Protecting Jewish communities requires more than security

More officers around Jewish neighbourhoods, schools, synagogues and community centres will provide reassurance at a moment when many Jewish people are asking whether everyday life is becoming less safe. But the very need for such measures should give us pause. Physical security can deter attacks, but cannot, on its own, create lasting safety.

In his resignation speech, Keir Starmer described “ripping out the poison of antisemitism” within the Labour Party as one of his defining achievements. It is justified to describe antisemitism in those terms, but poison rarely confines itself neatly to one institution or one moment in time. The harder test is what happens beyond party politics: whether a society recognises antisemitism before it settles into the background noise of everyday life.

Recent events in Britain show why this matters. In Golders Green, ambulances belonging to Hatzola, a Jewish volunteer emergency service, were set alight outside a synagogue. In the weeks that followed, synagogues and Jewish-linked premises in Finchley, Hendon and Harrow were also targeted. Each incident has its own circumstances and demands its own response. Yet taken together, they ask a larger question: whether repeated acts of antisemitism are being treated as isolated headlines rather than signs of a deeper civic challenge.

Hatred rarely arrives all at once – it gathers force through the normalisation of exclusion, dehumanising language and conspiracy theories. Democratic societies do not become weaker because of a single incident. They become weaker when each incident is explained away in isolation, until what once seemed exceptional begins to feel ordinary.

This is why Holocaust remembrance matters today. It is not simply about preserving the memory of the past, important though that is. It is about strengthening our ability to recognise the patterns that history teaches us to take seriously. This is the work of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance: to ensure remembrance remains active, not ceremonial. The purpose is not to suggest that history repeats itself in identical ways, but to help democratic societies recognise hatred before it becomes embedded in public life.

Antisemitism is, first and foremost, an attack on Jewish people. But it is also a test of the health of a democracy. When synagogues, schools, charities and community institutions require ever greater layers of security, something has changed for Jewish people and for the society around them. The question is whether we recognise the conditions that allow hatred to flourish, not just how we respond once it becomes visible. True resilience also depends on education, principled leadership and confidence that antisemitism will be challenged – wherever it appears and in whatever form.

If confronting antisemitism within Labour becomes part of Keir Starmer’s political legacy, it will be an important one.

The larger challenge belongs to every democratic society. Poison does not cease to be dangerous because it leaves one institution – it ceases to spread only when a society refuses to tolerate it anywhere.

That requires more than declarations. It requires governments, institutions, educators and citizens to recognise antisemitism early, challenge it consistently, and create societies in which Jewish life can flourish openly and safely.

Holocaust remembrance is most powerful when it informs action. That means investing in education, protecting the integrity of the historical record, and giving teachers, institutions and policymakers the tools to recognise and respond to antisemitism before it becomes entrenched.

Democratic societies are strongest when remembrance shapes the choices they make today – not only the way they remember yesterday.

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Michaela Küchler is Secretary General of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance.

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