Shortly before 11am yesterday morning, friends Isaac Cohen and Ido Birman were driving towards the Hager’s synagogue in Golder’s Green to pray. As they pulled up, they saw two men sprinting towards the synagogue, screaming about a man with a knife.
Cohen and Birman spun their black Peugeot SUV around and began searching for the attacker. As they coasted along Golder’s Green Road, they found him loping along the street, making a beeline for a middle-aged man in a navy coat and a younger woman.
I'm Peter, The Londoner's newest recruit. As soon as we saw the terror unfolding in Golders Green, I hopped on a train and went up there. We've been reporting on the unrest in North London for a few weeks now and knew this wasn't a one off, but an escalation in a series of attacks. When I arrived, I found a community increasingly on edge, but determined not to be completely disrupted.
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“Move! Move! Move!” the men screamed in Hebrew to alert the man, who whirled around and sprinted around a parked car to narrowly escape. More than four hours after the attack, in a blustery sideroad running towards Hager’s synagogue, Cohen and Birman are showing me a video they filmed of their intervention. In the grainy footage, they can be seen desperately honking their car horn and shouting at pedestrians.
Video taken by Birman and Cohen of their attempts to warn people in Golders Green. Video courtesy of Isaac Cohen and Ido Birman
The clip is only 23 seconds long, but their mission lasted far longer.
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