MANCHESTER, England—At Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation, worshippers now pass through 10-foot security gates to enter the Orthodox synagogue. Inside, posters outline emergency lockdown procedures and offer support for those affected by antisemitism. A reinforced door has replaced the one left riddled with bullet holes a year ago.
During this year’s Yom Kippur service, the synagogue was full, except for two seats that remained empty, marked with plaques bearing the names of Adrian Daulby, 53, and Melvin Cravitz, 66, the two members killed in the attack on Oct. 2, 2025. When a special memorial prayer was recited for them, “you could hear a pin drop,” says congregant Alan Levy.
Throughout the service, Levy found himself constantly checking the time. “I couldn’t take my eye off the clock,” he remembers.
Each glance took him back to what had been happening at that exact same time a year earlier, when he and fellow worshippers pressed their bodies against the door to hold off a knife-wielding terrorist.
Yet despite the pain of returning, the sanctuary was filled to near-capacity. “People felt part of a community,” Levy says. “People felt that we were all in it together. ... On the anniversary, the Heaton Park community all came to support the shul.”
For synagogue member Raphi Bloom, who had been on his way there when the attack occurred, the anniversary service carried a heavy weight. “You could feel the tension in the air, you could feel that people felt they had an extra sense of responsibility, and it was very poignant,” he recalls.
As the traditional Yom Kippur prayers were recited—asking “who shall live and who shall die; who shall live out his allotted time and who shall depart before his time”—Bloom’s mind returned to the previous evening’s service one year earlier.
He remembered standing in the sanctuary alongside Adrian and Melvin. “And the next day they were dead, by the hand of a terrorist.”
‘Root causes aren’t being tackled’
A year after the attack, the trauma across Greater Manchester’s Jewish community remains palpable. Many say that the security upgrades, while necessary, feel like a constant, sobering reminder of ongoing hostility in the same month marked by the Hamas-led massacre of 1,200 people in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and the terrorist shooting at the Tree of Life*Or L’Simcha synagogue in Pittsburgh on Oct. 27, 2018, which left 11 Jewish worshippers dead.
“Ultimately, we live behind more walls and more gates than we ever have,” says Yoni Finlay, a congregant who was wounded by police gunfire while helping keep the attacker out. “The reality is you know things have been done. ... But I don’t think we feel safer. The community doesn’t feel safer a year on. It often feels like the root causes aren’t being tackled, almost like a sticking plaster.”
That insecurity is reinforced by day-to-day encounters. Synagogue president Hilary Foxler notes that drive-by verbal abuse and offensive hand gestures directed at the synagogue are a near-daily occurrence, monitored constantly on 24-hour CCTV. Nearby Jewish schools now resemble “fortresses,” Finlay says, where children practice emergency evacuation drills—a reality that makes educational settings feel eerily akin to “open-air prisons” to anxious parents and grandparents.
“I worry personally what the future of this country holds for my children,” Yoni reflects. “Where are we going, and what will things be like when they are adults?”
For members of the wider Manchester Jewish community with family at Heaton Park, the day brought its own distinct fear. Gary Rich was at another synagogue when he heard about the attack. His father was at Heaton Park, and Rich rushed to find out whether he was safe. He was relieved to find out that he was, but later that afternoon, while walking his dog a few minutes from the synagogue, someone wound down a car window and shouted abuse at him.
Security had already been part of his children’s school lives for years. When one of his sons visited a non-Jewish college, he was startled that he could simply walk into the reception area.
The congregation’s fears have been sharpened by events beyond Heaton Park: the arson attack that destroyed four Hatzola ambulances in Golders Green, a heavily Jewish suburb of London, and the stabbing of two Jewish men there weeks later. On Sept. 19, the afternoon before the start of Yom Kippur this year, counterterrorism police arrested two men in Manchester over a suspected plot to target the local Jewish community. Police did not publicly identify a specific intended target, yet this did little to ease the worries of multiple congregants, who speculated whether it was their synagogue once again.
For Foxler, the arrests reinforced a thought she had struggled with since last year’s attack: “The fact that we’ve been hit once doesn’t mean we’re immune from being a target again.”
‘This is my home’
Conversations about leaving Britain have become hard to avoid. Families interviewed spoke of friends and relatives considering moving to Israel, despite the war there, and of the ties that make leaving difficult.
“There’s a lot of talk,” says Foxler, about “which country is safe for us to go to, apart from Israel. I know people that have gone, and people that would go, but they’ve got family here. It’s very difficult.”
Bloom says, “I think you’d have to be walking around with earplugs in, not to have heard those conversations.”
His message to fellow British Jews, however, is one of resolve. “If you’re going to leave, leave because you want to leave. Don’t leave because you’re running—is my comment to fellow British Jews.”
He adds: “I’m a proud Mancunian Jew. This is my home. This is my city.”
