The Bury Times, a newspaper in the Greater Manchester area, published two reports of Jewish interest last week, about planning approval for a new mikvah, and on a Holocaust education program ahead of Holocaust Memorial Day.

However, when the stories were shared on the paper’s Facebook page, they attracted so many antisemitic comments that the news editor was forced to delete them.

In an open letter on Friday, Andrew Topping, the outlet’s news editor, asserted that the paper would not tolerate antisemitism and pleaded with social media users to be “better and kinder.”

The outlet’s news editor, Andrew Topping, wrote in an open letter to readers, “We have been forced to delete both posts from our Facebook page due to the sheer scale of commenting on each post and the thousands of comments to moderate, remove and take action on,” he wrote. “Unfortunately, at least 60 to 70 percent of those comments were antisemitic. Possibly even more.”

Topping added that the comments included “outdated religious tropes, denied the existence of the Holocaust, and made a large proportion of our community here in Bury feel marginalized at a time of significant international tension.”

“Simply, this is not acceptable, and it is not something we, here at the Bury Times, are willing to tolerate.”

“A handful of users had already been banned, and we will not hesitate to take further action against those who persist in abusing our comment section to peddle hatred,” he added.

Deleting the posts had been a “last resort,” he said. “However, we may now be forced to turn commenting off on certain stories in the community because we simply do not have the time or resources to monitor and moderate thousands of discriminatory comments.”

He noted that Bury “has one of the largest populations of Jewish people in the UK’.”

The new mikvah was “a great news story for local female Jews,” he said. “They should not be prevented from celebrating good news in their community out of fear about antisemitism in the comments section and should be able to freely comment on Facebook without fear of persecution.”

The Holocaust education program was “also a vital project to continue educating the next generations about one of the most horrific, systematic, and inhumane acts of genocide in human history.”

He mentioned last September’s murderous terror attack on Heaton Park Hebrew Congregation in Manchester and more recently, the foiled terrorist plot against Jews in Manchester.

“We simply ask people to be better and kinder and consider how your words may impact the more than 10,000 Jews who call Bury their home,” he said.

“The world is in an exceptionally fraught and fragile place, and unity, not division, is the only way for society to prevail over such tension and intolerance.”

(YWN Israel Desk—Jerusalem)