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As London Burns, Riots Spread to Jewish Communities

JTA

While some Jews in London marked Tisha b’Av on Tuesday by lamenting the burning of the Holy Temples on that day some two millennia ago, other London Jews watched as their city burned amid widespread rioting.

“Everyone is shocked,” Joel Braunold, a lifelong Londoner, told JTA in a phone interview just after leaving Tisha b’Av services Monday night. “People are angry and scared.”

Violent protests that broke out last Saturday following a deadly police shooting in the North London neighborhood of Tottenham quickly turned into riots, arson attacks and looting in neighborhoods this week all over the city in the worse civil unrest that London has seen in 25 years.

In some cases, the Jews reportedly weren’t just bystanders.

The Guardian reported that some members of Tottenham’s small Chasidic community — all that remains of a once-substantial Jewish community that earned its local soccer team the nickname “the Yids” — gathered to jeer police. A video posted on YouTube shows Orthodox men laughing and then scattering as a crowd of mounted police officers move in.

In another video, young Orthodox men can be seen handing out challah.

“When I saw Jewish people out tonight I was happy,“ one protester told the Socialist Worker newspaper. ”I thought, it’s not just us. They gave us bread.”

Most Jews, however, appear to be eager for a return to law and order. Local rabbis and the Shomrim Orthodox security service have warned Jewish community members to stay away from the riots, the UK Jewish Chronicle reported.

As the riots spread to Jewish areas of Stamford Hill and Golders Green, several Jewish-owned businesses were ransacked. Joelle Selt told JTA that her father’s general store was robbed at knifepoint by masked men, and a 71-year-old Jewish-owned store in Tottenham was looted Sunday morning, the Chronicle reported.

“They are tearing up their own community,“ the store’s owner, Derek Lewis, said of the rioters, as reported in the Chronicle. ”It’s tragic.“

At least two stabbings were reported Monday night in Stamford Hill, and clashes between rioters and police were reported in Golders Greer and Camden.

Linda W., a mother of three daughters who lives in London, contrasted the rioters disparagingly with the massive but nonviolent protests in Israel over high housing prices.

”It’s evident who raises the better man,“ she wrote in an e-mail to JTA.

Linda said the Riot Act — a 1715 law that made it a felony for groups of 12 or more to refuse to disperse after being ordered to do so — should be returned to the books. The law was repealed in 1973.

”People want to enforce the law by any means necessary,“ Braunold said. ”They don’t care anymore; they just want the riots off the streets.“

The rioting began following the police shooting Aug. 4 in Tottenahm of a suspected drug dealer named Mark Duggan, and spread to young people in poorer neighborhoods. Many analysts have linked the riots to the weak economy, widespread unemployment and deep budget cuts that have hurt Britain’s poor.

”There are underlying causes,“ Braunold said, ”but first the rioting and hooliganism needs to stop. This brings out the worst characteristics in people, and they need to face the consequences.”

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19 Comments

  • WHAT????

    what an awful chilul Hashem. Jews do NOT condone violence and should be nowhere NEAR the riots. We have had our share of riots in history, for once this is not about the Jews. Please keep it that way.
    Jeering? handing out challah? Sick.

  • just thinking

    I hope this doesn’t turn into the classic “It’s the Jews’ fault” or the more modern “It’s the Israelis’” fault. England isn’t now, and never has been, ohavei yisroel.

  • Get a shotgun

    Take a lesson from Crown Heights.

    Don’t rely on the authorities

    Get a shotgun

  • DeClasse Intellectual

    #1–It is Tisha b“Av.

    Historical triva–what event began on Tisha b”Av that many say might rival the impact of the destruction of the Bais Hamedosh and had a smiliar hiorriific impact upon the war??

  • DeClasse Intellectual

    opps–should have read–had a similiar impact upon the world? So again what occurred on Tisha b’Av that forever changed the course of world history????

  • Milhouse

    I don’t believe the bit about chassidim cheering the rioters. This writer is surely making it up.

  • Lubavitch resident of Tottenham, London

    To No 7, you are foolish, there are many people of many cultures living all over England and many other countries around the world, including America, ‘The Melting Pot!’

    To No 9, you are also foolish, look carefully at the pictures, you will see many jewish men with long payos, tzitzis flying, and mobile phones making a major Chilul Hashem. As No 2 wrote, ‘hope this doesn’t turn into the classic “It’s the Jews’ fault!’ There were many such comments, ‘why were they involved?’The police were very upset as the Jews are a peaceful people, why were they there?
    Unfortunately, ‘live TV!!’

    There are too many innocent people and businesses that were hurt and/or destroyed, and far to many families are homeless, there homes and everything they owned destroyed in the fires!

    We desperately need MOSHIACH NOW!!!

  • i8dkasha

    Muslims were the ones who were killed defending their businesses – “poga bo kayotze bo”

  • Get your facts right!

    The riots have nothing to do with Jewish people. It is not an act of anti-semites nor of terrorists. It the act of criminal youths who have nothing better to do with their lives than copy the riots that was started as the result of the killing of a gang-member.
    Collive should make sure to post only true articles and not those of writers who do not know the facts! This causes loshon harah across the world!

  • Lubavitch resident of Tottenham, London

    No 11, you are correct, 3 muslim/pakistani youths aged around 21 were hit and killed by a driver who drove his car directly into them, killing them while they defended their business.

    No 12, ‘the riots have nothing to do with Jewish people’ yet many Jewish property owners lost greatly by these lawless criminals. While you and I know the Jews had nothing to do with it, they should not have been there handing out challah and then getting into the ways of the TV cameras looking as if they were causing trouble.

  • DIRA-MIVORA

    ON TISHA B’AV IN 1290 KING EDWARD 1ST OF ENGLAND SIGNED AN EDICT EXPELLING ALL JEWS FROM ENGLAND.
    ON TISHA B’AV 2011 – THIS .

  • DeClasse Intellectual

    It seemed that time stood still that fateful summer in Europe as Tisha b“Av approached. Sabers rattled, armies prepared to march, country leaders ran around like geshochted chickens afraid of their own shadow, people held their breath. On Tisha b”Av in August of 1914, World War One began and that Tisha b“Av occurrence left us with Communism, Fascism, the holicost among many of the them from the Armenian to the Balkans at the end of the century. That day foreever changed the world and the world has not yet recovered. There were many causes of this clamity starting with the Congress of Berlin(1878). This Tisha b”Av event rivials the destructions of both Bais Hamekdoshes for the ill and the evil that has befallen from it.

  • LubyLondoner

    Thing seem to be inproving now with the 16000 police that are on duty! Yet us here in london still have to be careful

  • BTW

    Just so you should all know its spread to Manchester also plus many other citys in England! and it seems to be bad in those places!