“It started with a fellow pupil saying ‘Heil Hitler’ to my son – in the classroom, the school corridor and the playground.” Sarah’s* teenage child didn’t want to go to school the day after this happened. “He was very upset,” she says. “He was also worried about reporting it and being seen as a snitch. There are incidents all the time and it’s not a nice environment for him.”
Sarah’s son attends a state secondary school in Surrey. As a Jewish pupil, he had experienced one incident of anti-Semitism there before Oct 7 last year. But since Hamas’s terror attack on Israel and the ensuing war in Gaza, the British schoolboy has found himself at the sharp end of an escalation in anti-Semitic abuse from his peers, some of whom have taken to incorporating the word “Jew” into his name.
