A charity that provides security for Jewish groups has reported a 650% increase in antisemitic incidents in South Yorkshire since the 7 October Hamas attack on Israeli civilians.
The incidents, reported by charity Community Security Trust UK (CST UK), include eggs thrown at the car of a visibly Jewish man while he was inside, shouts of “f****** Jew”, a Nazi flag on display in a window, and a grotesque online death threat.
The organisation reports that they responded to thirty antisemitic incidents between 7 October 2023 and 15 February 2024. The thirty incidents included nineteen in Sheffield, five in Rotherham, four in Barnsley and two in Doncaster. This time last year, there were only four incidents.
This data represents one in thirty-four Jewish people in Sheffield experiencing an incident reported by CST UK since the Hamas attack.
In a speech at Sheffield’s Holocaust Memorial Day event, Police & Crime Commissioner Alan Billings said: “Hatred is a failure of imagination. An inability to put yourself in the shoes of others. And those hatreds diminish our humanity, and they wreck our communities.”
Sheffield’s Jewish population is small, with only 649 Jewish people listed on the 2021 census in a population of 556,500. The Reform Jewish community in Sheffield is so small that it does not have a rabbi.
Jane Ginsborg, chair of the committee that manages Reform synagogue Seven Hills Shul in the absence of a rabbi, said: “Certainly I am hearing that Jews feel more frightened than they have ever felt before in Sheffield, including the parents of school children, university students and lecturers, as well as older members of both synagogues.”
South Yorkshire Police also reports a steep increase in antisemitic hate crime, though the numbers are small given the Jewish population size. In the month from 7 October to 7 November, there was an increase in hate crimes coded “Racial Hate – Jewish” from one in 2022 to nine in 2023, as well as an increase in hate crimes coded “Religious Hate – Jewish” from four in 2022 to fourteen in 2023.
Dr Billings said: “Of course when the police are involved that’s inevitably after the fact. There’s already been a hate incident or hate crime. ”
South Yorkshire’s spike in antisemitic hate incidents is part of a wider trend. CST UK recently reported a 589% increase in antisemitic incidents across the UK from 7 October.
Dr Billings said: “The opposite of hatred is empathy. But how do you do it? That’s not a police matter, that’s a matter for all of us. So I think we need to talk more about prevention than enforcement.”
