At the floor, I’m ideally fitted to put in writing in regards to the terrorist atrocity at the Heaton Park synagogue. The assault, at the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, Yom Kippur, left two Mancunian Jews lifeless, a number of severely injured and an area (and nationwide) Jewish group traumatised.
Over a 40-year occupation, I’ve researched and written about antisemitism in the United Kingdom, from the readmission of the Jews to Britain within the mid seventeenth century thru to as of late. I’ve additionally printed extensively on British Jewish historical past over the similar length. Finally, I’m a Mancunian Jew born and taken up within the town, later running within the Manchester Jewish Museum.
There are, alternatively, limits to my talent to grasp what came about. I’m an insider as a result of my roots: my folks purchased their first space at the identical boulevard as Heaton Park synagogue within the Nineteen Fifties. However I’m additionally an interloper, having grown up within the south aspect of town in certainly one of its leafier suburbs, and spent over part my lifestyles some 260 miles away in Southampton.
What follows is an try to put the occasions of October 2 into the historic context of Manchester Jewry and antisemitism within the town. For my part, the horror does no longer are compatible into a much broader development of responses to Jews in Manchester, or the broader British Jewish group.
The historian of Manchester Jewry, Invoice Williams, insisted that “in no sense can the Jewish community be regarded as ‘alien’ to Manchester. It was not a late addition to an established pattern of urban life, but an integral part of the pattern itself”.
Even supposing Manchester has Roman roots – Mancuniam – it’s necessarily a contemporary town. Certainly, it has a justified declare to be considered the primary trendy, commercial town on this planet. It’s been and stays a town made via migration. The primary Jews, pedlars after which shopkeepers, settled within the the town within the past due 18th century, principally of German Jewish starting place.
Manchester grew slowly within the first part of the nineteenth century, with Jews coming additionally from jap Europe and north Africa. This variety of starting place used to be mirrored within the synagogues and communal organisations. Via the 1870s, the group had grown to round 4,000, part of whom have been from jap Europe. It used to be a development that will accentuate within the length of mass immigration till 1914, when it reached round 25,000.
Even earlier than that inflow of Jews with Polish, Lithuanian, Romanian and Ukrainian starting place, Manchester Jewry used to be via a long way the biggest provincial Jewish group in the United Kingdom, a standing this is more and more true as of late.
As a part of that development, the Heaton Park synagogue used to be based in 1935 and moved to its provide location in 1967. Its historical past displays the rising suburbanisation of Manchester Jewry clear of the unique agreement spaces of Cheetham Hill and Strangeways.
As of late, Manchester is without doubt one of the few Jewish communities in the United Kingdom this is rising, totalling round 28,000 within the 2021 census, a 12% build up from {that a} decade previous. A lot of that expansion is made up of the very orthodox, or Haredi, communities, a few of whom got here from Hungary as refugees in 1956.
Manchester Jewry has maintained a very sturdy native identification, however is notable in its variety. That is obvious in its other varieties of spiritual apply, geographical origins (together with 7,000 who escaped Nazi Germany within the Thirties and the more moderen migrants from Israel), socioeconomic profile and politics.
The Manchester Jewish Museum and historical synagogue, simply two miles clear of the web site of the assault.
Mickey Lee/Alamy
Antisemitism in Manchester
The town has at all times prided itself on its cosmopolitanism and tolerance, although has no longer at all times lived as much as the best of the latter. There have been occasional assaults, in print and in particular person, at the early Jewish pedlars to the city.
All over the primary international warfare, Jewish infantrymen fought again in opposition to slurs that they have been heading off army carrier. There used to be an much more militant reaction from Jews and non-Jews all through the Thirties to makes an attempt via the British Union of Fascists to fire up antisemitism in Manchester and different spaces of Jewish focus in Britain.
Till the horror of the Heaton Park synagogue assault, possibly probably the most tricky second for Manchester’s Jews got here in 1947 when there have been antisemitic riots in Manchester and close by Eccles following rightwing extremist Zionist terrorism in opposition to British infantrymen in Palestine. Many of the violence used to be in opposition to Jewish assets and no longer particular person; it used to be nonetheless surprising to a group nonetheless reeling from the have an effect on of the Holocaust.
Something uniting such articulation of antisemitism is the authentic reaction to them. The Justice of the Peace who described the 1947 riots as “both un-British and unpatriotic” used to be similar to the sentiment from all British spiritual and political leaders in 2025.
Manchester has recovered from and proven authentic unity after acts of terrorism earlier than: the IRA bomb in 1996 and the Islamist terrorist bombing of Manchester Area in 2017. It’s already transparent this pleasure of position and mutual give a boost to is found in Manchester as of late. As one native resident said: “These people are sent to divide us, but they won’t.”
The assaults of 2017 and 2025 have been terrorist acts of people, completely untypical of and denounced via the native Muslim communities. They have been onerous, if no longer unimaginable, to expect. Those outrages have and can go away massive scars on the ones immediately impacted, however they run utterly in opposition to the grain of a spot that takes authentic pleasure in its variety, together with the wealthy Jewish historical past which is integral to Manchester.
