British Anti-Semitic Incidents Soar To Record
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(JTA) — The Jewish community of the United Kingdom recorded 767 anti-Semitic attacks in the first half of 2017 — the highest figure recorded within six months since monitoring began in 1984.
The total number of incidents recorded from Jan. 1 to July 1 by the Community Security Trust, British Jewry’s watchdog on anti-Semitism, constitute an increase of 30 percent from the 589 incidents from the same time period of 2016, CST wrote in a report published Thursday.
CST has recorded 80 violent assaults in 2017, a 78 percent rise from the 45 over the first six months of 2016 and the highest number CST has ever recorded for the January to July period.
In one incident, unidentified individuals threw a brick with the word “Jew” and a swastika painted on it into the home of a Jewish family in the London borough of Edgware on Shabbat. No one was hurt in the incident.
Nearly half of the incidents recorded by CST in 2017, or 351 cases, involved verbal abuse directed at individual Jews.
CST Chief Executive David Delew said: “Anti-Semitism is having an increasing impact on the lives of British Jews.”
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