemitic incidents were reported in the first half of 2025. This was the second highest level ever recorded for that period, just behind the same timeframe in 2024.

Among the incidents in recent months have been synagogues desecrated with excrement, the vandalism of a rabbi’s home with a swastika and an incident in which visibly Jewish teenagers were shot at with an air rifle. 

Meanwhile last week, soccer club Aston Villa announced that it was banning fans of Maccabi Tel Aviv from attending a match at their stadium next month. The decision came after police in Birmingham, Britain’s second-largest city and home to a substantial Muslim population, warned it could not guarantee fans’ safety, leading the Israeli football club to announce on Monday that it would decline any tickets offered to its fans out of concern for their wellbeing and safety. The U.K. government said it was “deeply saddened” by Maccabi Tel Aviv’s decision.

Writing in The Guardian in the wake of the Manchester attack, Dave Rich, director of policy at CST, said, “Antisemitism has been allowed to rise in an unacceptable way for far too long. Last year’s official hate-crime statistics showed that a Jewish person in Britain was 12 times more likely to be the victim of a religious hate crime than someone from any other faith background. Calls for violence against Jews, or Israelis, or Zionists, online and on our streets, have become normalised in parts of our politics.”

The U.K.’s recognition of a Palestinian state was also met with concern over the message the move conveyed about the country’s priorities around the war in Gaza. 

A survey of over 4,800 British Jews conducted prior to the Manchester attack by the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, a U.K.-based Jewish research organization, found that Jews’ sense of “ambient antisemitism” in society, including hostile media coverage, online commentary and microaggressions, had increased substantially — 45% of respondents said they experienced it “frequently” or “regularly” in 2025, as opposed to only 8% of British Jews before the Oct. 7 attacks. 

In a statement released after the Manchester, attack CST described what happened on Yom Kippur as “the kind of terrorist attack that we have prepared for over many years.” 

That is cold comfort for many in the community. “If somebody decided to ram a car along the pavement as the kids were heading into school, they would be hitting lots of kids and lots of parents,” Melanie, the nurse who attended the vigil, said.

“We don’t have any thoughts that the government is going to protect us because they haven’t done so far,” she said. “It’s terrifying for the kids to know this is the world they’re growing up in.

Is there any place for Jews in this country anymore? If things carry on the way they’re going, I don’t think so because we’re just targeted all the time.”

Lord Katz, a government frontbencher in the House of Lords, told JI that the government has been “acutely aware of the increasing fear and anxiety of the community over the past two years.” 

“Whatever your views on the Israeli government, it’s always been clear that that shouldn’t impact on the way that British Jews live their lives and the government’s commitment to working with the CST and other communal bodies to ensure they have enough funding and the right legal measures in place to tackle antisemitism is very very clear and is underlined by lots of recent activity,” he said. 

“In the long term, though, it has to be about tackling the cause and not just the symptoms. It has to be done through education and building community cohesion and there’s no easy route to that.”

Katz added: “This isn’t a party political issue — whether it’s attending football matches, wearing Jewish insignia, using the NHS [National Health Service] or feeling safe on our streets and campuses, the Government knows British Jews are fearful and will protect our rights, liberties and way of life.”

Journalist Nicole Lampert, who has been outspoken about antisemitism in the U.K., said that antisemitism began to flourish under the previous Conservative government. The marches have been taking place since the start of the war when Rishi Sunak and his Conservative government was still in power. 

She said: “There are many people to blame, but of course, the people that are in control of things are the government,” she said, adding that Labour “came with a history of antisemitism,” referring to the party’s previous leadership under Jeremy Corbyn, who had a long record of anti-Israel and antisemitic rhetoric.

In 2020, an investigation by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) found that under Corbyn the party had a culture “which, at best, did not do enough to prevent antisemitism and, at worst, could be seen to accept it”.

Lampert said, “Many of the people that were in the cabinet, including Keir Starmer, had been in the cabinet with Jeremy Corbyn and had told us to vote for Jeremy Corbyn and had refused to really speak out against antisemitism.”

“Although Keir Starmer said ‘I’m going to clear this party of antisemitism’ [in his leadership campaign], in some ways he used antisemitism as a blunt tool to just get rid of the far left in his party,” she added.

“They didn’t use it as an opportunity for a teachable moment as to what antisemitism actually is and what they’d done wrong,” Lampert said. “That was really frustrating because antisemitism is complex. If you had explained ‘this is why you’re antisemitic’ or ‘this was what was wrong,’ that would’ve been better.” 

Alex Hearn, co-director of the campaign group Labour Against Antisemitism, agreed.

“Time after time we’ve seen that it’s easier to remove Jews rather than to challenge racism,” he said. “It’s easier to erase the people who cooperate rather than challenge the vocal and unlawful minority. 

“The places we’re allowed to go safely are getting narrower and narrower. Don’t go to central London during marches, don’t walk down the streets looking visibly Jewish, don’t go on social media. And it’s just growing and growing, whether it be comedy clubs or now football matches — our world is getting smaller,” Hearn said. “Then what we’re hearing from our government is that they say the right things when they have to and we find ourselves applauding the sentiments, but wondering where the meaningful action is.”

