JUDAICA - Wisdom In Torah

ing to 6.9% in 1990. Only the Progressive movements showed
signs of consistent growth. In 1983, 22.4% of Jews affiliated to
synagogues belonged to Reform and Liberal congregations.
According to 1990 figures, the Reform Synagogues of Great
Britain accounted for 17%, the Union of Liberal and Progressive
Synagogues claimed 7%, with the Masorti movement taking
a small, but growing share. The Sephardi community held
steady at just under 3% of the total.
The geographical and social distribution of British Jews
barely altered. Two-thirds continued to inhabit the capital.
The only growth areas were the “sun-belt” towns on the South
Coast such as Brighton, the largest with 10,000. Manchester
Jewry maintained its numbers at around 30,000, but Leeds had
seen a fall from around 14,000 to about 11,000. A similar drop
was estimated for Glasgow. Within each metropolitan center,
Jews remain concentrated in a small number of prosperous,
suburban, middle-class districts: Bury in Manchester, Moortown
in Leeds, northwest London and Redbridge, an eastern
suburb of the capital. The first centers of settlement are now
almost bereft of Jewish residents or institutions.
In the mid-1990s the Board of Deputies Community Research
Unit estimated the total number of Israelis in the UK to
be at least 27,000. Their distribution reflected that of the Jewish
population. Over two-thirds live in Greater London, with
the majority concentrated in the northwestern boroughs. The
highest concentration of Israelis outside London, 7% of the
total, is in the northwest of England. The Israelis had a different
age profile than British Jews. Over 25% were aged under
16 and only 2% were over 65 years, as compared to 17% and
25% respectively for British Jews. There have been no significant
changes in the geographical or occupational distribution
of British Jews.
POLITICAL DEVELOPMENTS. The General Election of 1979
returned to the new House of Commons 21 Labour and 11
Conservative Jewish members. The new Conservative Government
included one Jewish cabinet minister, Sir Keith Joseph,
responsible for industry and regarded as a strong influence
on the economic thinking of Prime Minister Thatcher,
and senior ministers outside the cabinet including Nigel Lawson
(Financial Secretary, Treasury), Leon Brittan (Home Office),
Mrs. Sally Oppenheim (Consumer Affairs), as well as
junior ministers such as Malcolm Rifkind (Scotland) and Geoffrey
Finsberg and Lord Bellwin (Environment). In spite of
the prime minister’s personal commitment to Israel and the
strong Jewish vote in her constituency (Finchley), concern
was expressed at the pro-Arab record of influential Foreign
Office ministers and some evidence of Britain modifying her
attitude towards Israel in line with developing EEC policies
on the Middle East.
In 1980, earlier discussion of the question whether there
was a specifically Jewish pattern of voting crystallized in a debate
between the political scientist, Dr. Geoffrey Alderman,
who maintained that Jews voted according to their communal
interests and could exercise a key influence in important
england
marginal constituencies, and Dr. Barry Kosmin, director of the
Board of Deputies’ Research Unit, who showed that the trend
of Jewish voters to support the Conservative Party merely reflected
their increasingly middle class status; and even if Jews
did vote to support a particular policy, they could not affect
the outcome in more than a very few constituencies.
A disturbing change during the later 1970s was that of
the extreme right-wing National Front from latent to overt
antisemitism; and their obtaining 75,000 votes, with some
high percentages locally, in the 1976 district council elections.
In the 1979 general election, however, when the turnout was
much higher, their 301 candidates polled a total of only 191,000
votes with the highest vote for any of their candidates just over
2000; nor did any National Front candidate win even one local
council seat. However, in late 1980 Anglo-Jewry shared the
unease caused in European Jewry generally by the violence of
right-wing movements, notably the Paris synagogue bombing;
and the recurrence of anti-Jewish incidents, albeit scattered
and unpublicized, combined with deepening economic
recession, gave cause for concern.
The principal manifestation of anti-Jewish activity was
however associated with the Arab and overwhelmingly leftwing
propaganda against Israel, particularly on university
campuses. With some 12,000 Arab students in British universities
and higher technical institutions, outnumbering Jewish
students, especially in engineering and other vocational faculties,
anti-Israel propaganda in student organizations had been
rife for some years, and it developed into overt anti-Jewish
discrimination in 1977. The (British) National Union of Students
had voted in 1974 to “refuse any assistance (financial or
otherwise) to openly racist and fascist organizations … and
to prevent, by whatever means are necessary,” any members
of these organizations from speaking in colleges. The resolution
of the UN Assembly in November 1975, equating Zionism
with racism, thus gave a welcome opportunity to the Socialist
Workers Party and the General Union of Palestinian Students.
Student unions at some eight universities and five polytechnics
voted to withdraw recognition from local university Jewish
societies. Decisions at such meetings are usually taken by
a small minority of the total number of students in the institution,
and several were subsequently reversed. In 1980, however,
the exclusion of Israeli scholars from an Arab-sponsored
colloquium at Exeter University was widely criticized as an
infringement of academic (and tax-payer supported) freedom
of discussion.
Support for Israel continued to be possibly the most socially
unifying factor in Anglo-Jewry with the organizational
framework complementing, even to some extent replacing,
more traditional patterns of organization. The advent of the
Begin Likud government in 1977 evoked at first a detached,
even critical, attitude, from personalities accustomed to dealing
with the previous governments in Israel. The peace initiative
of Prime Minister Begin and the Camp David agreement
which followed, however, produced a much more sympathetic
attitude within Anglo-Jewry. The Likud government’s settle-
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