Residents come together to insist their diverse neighbourhood will stick together
Residents come together to insist their diverse neighbourhood will stick together
“These people are sent to divide us, but they won’t,” said Barry Moore, as he walked his dog near the site of the terror attack on Heaton Park synagogue in Manchester.
On the gently sloping street where two people were killed and four seriously wounded, neighbours from different faiths pulled together.
Jewish residents evacuated from their homes on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, chatted with Muslim neighbours behind the cordon on Middleton Road in Crumpsall, sharing bottles of water, blankets and best wishes.
Black and white residents came to the scene to express their shock and sadness at the horror that unfolded on Thursday morning while police investigated two locations – the synagogue and a nearby residential address they had cordoned off.
As a Christian church set up a stall to hand out food to strangers, Moore, 55, remembered the last attack that rocked his “great community” – the 2003 murder of police officer Stephen Oake by the terrorist Kamel Bourgass.
He added: “I’m a retired window cleaner so I know everyone and everyone knows me. We are not going to be more twitchy in this area. The last time something significant like this happened was when the police officer was killed down the road. This brings back memories of that. We pulled together then and we’ll pull together now.”
Crumpsall is a very diverse area, one of a series of neighbourhoods to the north of Manchester city centre at the heart of one the UK’s biggest and most vibrant Jewish communities.
