Exposé: Who are the Board of Deputies of British Jews?

In the issue of Jewish News where Rebecca Long-Bailey sadly rushed to say ‘I’ll sign up to the Board’s asks’, there is an interesting letter from a former Board associate :

‘The Board of Deputies has issued 10 pledges to Labour Party leadership candidates, which include ensuring transparency, and engaging only with the community’s representative bodies. Would the Board itself, in the interests of transparency and confirming its representative status, be prepared to publish a list of its constituencies, the deputies elected to represent each of them, and the numbers of people who voted for each of them in the most recent elections?
[signed] Daniel Bernstein Vulkan, Ex- senior researcher, Board of Deputies’
Clearly we in JVL are not the only people who find that the Board is even more unrepresentative than it has been in the past.

It is of course really important to expose the BoD for who they are, who they think they are, what their role has been historically but this is superficial and misleading.
The most significant way the Board has failed to represent the community has been in terms of class. While the early BoD leaders were from the well to do Sephardi community joined in the early 1800s by an Ashkenazi elite. By the 1850s/1860s there were many poorer Dutch and German Jews in London totally unrepresented by the BoD.
That was even more the case for overwhelmingly poor Jews who settled especially in London’s East End from the 1880s. The failure of the BoD to lead the fight against Mosley’s fascists in the 1930s (they told Jews to stay indoors and not make trouble) was because they were completely out of touch with working class lives in the East End. Some 90% of London-based Deps at that time lived outside the East End. Even those members who represented East London synagogues mostly lived out of the East End.
And yet – and this significantly disrupts the narrative offered by the author of this article – from 1897, when Political Zionism was created, until the late 1930s, the BoD was led by * ANTI-Zionists *
They saw themselves as British patriots, who did not want to be accused of having dual loyalties, but they also expressed fears that the position of Jews as a minority in Britain seeking equal treatment would be undermined by the existence of a Jewish state. It wasn’t just them. Britain’s Chief Rabbi in 1911 was asked what he thought of Zionism. He described it as an “egregious error”. Shame he is not Chief rabbi today!
The key point here is that the BoD has taken various perspectives on Zionism historically – its constants have been representing the more conservative elements of the community, and taking anti-Left stances.
Its record on fighting antisemitism and other racism is abysmal: not simply giving bad advice re Cable Street, but undermining the 43Group who fought fascists just after WW2, instructing Jews to steer clear of the Anti Nazi League in the 1970s, and failing today to support Muslim bodies who are demanding an investigation into Islamophobia in the Tory Party. None of these positions are essentially driven by Pro-Zionism though that tends to get woven in to the rationalisations.
Lastly, it’s own democratic deficits: most of its members are elected through synagogues largely in uncontested elections. I believe it is still the case that in some of these elections women do not have voting rights. And besides, whatever views are expressed by Board members its key political statements are produced by paid officers like Van der Zyl.

I have already sent these comments to Koser. This is a descriptive history but it leaves out the political development of the Board from anti-Zionist to Zionist. These were my comments:

‘This is a very patchy history of the Board of Deputies. I asked you if you had seen the constitution of the Board and you didn’t respond. I assume you hadn’t because there is no mention of Clause D of Aims Purposes and Powers which is:
‘(d) Take such appropriate action as lies within its power to advance Israel’s security, welfare and standing.’

Mishkenot Sha’ananim you describe as a Jewish settlement. This is not correct. It was a Jewish neighbourhood. It didn’t colonise any territory. Moses Montefiore also gave to non-Jewish communities. he wasn’t a Zionist. [which is not surprising since there was no Zionist movement among Jews at the time, it was a wholly non-Jewish movement around people like Ernest Laharanne, Lord Shaftesbury and George Elliot]

I’ve also looked up Wiki and it states that it was a Jewish neighbourhood. Either way it can confuse people who equate it with the settlements on the West Bank which are acts of land theft and exploitation.

You miss out entirely the controversies over the Balfour Declaration and the letter to the Times by David Alexander, the President of the BOD and Claude Montefiore President of the Anglo Jewish Association on May 24 1917, arguing against setting up a Jewish state. The Board eventually disowned the letter but it was not until the appointment as President in 1940 of Selig Brodetsky, a member of the Zionist Executive, that the Board definitely moved into the Zionist camp. There had been a long period when it was under the control of the non or anti-Zionist Jewish bourgeosie, people such as Neville Laski.

Other prominent figures in the Board who were anti-Zionist included Lucien Wolfe.

Montefiore was a pillar of the Establishment and the Jewish bourgeoisie who were opposed to Zionism not least because it threatened their campaign for Jewish Emancipation in Britain. I know nothing of the correspondence with the consul in Damascus other than the fact that Montefiore was taken up with the Damascus Affair of the previous year. [when several Jews died under torture as they were interrogated about blood libel accusations – which derived wholly from French monks]

I’m not doubting that there were Zionist officers of the Board prior to 1940 but the point I’m making is that with Selig Brodetsky they took over the Board. In reality the non-Zionist Jewish bourgeoisie were moving towards a Zionist position well before that, Laski attending the 1933 World Zionist Congress in Prague.

I just came back to this page (which I still had open – along with a lot of other pages/tabs – when I restored my previous session), and this time I watched and listened to the video. I’m not going to watch it again, but on at least TWO occasions Van der Zyl says/claims that Jeremy Corbyn is “spending more and more time with terrorist and extremists” and “with people who threaten the security of Britain”, but she doesn’t say WHO these ‘terrorists’ and ‘extremists’ ARE, and it’s strange that the interviewer doesn’t think to ask her who they are either. Needless to say, the reason Van der Zyl DOESN’T elaborate OR the interviewer inquire as to who it is she’s referring to, is because it’s complete and utter fabrication, and she is lying through her teeth.

I’m not familiar with the i24 News Channel and have never heard of it before, but I just did a search and in the wikipedia entry it says: ‘i24NEWS is an Israeli international 24-hour news and current affairs television channel located in Jaffa Port, Tel Aviv, Israel. It broadcasts in French, English and Arabic.’ Anyway, I can only assume that the channel is watched by a lot of Jewish people around the world, and the vast majority of them wouldn’t know any different, and Van der Zyl knows it of course.

I don’t suppose Jeremy is/was even aware of the interview and what she said, or surely he would have threatened to sue her for defamation if she didn’t retract the accusation and apologise publicly. I mean if Jeremy really HAD been spending more time (which of course implies that he had previously been spending time with these ‘terrorists’ and ‘extremists’ only LESS time than he NOW is) with such people, then it would have been all over the British media AND Van der Zyl doing interviews on all the news channels in respect of it, but it is of course a Big Lie and a falsehood in true black propagandist style, and THAT is why it wasn’t AND why she didn’t.