The spate of antisemitic attacks in London’s Stamford Hill neighborhood continued on Friday with a brick thrown through a synagogue window.
According to Shomrim (Stamford Hill), a neighborhood watch group that protects London’s Hasidic Jewish community, an unknown man threw the brick through the synagogue window during evening prayers.
In a separate incident three Jewish girls walking home from school on Amhurst Park road, also in Stamford Hill, were confronted by two men seemingly trying to attack them while shouting “Jew,” according to Shomrim.
The incidents are the latest examples of what Shomrim has described as a “hate crimes pandemic” directed at the large Hasidic community in Stamford Hill and the surrounding borough of Hackney in north London. The London Metropolitan Police have recorded 487 antisemitic hate crimes so far this year with 108 occurring in Hackney, the second most of any of London’s 32 boroughs behind the London Borough of Barnet, which also has a large, prominent Jewish community.
On Thursday, a cab driver in Hackney shouted “This is the last time I am taking Jews as you kill Muslims in Israel” at a “heavily pregnant” Jewish woman after picking her up from Homerton University Hospital.
Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA), a UK nonprofit, notes that UK Home Office statistics show that Jews are four times more likely to be the target of a hate crime than any other faith group in the UK, with an average of three hate crimes directed at Jews every day in England and Wales.