Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

London School Hit With Anti-Semitic Graffiti

Unidentified individuals scrawled anti-Semitic pejoratives at a Jewish elementary school in London.

The graffiti reading “F—- the Jews” was discovered this week at the Simon Marks primary school in the east London borough of Hackney, the Jewish News of London reported Wednesday.

A spokesman for the Jewish volunteer watch group Shomrim said: “It’s disturbing. They were nasty words. It’s being investigated at the moment – we’re checking out CCTV but no one has been caught yet.”

The Board of Deputies of British Jews said in a statement that the group was “deeply concerned” by the attack.

At a separate incident last week, two cars that were vandalized outside Skver Synagogue by a man wielding an axe or a hammer, according to Shomrim.

According to figures released Friday by the Metropolitan Police, anti-Semitic crimes rose last year by 138 percent over 2013, from 208 to 495, with some of the biggest increases occurring in the boroughs of Brent and Hackney.

“The alarming rise in reports of antisemitic incidents is disturbing and serves to emphasise the importance of acknowledging and then combatting discrimination which can cause British Jews to feel threatened and endangered,” said Jonathan Sacerdoti, director of communications at the grassroots Campaign Against Antisemitism group about the data.

Earlier this week, police ordered a group of neo-Nazis who planned to hold an anti-Semitic rally in the heavily-Jewish London area of Golders Green to move the event to central London.

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and the protests on college campuses.

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

Make a gift of any size and become a Forward member today. You’ll support our mission to tell the American Jewish story fully and fairly. 

— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.