The Narrow Bridge: Inside Manchester’s Synagogue Attack and a Community’s Defiant Stand

By: Fern Sidman

When a 78-year-old volunteer guard sounded the alarm outside Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation last week, he likely prevented a still greater massacre. The attacker had rammed his car through the gates and lunged at worshippers with a knife on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year. Within minutes, members of the congregation and private security staff were holding the doors shut with their bodies, fighting to keep the assailant from bursting into the sanctuary.

Two men—Adrian Daulby, a longtime volunteer, and Melvin Cravitz, a professional guard—were killed. Three others were badly injured. As the BBC reported on Tuesday, the tragedy was as swift as it was symbolic: a community long braced for violence suddenly confronting the nightmare it had always feared.

For decades, high fences, cameras, and volunteer guards have been the unremarkable architecture of British Jewish life. Synagogues, schools, and cultural centers function under a vigilance that most citizens cannot imagine. “We don’t think twice about it anymore,” one Heaton Park congregant told the BBC. “Security shifts are just part of the rhythm of the week.”

That rhythm was born of necessity. Since the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel, antisemitic incidents in Britain have soared to levels unseen in modern times. The Community Security Trust (CST)—the charity that coordinates protection of Jewish sites—recorded 1,521 antisemitic incidents in the first half of 2025, according to figures cited in the BBC report. More than half explicitly referenced the Hamas assault or the Gaza war. Greater Manchester alone logged 446 incidents in the 12 months to September 2024—a near-vertical spike.

One Manchester rabbi told the BBC months ago that the question was no longer if a deadly attack would happen, but where. Last Thursday, the answer arrived in Crumpsall.

The BBC’s reporting reconstructs a portrait of courage almost cinematic in its detail: ordinary congregants wearing stab-proof vests, trained through CST courses, throwing their weight against synagogue doors as the attacker slashed and screamed outside.

Among them was Marc Levy’s father, a familiar figure at Greater Manchester’s Jewish Representative Council. “He was on duty that day,” Levy told the BBC, recalling the hours of panic before he learned, through live television images, that his father had survived.

The CST’s director of policy, Dave Rich, told the BBC that such volunteers are indispensable. “Police will never have the resources to protect every Jewish building,” he said. “So we have this partnership—a collective security infrastructure for the Jewish community—which sadly has been necessary for many years.”

That infrastructure is a lattice of local heroism. The CST trains thousands of volunteers annually, equipping them with defensive tactics, radios, and stab-resistant gear. In Orthodox neighborhoods of London, a parallel organization—Shomrim, Hebrew for “guardians”—conducts nightly patrols and works closely with the Metropolitan Police. These efforts, praised by the BBC, amount to a form of civilian fortification that mirrors the communal ethos itself: self-reliant, cohesive, quietly determined.

The BBC report situates Manchester’s tragedy within a grim international lineage: the 2012 shooting at a Jewish school in Toulouse, the 2015 hostage siege at a Paris kosher supermarket, the 2018 massacre at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue. Each became a warning to the next.

In France, where some half-a-million Jews make up Europe’s largest Jewish population, security has hardened into permanence. The BBC report quoted Robert Ejnes, executive head of the Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions (CRIF), describing armed officers “sleeping inside synagogues” after the 2015 Paris attacks. “The level of threat has increased so much,” he said, “that every Jewish family worries when their children go outside wearing a kippah or a Magen David. It’s probably the highest level ever known.”

Following the Manchester killings, France’s Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau ordered “all available means” deployed for visible police patrols—a move the BBC report likened to a trans-Channel echo of Manchester’s own security crisis.

In the immediate aftermath, Greater Manchester Police Chief Constable Sir Stephen Watson told the BBC his officers had “very significantly” stepped up patrols around Jewish neighborhoods and places of worship. But, he added soberly, “that level of policing cannot be sustained indefinitely.”

Community leaders say the dilemma is stark: the government responds to each attack with short-term security surges, but fails to confront the deeper corrosion of antisemitic sentiment and extremist rhetoric.

“Our fears and concerns have regularly been diminished and not acted upon,” Marc Levy told the BBC. “What we need isn’t just another layer of fences—it’s recognition that the hatred itself must be fought.”

Claudia Mendoza, head of the Jewish Leadership Council, was even blunter. “Successive governments,” she told the BBC, “have failed to confront violent jihadist language and the normalization of antisemitic hate. I don’t know how you put the genie back in the bottle—but it’s out, and it’s among us.”

Both she and Levy have spoken with the Prime Minister and Communities Secretary since the attack. Mendoza said she believes “they listened,” but many in the community remain unconvinced that listening is enough.

Perhaps no testimony captured the human cost more hauntingly than that of Rabbi Albert Chait, leader of the Leeds United Hebrew Congregation, who told the BBC he had never seen his children so terrified. His nine-year-old daughter, he said, was “physically shaking with fear.”

“‘Daddy, why do they hate the Jews?’ she asked me,” he recalled.