Hearn added: “Keir Starmer has announced increased security funding to the Jewish community, but other things show why that’s necessary: because the authorities consistently allow racists to run riot on our streets. So we’re building higher and higher fences but we’re not addressing the issue. The most high fences can’t keep everyone out, as we’ve learned from Manchester.”

Dovid Lewis, the rabbi of Bowdon synagogue in south Manchester, said that, like many others, he had been “shaken and shocked” but “not surprised” by the Yom Kippur attack. “Antisemitism is insidious throughout society at the moment,” he said. 

“There’s a reason why we have guards outside shul,” he said. “It’s not because we’re paranoid. It’s because there’s a credible threat.”

One of the worshippers at Lewis’ synagogue told him that following the attack she felt most insulted by an interview in which Starmer said that Jews “should feel comfortable in my country.”

The rabbi responded, “We don’t need to feel comfortable in the prime minister’s country — this is our country. I was born here, my parents were born here, my grandparents were born here.”

“You can’t declare [support for] a Palestinian state on Erev Rosh Hashanah and declare at the Labour Party conference, between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, that Israel is committing genocide, then scratch your head and wonder why somebody named Jihad Al-Shamie did what he did several days later,” he said. “There is a cause and an effect.”

The University of Maryland Student Government Association is set to consider a resolution at the start of Yom Kippur on Wednesday evening calling on the university and its charitable foundation to implement a boycott of companies and academic institutions with ties to “Israel’s regime of apartheid and occupation.”

The final vote “was first set for Rosh Hashanah and now moved to Yom Kippur,” Leo Terrell,  who leads the Trump administration’s antisemitism task force, wrote on X. Terrell criticized UMD’s student government for “intentionally picking the holiest days of the year for Jews in order to force them to choose between defending their Zionist identities or observing their religion.” 

UMD has one of the largest Jewish student populations in the country — nearly 20% of the College Park undergraduate student body of more than 30,000 students is Jewish, according to Hillel International.  

When the vote was announced, UMD President Darryll Pines told the university’s newspaper, The Diamondback, that the university supports SGA’s right to debate the issue. But he added that the university wants to ensure the process is “open and fair and has dialogue from all parties of our broad student body.” 

“Resolutions voted on by the Student Government Association are student-led and reflect perspectives of voting members of the SGA,” a university spokesperson told Jewish Insider. “They have no bearing on university policy or practice.” 

Still, Jewish leaders on-campus expressed concern about the vote’s impact on campus climate for Jewish students — especially as it’s being held on a Jewish holiday.   

“Yom Kippur is the holiest day of the year for the Jewish people, a time of introspection when our students are fasting, and attending prayer services with their community. Holding a vote that seeks to demonize the Jewish homeland on a day when Jewish students will not be able to participate is exclusionary, biased and flat-out wrong,” Rabbi Ari Israel, executive director of UMD Hillel, told JI. 

“I am deeply disappointed that SGA decided to hold a BDS vote on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year for the Jewish people,” Einav Tsach, a senior studying journalism and business who formerly led Mishelanu, an on-campus Israeli-American cultural association, told JI. “This strategy underscores the true intention of the BDS campaign: to divide our campus community and exclude Jewish students from a vote that is biased and wrong.”

If the resolution passes, the student government would urge the university and the University of Maryland College Park Foundation to implement boycott, divestment and sanctions policies against companies and institutions “complicit in the oppression of Palestinians.” 

The resolution mentions Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin as two companies that provide infrastructure used by Israel. The association would also call on the university to implement a process for student oversight on investments and partnerships to ensure it isn’t “complicit in violations of international law and human rights, including those perpetrated against the Palestinian people.”

UMD’s student government voted in support of divestment in a campuswide referendum in April, at which time the university responded that it would not divest from Israel. Other divestment resolutions fell short of advancing in 2017, 2019 and 2024. 

The University of Maryland hasn’t faced the same levels of antisemitism that have occurred on many elite campuses since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terror attacks in Israel. 

However, the university faced controversy last year when it granted Students for Justice in Palestine a permit to hold a demonstration on the campus’ central McKeldin Mall on the first anniversary of the attacks, prompting swift backlash from campus groups including Hillel and the Jewish Student Union. 

After the university canceled the protest, SJP filed a lawsuit stating that its First Amendment rights had been violated. A federal judge wrote in an opinion that the group “has demonstrated a substantial likelihood that it will prevail [in its lawsuit] on the merits of its freedom of speech claim.” 

The university reversed its decision and allowed the demonstration to take place, but the lawsuit moved forward. In August, the University of Maryland and Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown asked the state to approve their joint request to settle the First Amendment lawsuit for $100,000 paid to the plaintiffs. 

It was Yom Kippur 2016, and Sarah Hurwitz was attending prayer services in Washington, D.C. The longtime speechwriter for then-First Lady Michelle Obama didn’t welcome the intrusion of work into the holiest day in the Jewish calendar. 

