Phones turned off during Yom Kippur, worshippers leaving synagogue hear news of attack

It’s just gone 7.30pm – and outside a synagogue in north Manchester, we’ve heard the shofar, a ceremonial horn, being blown to mark the end of the long day of prayers.

The streets, which had been so quiet all day, fill with people and families.

We’re just minutes away from where the attack took place.

But people haven’t had their phones on in synagogue – and we find ourselves in the slightly surreal position of having to tell people what happened to members of their community, just a few roads away.

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“Did many people get hurt?” Rachel, in her 70s, asks me.

I tell her two have died.

She gasps and says: “My gosh. It’s the holiest day of the year.

“Very, very frightening. We’re not safe.”

Read more:
Witnesses describe how attack unfolded
What we know about synagogue attack

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Earlier in the day on these streets, we saw additional police patrols, with officers telling us they were here to reassure members of the public.

But people are accustomed to seeing security here.

Both paid and volunteer security staff, in their hi-vis jackets, are a permanent fixture outside every synagogue.

It’s to help protect a community that, even before this attack, has felt under threat.

“The security is not the solution,” one man tells me as he heads home from prayers. “Those who really want to do [something like this], they will do it with lots of security, it doesn’t matter.”

Among everyone we spoke to, there was a sense of shock at what had happened, but perhaps not necessarily surprise amid rising acts of antisemitism in the UK.

David Yehudi and the rabbi he studied with said it had felt like a long time coming.

“As a grandchild of a Holocaust survivor, I feel as if this is before 1935 again,” he says. “That’s the overwhelming feeling all over the world.”

The rabbi adds: “The United Nations was set up with the intention of ‘never again’, and where is the United Nations? In terms of the global support against antisemitism. It’s just not there anymore. We are as unsafe as we were before the war.”

It is a shocking thing to hear, on this, the most solemn of days.