Switching off my phone for Yom Kippur this year felt almost impossible.
In the past, the fast itself — 25 hours without food or water — was the most daunting part of the holiest day on the Jewish calendar.
This year, it was different. Turning off the phone meant stepping away from a world teetering on edge, with the gnawing dread that by the time we reconnected to the outside world, something terrible might have happened.
For Jews everywhere, that anxiety is no longer abstract. It is lived experience.
Antisemitism is surging in the United States, where I now live, and in Britain, where I was born and raised.
The fear that an attack might occur somewhere during Yom Kippur was not merely paranoia; it was the rational expectation of a community that has seen too much.
And then it happened.
The terror attack outside Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation in Manchester, England, on Thursday morning was appalling not only in its cruelty — targeting worshippers on the holiest of days — but also in its terrifying inevitability.
The Community Security Trust, a UK charity advising Jewish communities on security, has documented record levels of antisemitism across Britain — just as America has seen Jew-hatred soar.
The streets, the campuses, the social-media feeds are drenched in vitriol, incitement and unambiguous support for terrorism.
Against this backdrop, Manchester was not an aberration. It was the outcome we feared.
This was the same Manchester, after all, that in 2017 succumbed to an abhorrent ISIS terrorist suicide-bombing attack at an Ariana Grande concert that killed 22 people and injured more than 1,000.
Hours after the Heaton Park carnage, cars drove past the crime scene waving Palestinian flags. It was a grotesque celebration of Jewish death in the heart of Britain.
This pattern is not new. In recent years, Jewish blood has been spilled on Jewish holidays with sickening consistency.
The Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas massacre in Israel coincided with Simchat Torah, the happiest day in the Jewish calendar marking the restart of the annual Torah-reading cycle.
In 2002, a Hamas suicide-bombing attack struck a Passover seder at the Park Hotel in Netanya, Israel, murdering 29.
In 1973, a coalition of Arab states launched a surprise attack on the Jewish state on Yom Kippur, with a real threat of destroying it.
The most sacred days on our calendar have become magnets for those who want to extinguish Jewish life — for obvious reasons.
Jews who focus on the holiday may be less vigilant about safety.
When they’re gathered, they boost the chances for more casualties.
And using a Jewish religious holiday for an attack reinforces the message that the terrorists are targeting Jews specifically for their religious identification.
It’s blatant, violent antisemitism.
On Tuesday, we’ll mark the two-year anniversary of Oct. 7. The horrors of that day — 1,200 murdered, 251 taken hostage, with rape and torture used as weapons — still sear our collective memory.
Yet instead of confronting the ideology that fuels such savagery, the international community rewards it.
The United Nations last week once again legitimized Hamas and the Palestinian Authority’s blood-soaked “pay-for-slay” program while gesturing toward Palestinian statehood, as if murder were a logical stepping stone to sovereignty.
This is the climate in which Jews live today. A climate in which the fear before Yom Kippur is less about withstanding hunger during the fast than about whether we’ll emerge to news of another massacre.
A climate in which Jews in Manchester, or anywhere in the UK, are murdered simply for being Jews.
That should not be Britain in 2025. But it is.
As part of the Yom Kippur observance, Jewish people around the world ask themselves where they fell short over the past year and what they must do to change.
Britain must do the same. The murders in Manchester are not only a tragedy for the Jewish community, but a test for the nation itself.
The question is not whether we are shocked and outraged by such horrors — but what we plan to do about them.
Jonathan Harounoff, Israel’s international spokesperson at the United Nations, was born and raised in London and is the award-winning author of “Unveiled: Inside Iran’s #WomanLifeFreedom Revolt.”
This story originally appeared on NYPost
