Over the past two years, the Board of Deputies of British Jews has faced questions of their own about how to conduct debates on Israel.<\/p>\n
Earlier this year, 36 of the board’s members signed an open letter, which was published in the Financial Times, protesting against “this most extremist of Israeli governments” and its failure to free the hostages held since 7 October.<\/p>\n
“Israel’s soul is being ripped out and we\u2026 fear for the future of the Israel we love,” the letter said.<\/p>\n
Five members of the Board were suspended for instigating the letter. The Board’s Constitution Committee found that they had broken a code of conduct by creating the “misleading impression that this [the letter] was an official document of the Board as a whole”.<\/p>\n
But for some, the letter represented a watershed moment where some of the conversations about Israel happening in private within the UK’s Jewish community could be had in public.<\/p>\n
Phil Rosenberg argues that there has long been healthy debate among the 300 deputies. His primary concern now is the safety of British Jews but also how the community sees itself.<\/p>\n
“We have a whole range of activities to confront antisemitism,” he says. “But we also believe that the community needs not just to be seeing itself, and to be seen, through the prism of pain.<\/p>\n
“It already wasn’t right that the only public commemoration of Jewish life in this country is Holocaust Memorial Day. And the only compulsory education is Holocaust education. Both of these things are incredibly important, but that’s not the whole experience of Jews.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Over the past two years, the Board of Deputies of British Jews has faced questions of their own…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":327530,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-327529","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/327529","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=327529"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/327529\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/327530"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=327529"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=327529"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=327529"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}