For many Jews sitting down with family and friends for Friday night dinner, the conversation is now turning to their “red line”. “What do we do? Do we have to leave?” asked Barry Frankfurt.
Israel had once been a place some might have considered retiring to, to live by the sea. “Never in our lifetime has it been considered we need to run away, we need to seek refuge … and that place might have to be Israel,” said Frankfurt, a brand consultant in north London. “We might have to do that because we don’t feel safe in the country we call home.
“Every couple of weeks you’ll hear of another couple or family in the community who have moved or will be moving soon to Israel,” he said. “And that should be the thing that shocks us as a country.”
The Jewish community feels that life in the UK is not safe, he said. Before Wednesday’s stabbings in Golders Green, there had been a series of attempted arson attacks at Jewish sites, including one in the same road where the stabbings began: when four Jewish community ambulances were set on fire in the early hours of 23 March.
Frankfurt, a British-born father of four, and chair of his local synagogue, is now considering his red line. “If the things that are part of day-to-day life become physically unsafe for you and your family to the point of risk of life, you’d be crazy not to consider alternatives. And that is where we are now.”
“Human instinct tells you, ‘it’s actually not going to be that bad,’” he said. Hearing verbal abuse shouted from a passing car, or seeing a swastika daubed on a tombstone, “You can say: ‘It could be worse.’ You can rationalise it as a random idiot or moronic youth.
“At the point at which [there are] physical threats, threats to life – and I’m not being hyperbolic, I’m not trying to dramatise – but we’ve seen in the past few weeks, we’ve seen this week in Golders Green, it is an actual threat to life. I think most people say: ‘OK, well if a threat to life isn’t your red line, then actually what is?’”
His daughter, Libby, 16, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Friday that she had been verbally abused at a Sabrina Carpenter concert while talking to Israeli concert-goers. She said a man nearby began screaming: “You’ve committed genocide, you’re killing babies.” It was her first direct experience of antisemitism.
She said she now doesn’t want to bring her own family up in the UK when she’s older. “Someone who isn’t Jewish is not scared to live their life. But I’m petrified just because I’m Jewish.”
Data from the Institute for Jewish Policy Research shows that 742 people emigrated to Israel from the UK in 2025, the highest annual total in more than 40 years, though the organisation said this did not amount to an “exodus”.
Charlotte, 43, who has three children under 13 and works in communications, and her husband, a civil servant, said their circle had spoken “sort of in jest, but also not in jest” of moving to the “very safe Jewish community in Panama”.
“Frequently we hear families are choosing to emigrate to Israel, either already left, or will be leaving at the end of this academic year, and it is no longer a surprise, even though Israel has its own challenges,” she said.
The couple, who grew up in London, always saw their lives as being in the UK, but she now questions the safety of her children: her six-year-old on the tube wearing a kippah [head-covering], her 11-year-old going for milkshake with a friend wearing a kippah.
She said: “Everybody thinks about the Holocaust and the people who got out and the people who didn’t get out. And how late is too late? I don’t want to leave. I have family, a life, my work, here. To leave all of that because we feel unwelcome is too much of a bitter pill to swallow.
“The talk about Panama, I’d like to think, is tongue in cheek, but if two or three of our best friends turned round and said we are going to move, I’m sure we wouldn’t wait much later. It feels very, very close to home, now.”
