Manchester's Yom Kippur Synagogue Attack: Has Europe normalised Jew hatred

On the night of 9 November 1938, Germany’s cities glowed not with candles but with flames. Jewish shops and synagogues were smashed in a frenzy orchestrated by the Nazi state. The streets glittered with shards of broken glass, which is why the regime mockingly called it Kristallnacht — the “Night of Broken Glass. ” A polite term for a pogrom, as if destruction could be softened by language. That night, Jews discovered what it meant when prejudice became policy and hatred moved from the margins to the mainstream. Europe promised that such hatred would never return. But history does not move in straight lines. On Yom Kippur 2025, in Manchester, glass crunched again. Not on shopfronts, but beneath the wheels of a car that rammed into Jews outside their synagogue, followed by a stabbing ram