ECAJ statement on the terrorist attack in Manchester.

The ECAJ has con­demned in the strongest terms the heinous ter­ror­ist attack that tar­get­ed Jew­ish wor­ship­pers at the Heaton Park Syn­a­gogue in Man­ches­ter as they gath­ered to com­mem­o­rate Yom Kip­pur, the holi­est and most solemn day in the Jew­ish cal­en­dar.

ECAJ Pres­i­dent Daniel Aghion described the attack as “an out­rage”:

This was not only an attack on the Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty of one syn­a­gogue. It was an attack on reli­gious free­dom. What­ev­er sick rea­son might have moti­vat­ed the per­pe­tra­tor to mur­der two peo­ple at ran­dom and seri­ous­ly injure four oth­ers, it points to a col­lapse of basic moral val­ues. No reli­gious, polit­i­cal or ide­o­log­i­cal moti­va­tion can ade­quate­ly explain, let alone jus­ti­fy, such an act of cal­cu­lat­ed bar­bar­i­ty.

Our hearts go out to the fam­i­lies of those who were mur­dered and to the injured, and to the whole Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty in the UK who have yet again been trau­ma­tized. The Aus­tralian Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty stands with them in sol­i­dar­i­ty and we offer them our com­plete sup­port.

Yom Kip­pur is a day of fast­ing and prayer, of search­ing one’s soul and exam­in­ing one’s per­son­al life to acknowl­edge fail­ures and short­com­ings and resolve to do bet­ter. Per­haps there is a mes­sage there for oth­ers as well.

Although not direct­ly linked to this par­tic­u­lar attack, the harsh and untruth­ful crit­i­cal rhetoric we have seen from anti-Israel mobs time and again on our streets and in our media has been seized on to enliv­en and exploit anti­se­mit­ic prej­u­dices more broad­ly, and on occa­sions to plan and car­ry out crimes of the kind that we have just seen occur­ring in Man­ches­ter. They need to reflect on their actions and their words.