“It all started with a classmate saying ‘Heil Hitler’ to my son – in the classroom, in the school hallway and on the playground.” Sarah’s* teenage son didn’t want to go to school the day after what happened. “He was very upset,” she says. “He was also worried about reporting and being seen as a whistleblower. There are incidents all the time and it’s not a pleasant environment for him.”
Sarah’s son attends a state secondary school in Surrey. As a Jewish student, he experienced an incident of anti-Semitism before October 7 last year. But since the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel and the ensuing war in Gaza, the British student has found himself on the receiving end of an escalation of anti-Semitic abuse from his peers, some of whom have come to incorporate the word “Jew” ” in his words. name.
A kid attacked him on Snapchat, telling him “you Jew — must be stopped.”
Sarah’s husband reported the incident to the police, who initially took it seriously but, more than a month later, have still not contacted the alleged culprit.
“This incident was really concerning for us,” says Sarah. “Now I’m scared to speak to my son in Hebrew [in public]. You take off your symbols and change your language to try [and hide]. I feel like my children are a target and that is very scary. This should not happen to children, no matter what background they are from.”
Your child is not the school’s only target. Sarah’s friend’s Jewish son, in Year 11 at the same secondary school, was approached by another boy brandishing a can of deodorant and telling him: “Gas the Jews”.
“There has been a huge increase in incidents since October 7th,” says Sarah.
The anti-Semitism experienced by Jewish students on British university campuses from the beginning of the war is well documented. But, according to Jewish parents, even very young children hear and see hostility from others their age.
Less than a month after the Hamas attack, a swastika and the words “Kill Jews” were found stained in the bathrooms of Channing, a private girls’ school in north London. The school warned students that anti-Semitism would not be tolerated.
O Community Security Trust recorded 325 incidents of antisemitism in British schools in 2023 – a 232 percent increase on the previous year. The majority – 70 percent – occurred after October 7th. In most cases, abusive behavior was involved, but 32 incidents of assault and 10 of damage or desecration of property were also recorded.
Anecdotal evidence suggests the picture has been similar so far this year in both public and private schools in Britain.
A child psychotherapist who works in numerous London schools believes that antisemitism is now systemic and needs to be tackled as such in schools. “And not just teaching ‘British values’,” she says. “Because it’s not being addressed.”
One of her child clients received so much anti-Semitic abuse that she is now changing schools. A schoolmate told another child, “I don’t play with Jews.”
The psychotherapist’s own children were not immune either. She and her family, who are British, lived in Israel until the start of the war and she moved them back to north London “to protect them”. But her eldest daughter, who is in the fifth year of a public elementary school, has been targeted by other children because she lived in Israel.
“They said she wouldn’t play with her because she’s from Israel,” says her mother. “At home we have been working a lot on how we are not responsible for a country. If we saw an American [while Donald Trump was in the White House], we wouldn’t attack them for having Trump as president. I talked to my daughter about how I went to marches in Israel because we want things to change and how we want peace and I don’t agree with a lot of what’s going on. But she shouldn’t feel responsible. She doesn’t understand half of what’s going on anyway. She is very upset.
The psychotherapist believes that the children behind the abuse are influenced both by social media and, in some cases, by what they hear at home.
Another Jewish mother – who, like the others, does not want to be identified for fear of making things worse – says her children have been repeatedly victims of anti-Semitic bullying at school. When one of them offered some money to a schoolmate who was short of change one day, they were told: “I don’t want your dirty Jewish money.”
On another occasion, a student turned on the gas taps during a science class and asked the woman’s son “if they were having flashbacks”.
They saw their colleagues giving Nazi salutes, while swastikas appeared on their desks.
Chana Hughes, a London-based family therapist who frequently sees young people and their parents in the Jewish community, warns that for many children, “their stomachs start to turn when Monday morning arrives.”
She says: “A 14-year-old girl sat in my office the other week and looked at her hands. She told me that a boy in her class had scrawled a swastika on the back of her chair and then denied it. ‘In my class, it’s cool to like Hitler,’ she told me.”
But children and their parents are often reluctant to report incidents at schools, she says.
“The children affected do not want anyone to know for fear of the repercussions. Parents also make a point of not making noise. They want to maintain a good relationship with their children’s school, they don’t want to be blamed for the increase in differences between communities and they are also intimidated.”
“Many school officials are complicit or silent,” says Hughes. “I was told that some employees wear keffiyehs [Palestinian scarves] or emblems with ‘from the river to the sea’. They were often asked to remove their badges, but the statements have already been made.”
She knows many well-meaning teachers who care about the well-being of Jewish children. “But they also want to keep all the parents happy and maintain the status quo in the school community,” she says.
“Often, employees themselves are confused about their answers and receive little guidance from the top.”
“When even elementary school children feel distressed about their Jewish identity, it is yet another worrying sign that the roots of anti-Semitism are running deep,” she says. “We need to stop this now, before it becomes the legacy of the next generation.”
*Name has been changed
