Jewish community in UK braces for first anniversary of Manchester shul attack

The Manchester synagogue where a jihadist attack on Oct. 2, 2025, left two men dead and a shaken British Jewish community will mark the assault’s first anniversary on Yom Kippur this Sunday.

Melvin Cravitz, 66, and Adrian Daulby, 53, were killed at the Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation Synagogue while trying to fend off the terrorist, who rammed the perimeter gates with a vehicle and then stormed the building’s entrance armed with a knife during the morning services of the holiest day in the Jewish calendar.

Cravitz, who had arrived to pray, was stabbed to death. Daulby, barricading the synagogue’s doors, was shot and killed by a stray police bullet. The attacker, Jihad al-Shamie, a 35-year-old British citizen of Syrian descent, was shot dead by police.

Three other people were wounded; one was hit by the car, one incurred a stab wound and the third was injured by police gunfire.

Chief Rabbi of Britain’s United Hebrew Congregations Sir Ephraim Mirvis will lead prayers this year at the Heaton Park Synagogue with the survivors and the bereaved of the terrorist attack, The Telegraph reported.

“We know that a good number of the members of the synagogue are highly apprehensive,” Mirvis told the British newspaper.

“There’ll be that déjà vu feeling coming into the synagogue on that same day, same time as when it happened, same location. Memories are still exceptionally fresh. The impact of such a terrorist attack runs very deep, and the trauma continues for a long, long time. And that is what we are experiencing,” he added.

The rabbi further linked the demonization of Israel in the aftermath of the Hamas-led massacre in the northwestern Negev on Oct. 7, 2023, to the actions of terrorists motivated to harm Jews across the world.

“When rhetoric towards Israel escalates, hostility towards Jews is never far behind,” The Telegraph quoted him as saying.

The U.K.’s latest sanctions on Israeli-made goods imported from Judea and Samaria and the Golan Heights marked “a dark day for British Jews,” Mirvis continued.

“It’s all a consequence of what has been put into people’s minds, the depth of hate speech which abounds, the cries, the chants, the slogans that we have heard from hundreds of thousands of people on the streets of our cities, together with policies of governments, standpoints, the overall general spirit of demonization of Israel, which our societies around the world have found to be acceptable, and that’s just one step away from the demonization of all Jews,” he said.

Ahead of the prayers at the Manchester synagogue, Mirvis composed a special prayer to be recited at Yizkor time (a special memorial prayer) on Yom Kippur, which he shared on X.

Citing the names of the victims, “whose lives were cruelly taken on the holiest day of the year,” the prayer requests God to grant “perfect rest” to their souls.