Record level of anti-Jewish attacks in Britain

Attacks on Jews in Britain have reached new highs:

New figures suggest the number of abusive and violent attacks on Britain's Jewish community reached record levels in 2004. BBC News spoke to one of the victims.

Sam, a softly-spoken solicitor from a leafy suburb of Manchester, was walking home alone after celebrating the birth of a friend's baby son.

It was a route he had taken thousands of times before. But as he turned the corner he was confronted by a gang of five white teenage youths.

They surrounded him and began snarling anti-Semitic abuse.

And this is not an isolated incident:

Recent figures released by the Community Security Trust (CST), who advise the Jewish community on matters of anti-Semitism and security, reveal a 50% leap in violent attacks last year.

Now Metropolitan Police records corroborate the Trust's figures for 2004 in the capital.

More than 500 incidents were recorded last year by the CST, ranging from life-threatening assaults to criminal damage to property. One-fifth of these were carried out by elements of the far right.

Yet according to many in the community, it's the desecrations of Jewish graves by neo-Nazis which really sends a shudder through the population, with its echoes of the past.

"It's particularly distressing for elderly Jews who have lived through all this before," says Melvyn Hartog, who maintains United Synagogues' cemeteries.

He describes what it was like to discover that Jewish graves at the Redan Road cemetery in Aldershot had been desecrated with swastikas, SS signs and Combat 18 insignia twice over a three month period:

"It was one of the saddest days of my life. One of the first graves I saw was the war grave of a Jewish second lieutenant who died in 1941.

"This man gave his life like many thousands to rid the world of the Swastika, now one had been placed on his grave."

Apparently a lot of the hostility has to do with the situation in the Middle East:

The CST say around 120 incidents in Britain last year were directly linked to tension in the Israel-Palestine conflict.

New research due to be published next month, for example, reveals a 'spike' in anti-Semitic incidents in London, during April-May 2002, when the Israeli Defence Force launched its incursion into the Jenin refugee camp.

The indications are that Orthodox Jews, with their easily-identifiable appearance, are bearing the brunt of such attacks.

In North London's Stamford Hill, home to one of Britain's largest Orthodox communities, feelings are running high, especially after a recent spate of violent attacks.

One parent at a Jewish school who asked not to be named said: "There's a feeling of fear and nervousness, of always looking over your shoulder."

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