A new blog

Today I read in the Evening Standard on the Thursday the 10th of April 2008. The headline reads stop picking on Jewish schools, Balls Told. It talks about how the children Secretary Ed Ball has been unfairly attacking Jewish schools over their admissions policy. The article continues by saying how the president of the board deputies for British Jews Henry Grunwald recognized the problem but felt that they were being unfairly picked on. I went to Sinai primary school and after a year and a half at another school which was non-Jewish I tried to go into the JFS from what I heard it is common practice for Jewish schools to ask extra payments. This helps  shows how many of the divisions there are in the Jewish community.

At the weekend I saw another result of how we run the Jewish community in this country and how such policies are now damaging it. In the Jewish Chronicle I read that over 50% of Israelis living in Great Britain did not mix with local Jewish people.  This may not sound that important but there around 50,000 of them in the United Kingdom.  What is more shocking is that I'm not surprised as I know the reasons why they've not mixed with the bulk of the community in the United Kingdom secondly I was not surprised at the result.  To understand why it's really happened you really need to just see what is going on. 

One friend of mine born in Israel who had spent most of her life in South Africa told me after two years living in London. After encountering London's Jewish community she had been totally put off of being Jewish.  When she first came to this country she joined of a couple of organisations here in London.  She was not a one-off.  When I was younger 10 years ago I too was a member of the organisation FZY. Unlike the other young people who went to Jewish schools or private I went to a normal comprehensive.  I soon found myself that I could not mix with the other members as they had all known one another from the age of 10.  I was a 16-year-old and I found myself in a community which claimed I was a member but which none of the people who were there are really seen me as a member.  The result in years according to a few friends (I don't know for certain if this is true) that the UK Jewish community is known to have the highest levels of social exclusion of any community in the United Kingdom.

I saw a repeat of this when I was at university in Manchester, a acquaintance of mine had come from India. His parents are originally from London but they'd moved to India on business. Whenever he tried to join a Jewish organisation he was turned down. Both his parents were Jewish in fact they were both members of the United Synagogue. After a few months he gave up he became one of the heads of the Manchester University Senate. When he warned a number of you UJS members about motion one he was ignored. The result was an anti-Zionist motion was almost passed by the University of Manchester's students union. I can think of  other examples but I'm now going to talk more about what the media are saying and what I think could happen if we don't do something to stop this madness.

In the Jewish News a writer suggested that is the Jewish community here in Great Britain was falling numerically the more of us should move to Israel.  I could not think of all worst idea but I could also not just think of a more out of touch idea of reality than what this man is saying. 

In the law we are taught sometimes to read between the lines for example some unscrupulous landlords will call a leasehold a licences to remove their tenants when they want to sell their property. In the UK organisations say that people are not as Zionist as they should be.

  In the article in the Jewish Chronicle the Israelis were saying that every time they tried to get involved with the British Jewish community they could not.  The problem here is that I'm willing to bet it's not just Israelis who are having a bad time of trying to get involved with Britain's Jewish community.  As I read the article in the Jewish News I actually felt fairly sick. 

From my time in the Weitzman Institute I knew for a fact that most Israelis strongly believe in the survival of the European Jewish community and the last thing they would want would be us all moving to Israel.  In any case these days we live in a more and more globalised world some Israelis see this as a big advantage for a small state in a poor part of the world which just happens to be a first world state.  I read in the Guardian yesterday that there are food shortages in Egypt and it hit the point even stronger than before what I had read in city of oranges as it showed just how unstable the Middle East was. 

In the last chapter of the book City of Oranges they talk about the Russian Jewish immigrants and how some of them are using drugs and one of the people they're interviewing is suggesting that immigration into Israel should be reduced.  You may ask how this has anything to do with our community.

What shows just how unrealistic that writer is in the Jewish News? Some of the worst offenders are trying to help people in Israel but if you actually meet the people running the organisation's what you tend to find middle-class British-born public school educated Jewish people. 

Sometimes you hear about it from Israelis I was the only British Jew studying at the Weitzman Institute. I spoke to the Israelis who was studying at the Weitzman Institute and had lived in Great Britain virtue all of them had been upset by how community treated them.  They told me they liked individual British Jews but they couldn't stand us as a community. 

So how can we stop this happening?  I would suggest more community projects but I think the projects need to be not run by people from inside the community unfortunately.  I've read about small American communities building campuses where they share the upkeep of elderly people but the solution to the problems with the British Jewish community I think would need to go deeper then this. 

In my last blog I talked about the growing Orthodox community. I can see in a matter of decades that at some point the ultraorthodox will make up the majority of the Jewish community of this country. If we have a minority of Jewish people who are rich middle-class many of the moving out to South Hertfordshire we are likely to end up with a similar community to the one that was in Holland last century.  My great- great-grandfather when he came over to Britain in 1870 met a nice Sephardic Dutch woman my great, great grandmother.  They fell in love and got married but I was always told that her family disapproved of him marrying her.  The reason for this was many of the Dutch Sephardic disliked the Ashkenazi immigrants.  In Holland itself the division was even worse between the two communities today in Britain's Jewish community with seeing I believe the late stages of a situation like that in Holland.  We have a large minority that is dictating increasingly to the majority on its own terms the sort of community it wants to see. Over the last few years we've seen increasingly the large sections of the Jewish community in this country resent the way it is being run.

It is now even catching the attention of our own government when they investigate Jewish schools in this country it sees how badly they treat the people they should be serving. More often than not the most students going to these schools will marry people who they meet at these schools or they met when they were a member of the youth movement. They then have children themselves they send them to the same youth movement and the cycle repeats itself. The problem is we live in a multi-ethnic society even in our own community is divided into different factions some of them are immigrants, some of them simply come from different parts of the country which does not have a big Jewish community. As I write this article I am becoming increasingly aware of just how badly our community is seen both at home in Israel and other parts of the world by both other Jewish people and Israelis. The message is simple things need to change if they don't we will have even worse problems in the next-generation. People don't take inequality in society ever if they did the present structure of Britain's Jewish community would be fine.

But to be blunt it is not...

Ian Rosmarin