Chait knew one of the victims personally—Melvin Cravitz, who was married to the mother of one of his oldest friends. “It was not distant,” he said. “It was family.”

In north London, a mother named Amanda, whose parents live in Manchester, faced a similarly wrenching decision the next morning: whether to send her daughters to their Jewish school, JFS. She told the BBC that when the headteacher’s message arrived promising reinforced security, “I felt reassured—but only just.”

As the BBC report observed in interviews across Manchester, Leeds, and London, British Jews are torn between the impulse to stay visible and the fatigue of vigilance. Some parents have quietly removed mezuzot—the small cases containing prayers—from their doorframes to avoid being identified as Jewish. Others have discussed emigration.

“My younger one said, ‘Do you think we should move?’” Amanda told the BBC. “I don’t think we could, but I feel very sad and unsettled—and both my daughters do.”

Yet defiance has long been a reflex of Jewish survival. “Show we are not cowed,” declared Rabbi Daniel Walker, whose synagogue was also attacked. “As Jews, we always rebuild, we always recover, we always return stronger.”

Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg, one of Britain’s most respected Masorti leaders, echoed that sentiment on the BBC: “Judaism is a deeply resilient religion. We’ve faced destruction and exile before. Our faith is an act of continuity.”

In north Manchester, community organizer Raphi Bloom put it more bluntly: “We’re not going anywhere. We’re not Jews with trembling knees—we are proud Mancunian Jews.”

Ironically, the Manchester killings appear to have galvanized the very volunteer network that first held the synagogue doors. “Since Thursday’s attack,” CST’s Dave Rich told the BBC, “we’ve seen a surge of people coming to our website wanting to train as volunteers. That’s not a sign of running away—it’s a sign of standing firm.”

For many, the act of showing up has become a moral obligation. Rabbi Chait, addressing his Leeds congregation on social media, urged worshippers to attend services despite their fear. “This Shabbat you have every excuse not to go,” he wrote, “but you also have every excuse to go. Don’t let them win.”

One Manchester mother described to the BBC how, when her young daughter asked whether it was still safe for Jews to live in Britain, she reached for an old Hebrew song: “The whole world is a very narrow bridge, and the main thing is to have no fear at all.”

Beyond grief and solidarity, the Manchester attack has forced uncomfortable questions about Britain’s social fabric. Why, community leaders ask, has antisemitism found such fertile ground in a multicultural democracy that prides itself on tolerance?

The BBC’s analysis traces several converging currents: the importation of Middle East conflicts into British discourse; the radicalization pipelines of online propaganda; and the polarization of identity politics that often casts Jews as avatars of power or privilege.

The CST warns that antisemitic hate “spikes whenever Israel is at war,” but the persistence of hostility even in quieter times points to something deeper. “It’s become normalized,” says one security volunteer interviewed by the BBC. “People feel emboldened to say and do things they wouldn’t have dared ten years ago.”

That normalization, many argue, is what makes the volunteer guards so essential—and so tragic. They exist because the state, however committed in principle, cannot be everywhere.

Within Greater Manchester Police, the sense of mission is palpable. Chief Constable Watson told the BBC that his officers “owe an enormous debt to the courage of the Jewish volunteers” who delayed the attacker long enough for armed units to arrive. “Without them,” he said, “the casualties could have been far higher.”

Yet Watson also acknowledged the strain on his force. “Every time we ramp up patrols,” he said, “we pull officers from somewhere else. The challenge is to balance visible reassurance with sustainable policing.”

For the moment, security remains at its highest level. But both police and community leaders agree that fences and foot patrols are not solutions; they are symptoms.

The BBC’s coverage of the aftermath captures an emotional spectrum—fear, fatigue, anger, faith—but perhaps most strikingly, resilience. Outside Heaton Park Synagogue, mourners have transformed the pavement into a sea of candles and handwritten notes. One reads simply: “For Adrian and Melvin, guardians of light.”

Inside, services have resumed. Worshippers pass through metal detectors, exchange quiet greetings, and bow their heads in prayer. Every movement is tinged with the memory of the attack, but also with the defiance of continuity.

“Judaism,” Rabbi Wittenberg told the BBC, “teaches that even in darkness we must kindle a flame. That’s not metaphor—it’s survival.”

Britain’s Jewish community numbers barely 300,000—small, tight-knit, and deeply woven into the nation’s civic fabric. Yet its anxieties reverberate far beyond its size. When a synagogue is attacked in Manchester, the shockwave reaches Leeds, London, Paris, and Pittsburgh alike.

The BBC report framed the story not as an isolated crime but as a mirror of an era: rising extremism, digital hatred, and the fragility of trust between minorities and the states that promise to protect them.

For those who stood behind the synagogue doors that day, the meaning is simpler. It is the instinct to hold fast, to defend faith with one’s hands if necessary, and to keep walking that narrow bridge without fear.

As one elderly volunteer told the BBC, his voice quiet but unwavering: “They came to destroy, and we are still here. That’s the only answer we have ever needed.”