Board of Deputies of British Jews

Board of Deputies of British Jews
Headquarters	London, UK
Type	lobby

According to its own account:

The Board of Deputies has been served throughout its history by individuals not only active in community affairs, but in other spheres of public life. Moses Montefiore stands as the single most prominent figure, but other notables include Sir Philip Magnus, Judge Neville Laski, Professor Selig Brodetsky, Lucien Wolf, Lord Barnett Janner, Michael Fidler, Lord Fisher and Lord Greville Janner. Officers of the Board have always represented Jewish interests at the highest level.

The history of the Board of Deputies has not always been a peaceful one either in its relations with the world at large or within the British Jewish community. There have been controversies about its structures and procedures; controversies over representation from the Orthodox and Liberal sides of the community; and controversies over Zionism and Israel’s politics. The ongoing problems which Israel has with her Arab neighbours have presented difficulties for the Jewish Diaspora. There have been clashes with other communal groups over policy and of course full and frank dialogue with non-Jewish individuals and organisations. Lively debate on virtually every subject has been a constant feature.

At a BoD dinner in 2007, Gordon Brown is reported to have said that “Israel will always have our support. We will be a friend in good times and bad and we will never compromise our friendship for political expediency.”.

Meeting with American Jewish Committee

In 2006, the American Jewish Committee (AJC) report a meeting with the Deputies of British Jews in 'an effort to strengthen AJC’s ties to British Jewry'

The report states that:

'AJC President E Robert Goodkind led a leadership delegation to London to meet with the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the main community organizing body for British Jews, as well as with the Community Service Trust and the newly formed Jewish Leadership Council. The group also met with British Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, longtime Jewish community leaders Lord Greville Janner and Sir Trevor Chinn, and with leadership from the Reform, Liberal and Conservative Masorti movements. In addition, the group held meetings with those Members of Parliament who initiated a serious parliamentary investigation of anti-Semitism, and with younger leaders of Conservative Friends of Israel and Labour Friends of Israel. AJC Board members Stanley Bergman and Peter Rosenblatt joined Goodkind on the mission.

People

• Greville Janner
• Eric Moonman
• Henry Grunwald (Board of Deputies president).

 

Employee on Wikispooks

Employee	Job	Appointed
Gillian Merron	BoD Chief Executive	2014

 

Related Documents

Title	Type	Publication date	Author(s)	Description
Document:All UK Labour leadership candidates sign up to stepped up pro-Zionist witch-hunt	blog post	15 January 2020	Robert Stevens	A day after posting the 10 points, the BoD tweeted that pro-Corbyn deputy leadership candidates Richard Burgon and Dawn Butler were “absent from the list of those who have signed the #TenPledges to tackle antisemitism in Labour.”
Document:Antisemitism threats will keep destroying Labour	blog post	12 February 2020	Jonathan Cook	If we are only allowed to gently chide Israel in ways that cannot meaningfully advance Palestinian rights, if we are prevented from discussing the strategies of staunchly pro-Israel lobbyists to silence Israel’s critics, if we are denied the right to push for an international boycott of Israel of the kind that helped blacks in South Africa end their own oppression, then nothing is going to change for the Palestinians.
Document:Corbyn and the Jews	article	15 December 2016	Gilad Atzmon	Commentary on the February 2016 meeting between Jeremy Corbyn and the leadership of the Board of Deputies of British Jews
Document:Enough is Enough: What would Mandela have said	Article	28 March 2018	David Rosenberg	If the Board of Deputies and the Jewish Leadership Council want to belatedly take a stand against all racism, they might want to look instead at groups such as the Traditional Britain Group attached to the Conservative Party who are promoting white supremacism and state-assisted repatriation of immigrants to their “natural homelands”
Document:Gaza massacre should be a turning point for British Jews	blog post	16 May 2018	Aron Keller	The 2018 Gaza Massacre represents a turning point which eliminates any existing moral ambiguity around Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. The sheer scale of the bloodshed makes the cognitive dissonance required for any decent individual to absolve Israel of culpability too difficult to sustain.
Document:Israel Stooges Freak Out over Baroness Jenny's Remarks - Again	Article	3 November 2018	Stuart Littlewood	Baroness Jenny Tonge: "The Pittsburgh synagogue shooting was an absolutely appalling and a criminal act, but does it ever occur to Bibi and the present Israeli government that its actions against Palestinians may be reigniting anti-Semitism? I suppose someone will say that it is anti-Semitic to say so?"
Document:LAZIR condemns persecution of prospective Member of Parliament by Israel lobby groups	Article	3 June 2019	Nureddin Sabir	LAZIR described the attacks on Lisa Forbes by the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the Jewish Leadership Council, and the Israeli secret service-linked Community Security Trust as “outrageous”.
Document:Labour & ‘anti-Semitism’: Real goal of establishment smear campaign is to deny socialists power	Article	23 April 2019	Ken Livingstone	After three years of screaming headlines, the truth about anti-Semitism in the Labour Party is finally revealed: just 0.08 percent of Labour’s half-a-million members have said or tweeted something anti-Semitic
Document:Labour's next leader has already betrayed the left	blog post	21 February 2020	Jonathan Cook	The next Leader of the Labour Party is already a prisoner to the "institutional antisemitism" narrative. That means their hands are chained not only to support for Israel, but to the reactionary politics in which Israel as a Jewish state makes sense – a worldview that embraces its style of ethnic, chauvinist, militaristic, segregationist politics.
Document:Pro-Israel outrage over BBC coverage of Holocaust memorial	Article	25 January 2020		Orla Guerin at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial: “Young soldiers troop in to share the binding tragedy of the Jewish people. The state of Israel is now a regional power. For decades it has occupied Palestinian territories. But some here will always see their nation through the prism of persecution and survival.”
Document:The EHRC’s report into Labour antisemitism is the real ‘political interference’	blog post	7 November 2020	Jonathan Cook	It is instructive to compare the certainty with which the EHRC treats Councillor Pam Bromley’s ambiguous remarks as irrefutable proof of antisemitism in Labour with its complete disregard for unmistakably antisemitic comments from Boris Johnson, the man actually running the country. That lack of concern is shared, of course, by the establishment media and Jewish leadership organisations.

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