by Hadley Freeman, The Times
I was horrified to learn that our school concert had been moved for safety
Oh look, it’s an email from my youngest child’s school. The end-of-year concert is moving to another venue — fine, whatever … oh wait, what’s this? The concert was going to be in a local synagogue but because of safety concerns the school, which is non-denominational, will find an alternative venue. Well, that’s a grim sign of the times, I think. So grim that it takes me a beat to realise this synagogue that has been deemed too dangerous is, in fact, our family synagogue. Where my children and I go every Saturday morning, where I drop them off for Hebrew school every week. That is now seen as such an obvious target for terrorism that it’s not safe for my children’s concert. Now I know how a lobster feels when the pot starts to boil.
Of course I’d noticed that things are, shall we say, ratcheting up. The synagogue has massively increased the number of security guards outside the front gates (which can only be opened by a buzzer, after your bag has been checked and someone inside has deemed you safe to pass) and the front door (ditto). The gold reserves in the Bank of England are easier to access than my little synagogue. But even that is not enough, and since the beginning of the year there have been increasingly urgent appeals for more of us to sign up to the guarding rota, in the hope that we can protect our shul from the kind of arson attack that happened to two other synagogues in the past two weeks, one only ten minutes away.