Anti-Semitic Bullies Force London Jewish Schoolboy to Remove Skullcap

A Jewish boy walking home from school on Wednesday evening was forced to remove his skullcap by a gang of bullies.

By: Barney Breen-Portnoy/The Algemeiner

According to the UK’s Evening Standard, an 11-year-old boy was surrounded in the Hackney neighborhood of the British capital by a group of unfamiliar older children, who threatened to beat him up if he did not take off his kippah (skullcap).

The boy was not injured in the incident, but the report said he was “badly shaken.”

“He lives near where the incident took place and had his rucksack over his shoulders as he was walking home from school,” a spokesman for north London’s Shomrim neighborhood watch group was quoted as saying. “The child said he tried to run away but the youths blocked his way.”

Antisemitic hate incidents in the UK jumped in the first half of 2016, with the Jewish community being targeted on an average of  three times per day.

In August, the head of a UK charity and anti-Semitism watchdog group told The Algemeiner that British Jews were “being denied justice” by their country’s main criminal prosecution agency, as it failed to crack down on antisemitic hate crimes.