Simon and Honey Gould, married for more than 20 years and with two children, live a seemingly peaceful life in their handsome five-bedroom house in a quiet British suburb.
Simon, 52, is a successful businessman running his own property company. Honey, 49, has pursued a career in marketing, while also raising son Arron, now 18, and daughter Angel, 16. Their wide circle of friends, close family and other relatives lives nearby.
Yet this summer the Goulds will leave everything behind – their north Manchester home filled with memories, their lovely, rambling garden, their busy social life – and leave the UK for good.
It may sound dramatic – incomprehensible, even. But the family, who are Jewish, no longer feel safe in this country. They believe they have no choice.
“It’s a terrible wrench,” says Honey, who admits that even emptying a single drawer “takes hours” as, bit by bit, she packs away the pieces of their life, ready for transit to their new home in the US state of Arizona.
“I’m proud to be British. My parents live in London. Simon has lived his whole life in two streets of north Manchester. Our house is the only home our son and daughter have ever known. But we have to do this, not least for the sake of our children.”
She is not the only member of Britain’s 300,000-strong Jewish community to feel things have reached crisis point. Since the gun attack that killed three peopleat the Jewish Museum in Brussels last year and the murder by radical Islamists of four Jews at a kosher supermarket on the outskirts of Paris last month, the chorus of concern has been growing. The actress Maureen Lipman recently revealed that she, too, is considering leaving the UKbecause of the rising number of attacks on Jews.
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