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FREE WEEKLY NEWSPAPER OF THE YEAR 7 October 2022
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12 Tishrei 5783
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Issue No.1283
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@JewishNewsUK
Faithfully ours!
What being Jewish means to us... in just one sentence. Pages 28-29
Bold move or a capital offence? Community divided over Board of Deputies president’s call for Jerusalem embassy shift The Board of Deputies president’s decision to use a speech at a Conservative Friends of Israel event to back calls for the government to move the UK embassy in Israel to Jerusalem has sharply divided opinion across the community, writes Lee Harpin. To cheers, Marie van der Zyl told the audience at Sunday’s event at the Conservative Party Conference in Birmingham, attended by Prime Minister Liz Truss: “We are really hopeful that the government is going to move the embassy, like America, to Jerusalem – the capital of Israel.”
Following her speech, the Board’s president is understood to have been contacted by deputies and other communal figures with messages of both praise and sharp criticism. Her decision to speak out in favour the embassy move was also discussed at a pre-Yom Kippur weekly meeting of the Board’s honorary officers on Tuesday. Van der Zyl remarks were immediately praised by former deputy Gary Mond, who told Jewish News his new organisation, the National Jewish Assembly, gave its “total support” to her
stance on the embassy issue. Another deputy, not known to be from the political right, also defended van der Zyl saying they could not see how she could have delivered a speech at the CFI event which gave the impression she did not support the prime minister’s earlier pledge to “review” moving the embassy to Jerusalem. A Board of Deputies source also stressed that the president would not have mentioned the embassy as an issue if Truss had not mentioned it herself since she became PM. But “pro-peace” group Yachad issued its
Marie van der Zyl at the Tory conference with Foreign Secretary James Cleverly
own speedy response to the Board president’s remarks, tweeting that with many in the community facing the impact of the cost of living crisis it was “absurd for our communal leadership to call on the UK government to make such a costly and unnecessary embassy move – one the British taxpayer will pay for and one the Israeli public did not demand.” After the Board tweeted a video of the president’s speech, which also included a call Continued on page 4