A terrorist attack on a synagogue in Manchester which claimed the lives two people has been condemned by political and church leaders. Michele Guinness believes the Jewish community carries wounds few outsiders can truly grasp. It’s vital Christians - who worship a Jewish Messiah - should take the time to reach out in love and friendship towards their Jewish neighbours, she says
There isn’t a Jew today who doesn’t sometimes find themselves thinking, “I am here today because I wasn’t there.”
The Holocaust throws a very long shadow down the years.
What do you say to your nine year-old child just back from school, where he has been learning about the Holocaust, when he asks you, “What would have happened to me if I had been there?”
I’m always conscious too on Remembrance Sunday that as I stand, sandwiched between the elderly who only just remember the last war and the young for whom the whole event is becoming an irrelevance, that they have no idea how much the occasion means to me. And I fight the tears that well up as I remember all those who sacrificed their lives to prevent the UK from becoming part of the Third Reich, and allowed me to exist at all.
It’s this inability to get inside the Jewish psyche that perhaps frustrates me the most about being a Jewish and a believer in Christ.
“Ah, but,” some have said to me in the church, “we don’t think of you as Jewish. You’re one of us.”
And I wonder what then I would have been to them if I hadn’t been a Christian.
The synagogue attack in Manchester was perhaps no surprise, heart-rending as it was. But it still turned my stomach, knowing as I do the importance of the Day of Atonement - that most holy of all days when congregants at the synagogue were confessing their sins in deep repentance and fasting. At least two men stood firm against the doors to prevent a greater carnage, but were tragically caught by police bullets and one died. They had probably rehearsed this procedure, always hoping it would be an unnecessary task.
At my nephew’s Bar Mitzvah last year, my husband and I and all our family were vetted at the synagogue gate by a member of the congregation, checked to ensure we were bona fide. A police officer watched from nearby.
All synagogues, Jewish schools, and youth clubs now have, occasionally armed, police security. And I wonder how Christians would feel if they faced the same procedures to get into church? Or that attending a church event at all came with a risk?
Difficult to say exactly how Christians should openly love their Jewish neighbours when there are so many varieties of Jews - from the fairly closed ultra-orthodox communities, where little more than a warm smile and hello is possible, to more assimilated Conservative, Reform and Liberal Jews, where loving friendships can certainly be formed with the offer of cards and flowers on festivals. Probably a better way forward than discussing Gaza. In fact many Jews are opposed to Netanyahu’s policies, some taking part in the pro-Palestinian marches. What they quickly realise is that few non-Jews have any real grasp of Israel’s history. A friend on one of the marches claimed everyone seemed to blame foreign secretary Balfour and the British for allowing the Jews back into the land in 1917. But thousands of Jews were already there and always had been, living peaceably with their Palestinian neighbours under British rule.
few non-Jews have any real grasp of Israel’s history
The real problem arose after the war when a third of the Jewish people were destroyed and many more found their homes sequestered by their neighbours when they returned from the concentration camps. Israel was the only dream they had left to keep them alive. Prime Minister Churchill had to do something, rather than let his troops go on firing on the boats that arrived from Europe, on passengers with their concentration camp numbers on their arms. He had no choice but to allow the Jews to have their own state. Nowhere else was safe. And sadly, that is fast becoming more and more the case at the moment.
Israel is and always will be the result of those endless years of persecution, causing trans-generational wounds in the people that seem as if they will never be healed. Not without an extra amount of love, understanding and acceptance - not for Israel’s political actions, but for the Jews as a people. I hope no one will judge me for the actions of the UK government I don’t agree with. After all, the Palestinian people suffered horrendously under Hamas, but the world said little about that.
As for Christians, the main thing is to recognise anti-semitism wherever it rears its ugly head, largely by understanding where the Jewish people are coming from with their tortuous history and their terror of being rejected simply for their ethnicity. And by learning some of their colourful traditions that enlighten and enrich our own understanding of the Christian faith. That always goes down well. After all, the God of the Old Testament is the God of both Jew and Christian. And Jesus the Messiah was Jewish. If Christians cannot love his relatives, who will?
