Synagogue attack: the Manchester I know – by antisemitism researcher and Mancunian Jew

On the surface, I am ideally suited to write about the terrorist atrocity on the Heaton Park synagogue. The attack, on the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, Yom Kippur, left two Mancunian Jews dead, several seriously injured and a local (and national) Jewish community traumatised.

Over a 40-year career, I have researched and written about antisemitism in the UK, from the readmission of the Jews to Britain in the mid 17th century through to today. I have also published widely on British Jewish history over the same period. Lastly, I am a Mancunian Jew born and brought up in the city, later working in the Manchester Jewish Museum.

There are, however, limits to my ability to understand what happened. I am an insider because of my roots: my parents bought their first house on the same street as Heaton Park synagogue in the 1950s. But I am also an outsider, having grown up in the south side of the city in one of its leafier suburbs, and spent over half my life some 260 miles away in Southampton.

What follows is an attempt to put the events of October 2 into the historical context of Manchester Jewry and antisemitism in the city. In my view, the horror does not fit into a wider pattern of responses to Jews in Manchester, or the wider British Jewish community.

Read more: Manchester synagogue attack: why so many people in Britain's Jewish community felt a sense of inevitability that this day would come

The historian of Manchester Jewry, Bill 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”.

Although Manchester has Roman roots – Mancuniam – it is essentially a modern city. Indeed, it has a justified claim to be regarded as the first modern, industrial city in the world. It has been and remains a city made by migration. The first Jews, pedlars and then shopkeepers, settled in the town in the late 18th century, mainly of German Jewish origin.

Manchester grew slowly in the first half of the 19th century, with Jews coming also from eastern Europe and north Africa. This diversity of origin was reflected in the synagogues and communal organisations. By the 1870s, the community had grown to around 4,000, half of whom were from eastern Europe. It was a trend that would intensify in the period of mass immigration until 1914, when it reached around 25,000.

Even before that influx of Jews with Polish, Lithuanian, Romanian and Ukrainian origin, Manchester Jewry was by far the largest provincial Jewish community in the UK, a status that is increasingly true today.

As part of that pattern, the Heaton Park synagogue was founded in 1935 and moved to its present location in 1967. Its history reflects the growing suburbanisation of Manchester Jewry away from the original settlement areas of Cheetham Hill and Strangeways.

Today, Manchester is one of the few Jewish communities in the UK that is growing, totalling around 28,000 in the 2021 census, a 12% increase from that a decade earlier. Much of that growth is made up of the very orthodox, or Haredi, communities, some of whom came from Hungary as refugees in 1956.

Manchester Jewry has maintained an extraordinarily strong local identity, but is notable in its diversity. This is evident in its different forms of religious practice, geographical origins (including 7,000 who escaped Nazi Germany in the 1930s and the more recent migrants from Israel), socioeconomic profile and politics.

Antisemitism in Manchester

The city has always prided itself on its cosmopolitanism and tolerance, though has not always lived up to the ideal of the latter. There were occasional attacks, in print and in person, on the early Jewish pedlars to the town.

In the late 19th century the Manchester City News described eastern European Jews as an “invading force, foreign in race, speech, dress, ideas and religion”. Another local journal called them “just as desirable as rats”. In contrast, the Manchester Guardian (which became The Guardian) supported the right of asylum for refugees, and praised the respectable middle-class Jews for the contribution they had made to the economy and culture of the city.

During the first world war, Jewish soldiers fought back against slurs that they were avoiding military service. There was an even more militant response from Jews and non-Jews during the 1930s to attempts by the British Union of Fascists to stir up antisemitism in Manchester and other areas of Jewish concentration in Britain.

Until the horror of the Heaton Park synagogue attack, perhaps the most difficult moment for Manchester’s Jews came in 1947 when there were antisemitic riots in Manchester and nearby Eccles following rightwing extremist Zionist terrorism against British soldiers in Palestine. Most of the violence was against Jewish property and not person; it was still shocking to a community still reeling from the impact of the Holocaust.

One thing uniting such articulation of antisemitism is the official response to them. The magistrate who described the 1947 riots as “both un-British and unpatriotic” was very similar to the sentiment from all British religious and political leaders in 2025.

Manchester has recovered from and shown genuine solidarity after acts of terrorism before: the IRA bomb in 1996 and the Islamist terrorist bombing of Manchester Arena in 2017. It is already clear this pride of place and mutual support is present in Manchester today. As one local resident stated: “These people are sent to divide us, but they won’t.”

The attacks of 2017 and 2025 were terrorist acts of individuals, utterly untypical of and denounced by the local Muslim communities. They were hard, if not impossible, to predict. These outrages have and will leave huge scars on those directly impacted, but they run totally against the grain of a place that takes genuine pride in its diversity, including the rich Jewish history which is integral to Manchester.

Tony Kushner does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.