UK Jews talk of leaving for Israel but few actually do

A couple of weeks ago, there was an early morning fire near a major kosher supermarket in London’s Golders Green. Many feared that this was yet another assault on the Jewish community. It coincided with the breaking news that the pro-Iranian Kata’ib Hezbollah in Iraq had been behind 18 attacks in Europe. The group was aligned with Iran’s Quds Force – the overseas arm of the Revolutionary Guards. It had operated a Telegram social media network of 22 channels to facilitate its campaign against Jews. Was this fire the latest episode in the campaign against British Jews?  

It turned out that the cause of the fire was an electrical fault but it did underline the sense of nervousness and almost expectation of further antisemitic incidents.

Commentators in the mainstream media were quick to speculate whether this would lead to a wholesale exodus of Jews from the UK, seeking safety elsewhere in a dangerous world. Social media chatter added simple-minded answers to a complex scenario.

At the end of April, the Institute for Jewish Policy Research (JPR) in London had published its report, Time to leave the UK? It stated that 742 British citizens had emigrated to Israel in 2025. The Israel Central Bureau of Statistics reported that in the past three years – the period of the judicial reform protests, the October 7 attacks, the war in Gaza, the conflict in Lebanon and the military confrontation with Iran – an annual average of 566 British emigrants had left for Israel. This was close to the annual average rate of emigration during the past two decades.

The JPR report noted that 1.27 Jews on average per 1,000 Jews emigrated to Israel between 2006 and 2025. By the beginning of 2026, this has increased to 2.36 Jews per 1000 Jews, but did not take into account the later attack on the Hatzolah ambulances in March.