But it was also just one day before the first lady was poised to make a memorable, impassioned and fiery address. In that speech in Manchester, New Hampshire, the First Lady lambasted then-candidate Donald Trump for “countless examples of how he has treated women his whole life… The belief that you can do anything you want to a woman. It is cruel. It’s frightening. And the truth is, it hurts. It hurts.” Obama’s speech was labeled “epic” by The Washington Post and “the most powerful speech of this election” by Vogue. 

And a day earlier, in the midst of the Yom Kippur liturgy, Hurwitz chose to have her say in drafting that address as well. 

“I put a lot of thought into how I felt about having to work in a moment where I didn’t want to be working,” Hurwitz recalled in a recent phone interview with Jewish Insider. “In the end, weighing all the costs and weighing the goals that we were working for… That was the calculation I made.”

Hurwitz said she made the choice to work on a speech that was able to “help so many people who’ve experienced sexual assault feel seen and heard… it was a really powerful, moving speech I was really proud to be a part of.” And she understands that all Jews “make that calculation for themselves in the modern world. I think for many Jews it’s just a constant balancing act.”

Those calculations and decisions all came along with Hurwitz’s recent journey to Judaism, an exploration on which she embarked in her mid-30s, which led her to embrace the religion she had mostly avoided as a child and young adult. She chronicled this journey, her beliefs and her approach to Judaism in her debut book, published today, titled Here All Along: Finding Meaning, Spirituality, and a Deeper Connection to Life — in Judaism. 

In the book’s intro, Hurwitz wrote that there was no major crisis point or wake-up call that led her to explore Judaism. Instead, despite working around the clock at the White House, she decided on a whim to sign up for a class at a D.C. Jewish center shortly after a breakup. 

“What I discovered in that class utterly floored me,” she wrote. Hurwitz — who worked as a speechwriter for Hillary Clinton’s 2008 primary campaign before being hired by President Barack Obama in 2009 and then transitioning to work for the first lady from 2010-2017 — discovered a Judaism that not only inspired and moved her but also mirrored her career in public service. 

“[People] know about tikkun olam and tzedaka and caring for the stranger, but Judaism has a lot of really deeper insights,” she told JI. “It has a lot of very specific thinking about how you help those who are struggling, about the value of each human life, and I think the more I learned about all of that, the more I was just struck by how much that was the driving force of my career in politics.” 

And years after she first began studying Judaism, Hurwitz said, she realized that “it might be helpful to write a book that I wish I’d had when I first started learning.”

In it, she strives to “cover the basics while also unearthing some of the deeper insights and showing people that Judaism has so much to offer about how to live a good life, how to be a better person and how to have spiritual connection.”

While Hurwitz admits D.C. has a certain reputation — one that is often not conducive to religion and spirituality — she said her journey to embrace Judaism fit in pretty well. 

“In the Obama White House, so many of my colleagues were such spiritual, compassionate, decent people,” she said. “So I think they really kind of identified with what I was doing, admired what I was doing… if you look at folks in the Obama White House, if you look at folks at a lot of the nonprofits… you’re going to find a lot of people who are not just self-centered, ambitious and self absorbed. I think you’ll find people who really care deeply about other people and are really public minded.” And those values, she said, “felt very in line with a lot of what I was thinking about when I was studying Judaism.”

Hurwitz experimented with all sorts of Jewish practices, finding the Jewish traditions that spoke to her and that jibed with her lifestyle. 

“I currently observe a grand total of two of the rules of keeping kosher — I don’t eat pork or shellfish,” she wrote in Here All Along. “I don’t observe the laws around Shabbat (which prohibit working on Shabbat, among many other things), though I do have regular Shabbat dinners with friends. I don’t spend much time in synagogues, but I do attend services for the major holidays, and I celebrate others. I also try to observe the ethical mitzvot and feel guilty about my frequent lapses in doing so. And I care enough about Judaism to devote thousands of hours to studying it (which is a mitzvah) and writing about it.”

The speechwriter said she doesn’t identify with any one denomination, but finds beauty and draws meaning from all of them. 

“I really appreciate the Reform movement’s inclusion and openness, its focus on social justice,” she told JI. “I really appreciate the rigor of the Orthodox movement and its deep textual learning and the commitments to things like Shabbat, which I think is just so powerful. When you actually spend time with folks who are observing Shabbat very, very rigorously, they are truly creating a sanctuary in time that’s special… I admire that. I also admire the Conservative movement’s focus on rigor plus inclusion.”

One topic that doesn’t play a significant role in Hurwitz’s book is the State of Israel. While she mentions traveling there, the Jewish community’s relationship to Zionism is largely unexplored in its pages. But that decision, Hurwitz said, doesn’t mean it’s not a part of her life.

“The modern State of Israel is very important to me,” she said. “My concern was that too often it’s just reduced to these very simplistic talking points and this divisive polarizing language that drives me crazy.” Therefore, Hurwitz didn’t want or feel the need to devote any particular chapter to it.

“Israel is not just some concept,” she said. “It’s a thriving democracy. It is a people, it is a culture, it is a history.”