Category: NEWS

Manchester Piccadilly to Euston train via Austria, Budapest and Williamsburg! - A Story of the power of faith to transform lives On a recent train journey to London for the Chief Rabbi’s annual conference, I met an amazing woman from the Satmar community who inspired me with her story of faith and hope in the face of adversity . This is the story … I was supposed to take the 10:15am train to Euston but ended up arriving early at Piccadilly and so took the earlier train at 9:35am. I found myself a seat by a table in the nearest coach that had ‘available seating’ and as soon as I had settled down I noticed a book of Psalms on the seat to my left over the aisle in front of a Jewish lady. It looked quite old and unusual and so I asked the lady who owned It about its origin. The lady (Mrs Weisz) introduced herself as originally from Williamsburg, New York from the Satmar community now living in Manchester. With...

Ida and Louise Cook were unmarried sisters in their mid thirties who lived with their parents. One wrote romance novels for Mills and Boon (England’s Harlequin equivalent) and the other commuted from their sleepy London suburb to work as a secretary for the civil service. They wore home made clothes and shared a love of opera. They loved opera so much, they would go to Germany for the weekend just to see the opera there. The Cook sisters were born in the early 1900s, and - in common with a lot of their generation in the wake of the deaths of so many young men during World War One - never married, living quietly at home with their parents in south London.. Their passion in life was opera, and they became ardent fans - in the words of their nephew John Cook, "opera groupies" - attending performances and waiting at stage doors in the hope of getting autographs. They also wrote...

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The appalling news that the IDF have recovered the bodies of six hostages, murdered by Hamas days before their discovery, once again underlines the nature of the terrorist opponents of Israel. However much one wants to believe dialogue is possible with people who do not share any semblance of the Judaea-Christian moral code, the facts speak for themselves: you cannot expect a meeting of minds when one side is totally committed to the genocide of the Jewish People. Netanyahu, with all his faults accepted, is a realist and just as the West acknowledged ISIL had to be destroyed because negotiations were impossible, so the war has to go on until the threat to Israel’s security is neutralized. The West, as Colonel Richard Kemp has repeatedly said, should wake up to the realization that Israel’s enemies are its enemies. Israel is used to taking flak from those countries that have sacrificed their moral compass for political expediency. She cannot allow herself...

Sir Keir Starmer’s landslide victory on the 5th of July may have been greeted by many as welcome news, but by others with a sense of trepidation. The turnout in the British 2024 General Election was not anything to be complacent about: just 60% of the electorate bothered to cast their votes; and Labour enjoyed a meagre 34% of the votes but enjoyed a handsome reward of 412 seats. One may take issue with the first past the post system of electing governments, levelling the charge it does not represent a true democracy, but there is little prospect of it changing to PR, when both main parties favour the current method of election that guarantees success for one or the other. But more important than debates about whether first past the post or PR is the fairer system, what does a Labour Government hold for the Jewish community of Britain? The short answer is there is cause for  concern. Those in the...

Hello Darkness my old friend ... What a glorious friendship journey! "Heart-warming story - especially for Simon and Garfunkel lovers, who aren't familiar with the story but love the song . . . . . “Hello darkness, my old friend…” Everybody knows the iconic Simon & Garfunkel song, but do you know the amazing story behind the first line of The Sounds of Silence? It began 62 years ago, when Arthur “Art” Garfunkel, a Jewish kid from Queens, enrolled in Columbia University. During freshman orientation, Art met a student from Buffalo named Sandy Greenberg, and they immediately bonded over their shared passion for literature and music. Art and Sandy became roommates and best friends. With the idealism of youth, they promised to be there for each other no matter what. Soon after starting college, Sandy was struck by tragedy. His vision became blurry and although doctors diagnosed it as temporary conjunctivitis, the problem grew worse. Finally after seeing a specialist, Sandy received the...

Ida and Louise Cook were unmarried sisters in their mid thirties who lived with their parents. One wrote romance novels for Mills and Boon and the other commuted from their sleepy London suburb to work as a secretary for the civil service. They wore home made clothes and shared a love of opera. They loved opera so much, they would go to Germany for the weekend just to see the opera there. In the 1930’s. No one paid attention to them crossing the border, a couple of dowdy women in their homemade clothes, nor on the return trip with their furs and jewels. What Ida and Louise were doing, in addition to going to their beloved opera, was collecting valuables from would be refugees to help them in their new lives. The sisters would find people who would vouch for the refugees, find people willing to home them, assemble papers for them, and even rented an apartment as a temporary space...