Bloom points to the deep roots of the community as proof of its staying power, saying, “you only have to look at my organization, the Fed, which next year will celebrate 160 years of existence helping the most vulnerable and poor in our community. You know we’re not going anywhere.”
Still, he acknowledges, “that doesn’t mean that it’s not scary; it doesn’t mean that it’s not dangerous; it does not mean that we’re not under threat. But we are resilient, and certainly, I’m not a Jew with trembling knees, to paraphrase Menachem Begin,” Israel’s prime minister from 1977 to 1983. “And we’re not going to go anywhere. We’re going to fight for what is our right as British Jews to lead dignified lives.”
‘A Venn diagram’
Several congregants said the escalation of hostility towards British Jews is inseparable from government positions and political rhetoric about Israel.
“When certain language is used, it soaks up the hatred and the justification,” says Yoni Finlay, who was shot as he helped barricade the synagogue door during the attack. “Heaton Park didn’t happen on the morning itself—that someone woke up and decided ‘I am going to attack a shul.’ It came from way before that. It builds up and then it ends up with something like Heaton Park.”
Finlay points to British Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband’s use of the term “ethnic cleansing” in relation to Palestinians in parts of Judea and Samaria, more commonly referred to as the West Bank, saying it could give people the justification to think, “‘Oh, well, if that is happening, I can go and do this then.’”
Bloom recalls what the attacker was shouting at worshippers as he tried to force his way inside. “As the terrorist, Jihad al-Shamie, tried to kick in the doors of the synagogue to murder more Jews, he was screaming, ‘This is what you get for murdering children!”
Bloom is a management board member of the Jewish Representative Council of Greater Manchester, whose advocacy has included meetings with the current prime minister, Andy Burnham, to press for action concerning the community’s safety.
“We said to him very clearly that if you place the blame for everything from Oct. 8 onwards on Israel without applying any agency to Hamas or the Palestinians, then you are incentivising those who seek to harm us because of their views on Israel’s actions in Gaza,” Bloom states, referring to Burnham’s announcement on Sept. 8 about sanctions being placed on goods produced in Judea and Samaria.
“By placing sanctions on Israel in the way that they did, they are placing a target on our back here. The fact that they apply all the blame for the lack of peace and for the situation in Gaza to Israel, without at all referencing Hamas’s massive role in tunnels and civilian shields and terror financing, puts a greater target on our back. We’ve said that to them directly, but they don’t seem to be listening to us.”
When government officials insist they condemn the Oct. 7 atrocities and stand against antisemitism, Bloom argues they fail to understand how foreign-policy decisions directly jeopardize the domestic security of British Jews.
“The challenge is making the prime minister and the foreign secretary see that those two things don’t sit in two isolated boxes. It’s a Venn diagram, Bloom says. “They overlap.”
His organization’s attempts at meaningful dialogue with regional Islamic organizations and mosques have repeatedly hit a wall.
“We had a couple of meetings that were very secret and very quiet; it was like we were having an affair, and we were the mistress. They basically said, ‘We’ll meet with you, but you cannot tell anybody that you’re meeting with us.’”
Bloom also criticizes local and national government for not calling out the Islamic organizations in Manchester that refused to meet with the Jewish community leadership. And he points to the problem of “Islamist extremism and radicalization” on both the local and national levels.
Bloom describes incitement in mosques on Fridays and on the streets, including chants of “globalize the intifada.” He says that “the government and the Charity Commission, and other regulatory bodies, have just not done enough. They’re unwilling to tackle it.”
He says, “We don’t want more fences and more cameras and more security guards. It’s undignified as British Jews to live like that. And it’s a moral stain on our collective British society.”
It is a frustration Levy echoes: “We’re grateful to the government for [security funding]. But the fact that we have to have that—and the fact that we’re the only faith community that has to come to pray behind such sorts of gates and security in 2026 in the UK—is just beyond belief.”
‘A community in trauma’
For Foxler, the work of the past year has included helping congregants find support for the emotional aftermath of the attack. People are coping in different ways, she says; “it’s going to be a long, long healing process.”
Finlay puts it plainly: “We are still a community in trauma; we are still dealing with the effects of what happened.”
In addition to collective trauma is collective gratitude for the bravery and heroism shown that day.
Foxler wants Andrew Franks to be acknowledged. The volunteer security guard was stabbed several times as he tried to protect others outside the synagogue. “How he survived is a miracle,” she said.
Asked about his own actions at the doors, Finlay rejects the praise of that horrible day. “I am not a hero by the way, I am not,” he said. “You don’t really think about it. You act because that is the right way to do it, that is what you have to do.”
Despite the attack and the rise in antisemitism he described, he says: “I really believe people are fundamentally good and want good. My hope is that we can somehow turn this around and get back to the society that we all want and all feel welcome in.”
Bloom sees the congregation’s return this Yom Kippur as a refusal to let terror define its future.
“Jewish life will continue,” he states plainly. “We won’t be cowed; we won’t be intimidated. But the government needs to be far braver.”
