Golders Green ambulance attack: how this part of London became a home for Jews

The arson attack on four ambulances in Golders Green early on March 23 has been called “a horrific antisemitic attack” by the prime minister, Keir Starmer.

These ambulances were run for the benefit of both the local Jewish and non-Jewish communities in this district of north London by a charity called Hatzola – meaning “rescue” in Hebrew. As these ambulances played a key supportive role in enabling access to health provisions for the good of all, it is especially shocking – and has further heightened the anxieties of British Jews.

This is a community still reeling after the attack on the Heaton Park Synagogue in Manchester in October 2025 on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish religious calendar, which killed two people. And the arson attack is part of a wider international wave of antisemitism, which has included Norway, the US and the Netherlands in the past few weeks. This is not an easy time to be a diaspora Jew.

Those who have carried out the attacks have come from different backgrounds. Many have been influenced by online hate emanating from Isis, and potentially individuals or groups supportive of the hardline Iranian regime. Counter-terror police are investigating whether an Iran-linked group is responsible for the arson. The terror group Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamiya (The Islamic Movement of the People of the Right Hand) has claimed responsibility for the attack, as well as others in Europe.

These attacks reflect the complex pattern of hostility towards Jews in the UK, which has been through a mixture of domestic and foreign-inspired hatred. In terms of the latter, there are several examples going back a century which can be highlighted.

The most well-known is the Jew hatred spread by Oswald Mosley and his British Union of Fascists (BUF), formed in 1932, which was at least partly stimulated by German Nazism.

Overall, however, there are deep domestic roots of antisemitism since the readmission of the Jews in the 17th century after a 300-year expulsion. But it has rarely resulted in violent attacks – even if it has made life uncomfortable for the Jewish minority in moments of crisis.

Golders Green’s rich history

These roots can be seen in relation to Golders Green which started to develop as a place of Jewish settlement from the first world war onward. While there were some Jews in this then small suburb in the 19th century, there was not much in the way of a formal community.

Pam Fox, the social historian of Golders Green’s Jewish community, states that “Before 1910 there was just a handful of Jews living in the community, but by 1915 … there were 300 households”. Growth continued after the first world war, and in 1922 the first synagogue, Dunstan Road, was opened. Today, the Jewish population is around 8,000 and represents some 40% of the suburb’s population.

Such crude statistics do not reflect the diversity of the Jewish population both past and present. As early as the 1930s, more orthodox Jews, some of them refugees from Nazism, were establishing different forms of worship from Dunstan Road, which was more in the form of mainstream orthodox religiosity. By the second world war, there were at least 14,000 Jewish refugees in north-west London (including Golders Green), who varied from the totally secular, to reform, to the very orthodox.

After the war, there were more influxes of Jewish refugees, including from Egypt, Hungary and later South Africa, as well as second- and third-generation Jews whose origins were from eastern Europe and then the East End of London. While the very orthodox are currently the growing group in Golders Green, it still has an incredibly heterogeneous Jewish population.

For most Jews, the vibrant cultural, social and religious life of Golders Green has made it a very comfortable place to call home. Even so, there has been antisemitism – organised in the form of the BUF and more commonly in the form of more casual prejudice.

In late 1945, the Hampstead Petition Movement aimed to remove all foreign Jews from the wider area, and it had some local support. In the Nazi era, local newspapers, including the Golders Green Times, objected to the alleged bad behaviour of the Jewish refugees who were falsely accused of being unpatriotic and selfish.

Today, the idea of Golders Green being a Jewish suburb ignores the reality that most of its population is not of that background. It also forgets the many types of Jewishness that are articulated there. Such nuances are lost on those carrying out the attack on the ambulances, with their universal usage.

It says much about the times that such distinctions are not made – many people hold all Jews responsible for the actions of a particular Israeli government. Yet in Golders Green as elsewhere, Jews for both political, cultural and religious reasons hold a range of attitudes towards the problems of the Middle East. Ultimately, such attacks are, as local Jewish resident Sam Adler put it, “cynical and cowardly”. If nothing else, as with Manchester, they have also brought communities together in solidarity and resistance to the ugliness of antisemitism.

Tony Kushner does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.