Mick Hartley

From the Sunday Times:

During her long and distinguished NHS career, Elizabeth had rarely experienced antisemitism in the workplace.

That was until June last year, a few months after the senior consultant, who is Jewish, began working for a new trust in a London borough.

She was discussing Orthodox Jews with a colleague as part of a conversation on how to communicate health messages to marginalised groups. “I was introducing myself to a colleague and I was talking about how sometimes it’s very hard to reach that community, because there’s a lot of fear about statutory services getting involved,” she said.

“She said, ‘Yes, there’s a lot of fear about it, but you know of course they [Jews] are everywhere, because they believe there is going to be another Holocaust and they continue to reproduce.’

“She carried on talking and after a while I said, ‘Actually, I know something about some of the beliefs they have, because I am Jewish’. She just said, ‘Oh my goodness, why didn’t you tell me?’ She was mortified.”

Elizabeth was shocked by the encounter, not least because the clinician was the head of a medical discipline and was required to engage regularly with the community.

Since the Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7 last year, she and other Jewish medics say they have observed an increase in anti-Jewish hatred from NHS colleagues, both online and in daily life. They also say staff are displaying political support for Palestine in ways that are affecting Jewish colleagues and patients.

In the 12 months after October 7, more than 5,500 antisemitic incidents were recorded in Britain, a threefold increase on the previous year.

According to the Community Security Trust (CST), a charity established to protect the British Jewish community, 78 antisemitic incidents have been reported in the health sector over the past 14 months. Of these, 42 were were perpetrated by healthcare professionals.

During this period, the Jewish Medical Association submitted 28 complaints to the General Medical Council (GMC), which regulates the conduct of doctors. In the 12 months before October 7, it submitted one.

Jewish leaders are due to meet this week with Wes Streeting, the health secretary, to urge the government to act. All the medics who spoke to The Sunday Times requested anonymity.

After October 7, Elizabeth’s London trust offered little support to Jewish employees. That December, a message to staff was sent via its internal weekly bulletin. It noted a recent rise in Islamophobia and provided information on where affected colleagues could receive help. No such communication had been sent in relation to antisemitism….

Hannah, a speech and language therapist working at another London trust, had a similar experience. She said the atrocity felt to “me and a lot of Jewish people like a bereavement”. Her children received death threats.

She had worked in a “really nice and supportive team”, but Hannah said that when she and other Jewish colleagues explained to leaders “how difficult we were finding it and we needed some support”, she was told by one manager this was not possible “because in the trust we need to be fair to both sides”. While Hannah later spoke to other managers and things improved, she found the initial response “ignorant and very polarising”.

Several weeks later, she and others were alerted that a colleague had been posting “really disgusting, antisemitic” content on social media. This included imagery invoking the blood libel (an antisemitic canard that Jews in antiquity used Christian blood in rituals) and the Holocaust, as well as “poems about Israeli children living on other children’s graves”. One picture, she said, depicted “two trenches filled with bodies, one showing Jewish skeletons from the Holocaust” and the second body bags “that said [they] were from Gaza” — drawing direct parallels between the Nazis and Israel.

Hannah and her colleagues filed a complaint to the trust last December. A year on there has been no resolution and she has received no formal update, despite repeated requests.

Several of her Jewish friends working in the trust had left because of the working environment. Hannah herself is considering leaving the NHS entirely. “There’s a double standard and it’s institutional,” she said….