|
Trending Topics
|
The Reality of the Antisemitic Terror Threat Is London Children Doing Lockdown Drills
(Telegraph-UK) Elisa Bray - My children have been playing "sleeping lions" a lot lately. In the childhood game, you lie still and don't make a sound or the "hunter" will get you. They have been playing the game at their Jewish primary school as part of the lockdown drills that take place in the wake of the horrific shooting at Bondi Beach. When parents at schools around the country are watching their darlings take part in nativity productions and carol concerts, at Jewish schools children are undertaking lockdown drills to help protect them from the threat of attack from terrorists who hate Jews. Lockdown drills are a sad fact of life for American families. In the USA, 96% of state schools conduct them. But most British parents feel safe in the knowledge that it does not take place here in the UK. Except, it does. Unfortunately, children who attend Jewish schools live in a somewhat different reality in parallel to their non-Jewish peers. And it is time that everyone knows. It is time people are aware of the deep anxiety we felt after the Sydney killings, yet another massacre of innocent Jews. It was soon after two synagogue goers were killed in Manchester on Yom Kippur. Each time there is an antisemitic attack, no matter where in the world, the shock waves felt across the Jewish community bring home the awful reality that some people really do want us dead. The school prepared the children in advance. At the sound of an alarm and the words "sleeping lions," they needed to be silent and calm, breathe to focus their minds, and listen to an adult. Staff closed doors and covered windows to conceal those within, then hid quietly with the children in the classrooms until they heard the "all-clear." At ten-years-old and now used to the experience, my daughter was unperturbed while a teacher pretending to be an intruder hammered on the door, shouting. But it was my four-year-old's first drill. His teachers called it a game of "hide and seek." He told me how he hid in the toilet, and "if we wanted to sneeze or cough, we had to hold it in." How very sad it is that Jewish people have grown accustomed to something so... abnormal. "Sleeping lions" is the terrifying reality for Jewish children going to British primary schools today. And people should be angry.