162 antisemitic hate crimes have occurred in London so far in 2023, according to London police.
By Dion J. Pierre, The Algemeiner
A wave of antisemitic hate crimes has hit Jewish Londoners in the last month, according to a slew of reports by neighborhood watch group Shomrim Stamford Hill.
Since April, the group has reported on a stranger’s approaching a Jewish woman and shouting “One day I will kill all you Jews,” the defacement of a Jewish family’s door and theft of their mezuzah, and an incident in which a Jewish mother and her infant were verbally abused and spit on, leaving the mother “traumatized and seeking support.”
In two recent incidents over the past week, Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) arrested a man for standing on the side of Ravensdale Road and shouting antisemitic epithets at Jewish community members passing through the area, and on Monday officers apprehended a woman who was “unleashing a torrent of racist slurs” on patrons of a Park Avenue Hotel, which is Jewish-owned, according to Shomrim Stamford Hill.
162 antisemitic hate crimes have occurred in London so far in 2023, according to data reported by MPS. Members of the city’s Orthodox Jewish community, one of the largest in Europe, were victims in a substantial portion of the 3,280 antisemitic hate crimes that MPS has recorded since 2018. 853 were tallied in 2021 alone.
Earlier this year, in January, a man entered a Jewish bakery and attempted to assault a Jewish woman after asking, “Are you Jewish?” That same month, a Jewish man and his infant son were assaulted while taking a walk in the Stamford Hill, a neighborhood of North London where large concentrations of Orthodox Jews live. The father was slashed. Later, a woman in Stamford Hill was stalked and assaulted by an unknown perpetrator.
In March, Shomrim Stamford Hill reported that someone knocked a 16 year old Jewish boy’s hat off his head “in a completely unprovoked incident” near Stoke Newington Railway Station, and that a tall man wearing an orange hoodie intentionally bumped into an Orthodox man while passing him on the street. Another man, whom MPS arrested and charged with committing a hate crime, shouted “Heil Hitler, I love Hitler” at Jewish worshipers leaving synagogue on Purim. He was, Shomrim said, armed with a knife.
On May 3, StandWithUs, an educational nonprofit, shared footage of two men harassing a group of Jewish children near a day school in north London. “Drove past the Zionist school on full blast,” a caption to the video reads, as they loudly play an Arabic song with lyrics extolling Hezbollah: “We’re Hizbullahi [members of Hezbollah] and I bear witness.”The men, whose identities remain unknown, laughed at the children, many of whom were wearing a kippah and preparing the cross the intersection they were passing through.