Manchester survivors feel unsafe one year later

MANCHESTER — At Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation, worshippers now pass through 10-foot security gates to enter the Orthodox synagogue. Inside, posters outline emergency lockdown procedures. A reinforced door has replaced the one riddled with bullet holes a year ago.

At this year’s Yom Kippur service, the synagogue was full except for two seats bearing plaques with the names of Adrian Daulby, 53, and Melvin Cravitz, 66, the two members killed in the attack on Oct. 2, 2025. When a memorial prayer was recited for them, “you could hear a pin drop,” congregant Alan Levy says.

Throughout the service, Levy kept checking the time. “I couldn’t take my eye off the clock,” he says. Each glance took him back to the same moment a year earlier, when he and fellow worshippers pressed their bodies against the door to hold off a knife-wielding terrorist.

Still, the sanctuary was nearly full. “People felt that we were all in it together,” Levy says. “On the anniversary, the Heaton Park community all came to support the shul.”

Raphi Bloom, who had been on his way to the synagogue when the attack began, says, “You could feel the tension in the air … and it was very poignant.” As the congregation prayed “who shall live and who shall die,” he thought of the evening service a year earlier, when he stood beside Daulby and Cravitz. “And the next day they were dead.”

‘Root causes aren’t being tackled’

A year later, the trauma remains palpable across Greater Manchester’s Jewish community. Many say the security upgrades, while necessary, are a constant reminder of hostility.

“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. “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.”

Synagogue president Hilary Foxler says drive-by verbal abuse and obscene gestures aimed at the building, which is monitored by 24-hour CCTV, are a near-daily occurrence. Nearby Jewish schools now resemble “fortresses,” Finlay says, where children practice evacuation drills.

“I worry personally what the future of this country holds for my children,” he says.

Gary Rich, whose father was at Heaton Park that morning, rushed over from another synagogue to find him safe. Later that afternoon, as Rich walked his dog a few minutes away, someone rolled down a car window and shouted abuse at him.

Events elsewhere have sharpened the fears: an arson attack that destroyed four Hatzola ambulances in Golders Green, a heavily Jewish London suburb, and the stabbing of two Jewish men there weeks later. On Sept. 19, shortly before Yom Kippur, counterterrorism police arrested two men in Manchester over a suspected plot against the local Jewish community. Police did not name a target, leaving congregants to wonder whether it was their synagogue again.

“The fact that we’ve been hit once doesn’t mean we’re immune from being a target again,” Foxler says.

Talk of leaving Britain has become hard to avoid. “There’s a lot of talk,” Foxler says, 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’s message to fellow British Jews is one of resolve: “If you’re going to leave, leave because you want to leave. Don’t leave because you’re running.”

“I’m a proud Mancunian Jew,” he says. “This is my home. This is my city.” He points to his organization, the Fed, which next year marks 160 years of helping the community’s most vulnerable. “You know we’re not going anywhere.”

That, he adds, “doesn’t mean that it’s not scary … it does not mean that we’re not under threat. But we are resilient, and certainly, I’m not a Jew with trembling knees” — paraphrasing Menachem Begin, Israel’s prime minister from 1977 to 1983. “We’re going to fight for what is our right as British Jews to lead dignified lives.”

Several congregants tie the rising hostility to government policy and political rhetoric about Israel.

“When certain language is used, it soaks up the hatred and the justification,” Finlay says. “Heaton Park didn’t happen on the morning itself. … It came from way before that.” He cites Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband’s use of the term “ethnic cleansing” regarding Palestinians in Judea and Samaria, saying it could lead people to think, “Oh, well, if that is happening, I can go and do this then.”

Bloom recalls that as the terrorist, Jihad al-Shamie, tried to kick in the doors, “he was screaming, ‘This is what you get for murdering children’.”

A board member of the Jewish Representative Council of Greater Manchester, Bloom has met with Prime Minister Andy Burnham about the community’s safety. He says Burnham’s Sept. 8 announcement of sanctions on goods produced in Judea and Samaria placed “a target on our back here.”

“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 incentivizing those who seek to harm us,” he says. “We’ve said that to them directly, but they don’t seem to be listening.”

Officials, he argues, fail to see that foreign policy and the safety of British Jews “don’t sit in two isolated boxes. It’s a Venn diagram. They overlap.”

Efforts at dialogue with local 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,” Bloom says. “They basically said, ‘We’ll meet with you, but you cannot tell anybody.’”

He says the government and regulators “have just not done enough” about incitement in mosques and on the streets, including chants of “globalize the intifada.”

“We don’t want more fences and more cameras and more security guards,” he says. “It’s undignified as British Jews to live like that.”

Levy agrees. “We’re grateful to the government for [security funding],” he says. “But 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.”

Foxler has spent much of the year helping congregants find emotional support. “It’s going to be a long, long healing process,” she says.

“We are still a community in trauma,” Finlay says.

There is also gratitude. Foxler wants Andrew Franks recognized: The volunteer security guard was stabbed three times trying to stop the attacker outside the synagogue. “How he survived is a miracle,” she says.

Finlay rejects praise for his own actions at the doors. “I am not a hero, by the way, I am not,” he says. “You act because that is the right way to do it; that is what you have to do.”

For Bloom, the congregation’s return this Yom Kippur was a refusal to let terror define its future. “Jewish life will continue,” he says. “We won’t be cowed; we won’t be intimidated. But the government needs to be far braver.”