A recent ConservativeHome article powerfully captured what many British Jews have been forced to confront: denial is no longer possible. The fear is real. The attacks are real. The evasions by some political figures are real.

Something has changed in Britain. Jewish schools, synagogues, shops and visibly Jewish neighbourhoods now live with a level of security concern that would once have seemed unthinkable. Parents worry about children walking through familiar streets. Jews who never previously felt self-conscious about being visibly Jewish now hesitate.

Britain has a serious antisemitism problem. That must be said plainly.

But after denial comes a second danger: panic. Serious problems require serious analysis. And here we must be careful.

The danger facing British Jews is not simply a story about Britain. Nor is it uniquely British. What we are seeing here is the British expression of a wider global phenomenon: the fusion of anti-Israel hatred, Islamist radicalism, far-left ideology and anti-Western resentment into a worldview in which Jews become the symbolic enemy.

This is visible not only in London and Manchester, but in Paris, Brussels, Berlin, New York, Sydney and on university campuses across the West. Wherever hostility to Israel becomes the language through which wider anger at the West is expressed, Jews are placed in the firing line.

That does not mean all Muslims are antisemites. It does mean we must be honest about ideological currents within Islamist politics and parts of Muslim communal activism which have turned hostility to Israel into hostility towards Jews. The slogan “globalise the intifada” was never a harmless chant. It meant what it said.

This is why the response cannot be sentimental. It is not enough for politicians to speak of “cohesion”, “dialogue” and “standing together”. Those words have their place, but they cannot substitute for policing, prosecutions, counter-extremism, school oversight, university discipline and political courage.

At the same time, Jewish leadership and Jewish commentary must avoid a different danger: despair masquerading as realism.

It is understandable that some Jews now ask whether they have a future in Britain. But it is not serious to speak as though British Jewish life is finished. Nor is it helpful, as some do in the wider communal conversation, to present aliyah simply as an escape route from danger. Israel is the eternal homeland of the Jewish people, but it is not a panic room. It is a country living with rockets, terror, war and daily security pressures of a kind British Jews have not experienced.

Jews who move to Israel do so for many reasons: faith, family, history, destiny, Zionism, belonging. Those are noble reasons. But to present aliyah merely as a move from danger to safety is confused. The Jewish people do not need illusions. We need clarity.

Britain remains a country with functioning institutions, courts, police, Parliament, allies and a deep reservoir of decency. Those institutions have often been too slow, too nervous and too evasive in confronting antisemitism. But they are not beyond reach. They can be pressed. They can be made to act.

British Jews are not helpless. We are not guests tolerated at the edge of national life. We are citizens, contributors, teachers, business owners, doctors, lawyers, soldiers, councillors, parliamentarians, neighbours and friends. We have every right to demand protection without apologising for our presence.

The proper response is therefore neither denial nor panic. It is clarity.

Name the threat. Confront Islamist antisemitism honestly. Challenge the far left’s obsession with Israel. Hold political parties accountable when they minimise or excuse Jew-hatred. Require universities to enforce their own rules. Insist that police treat intimidation as intimidation, not as colourful protest. And make clear that British Jews will not be frightened out of public life.

Jewish history has taught us never to be naïve. But it has also taught us not to collapse at the first sign of hostility. Jewish life in Britain was built by generations who endured hardship, exclusion and prejudice, yet still created schools, synagogues, charities, businesses and communities of extraordinary strength.

We honour them not by declaring the future over, but by defending it.

British Jews should not be told that their fear is merely a perception. It is not. But neither should they be encouraged to believe that despair is wisdom.

Panic is not policy. Fear is not analysis. And Britain’s Jews need more than lamentation. They need truth, courage, communal confidence and a state prepared to protect them.

Cover image: Canva Suite

The Jerusalem Post is right to say that Israel faces a real military strain. Reservists are exhausted, the war has dragged on, and the IDF’s manpower shortage cannot be brushed aside.

But that still does not settle the argument.

Too much of the current debate assumes that once the army has issued a warning and the court has ruled, all that remains is tougher enforcement. That is a mistake. The haredi (ultra-Orthodox) draft question is not only about numbers, legal authority, or equal burden-sharing. It is also about Torah, conscience, and the kind of Jewish state that Israel wants to be.

That is why this crisis cannot be solved by manpower logic alone.

An unequal burden and an unsustainable system

Yes, the public case is powerful: The burden is unequal, the old exemption model cannot continue indefinitely, and a nation at war cannot sustain such a gap in service. All true. Israel cannot ignore a question of this scale forever.

But urgency does not automatically justify crackdowns.

A harsher enforcement regime may produce some enlistment at the margins, but that does not make it wise. Coercion can create the appearance of success by forcing through a visible trickle, while discouraging a potentially larger number who might have entered voluntarily under more respectful and culturally serious conditions.

Once service is framed as capitulation rather than contribution, even those open to participation are pushed back into resistance. What is gained in immediate numbers may be lost in broader and more durable enlistment over time.

That is because for much of the haredi public, enforcement is not experienced as neutral state policy. Instead, it is experienced as an assault on a way of life, and once that is how it is felt, pressure does not simply produce compliance. It also fuels alienation, hardens resistance, and empowers the most uncompromising voices. If the goal is long-term national resilience, that is a very high price to pay.

The fairness argument, too, is less simple than it sounds. Fairness does not always mean sameness. A country can ask all its citizens to shoulder responsibility without insisting that every contribution take the same form.

The haredi public must bear responsibility

The real question is not whether the haredi public should bear responsibility. It should. It is whether the state has the imagination to recognize responsibility in ways other than forced conformity.

For the haredi world, this is not merely about convenience or coalition politics. It is rooted in a conviction that Torah learning is itself part of what sustains Jewish national life, and that military service brings with it not only physical danger, but cultural and spiritual pressures they believe threaten the fabric of their community.

One may disagree with that view, but one cannot dismiss it and still expect a stable solution.

That is the blind spot in much of the mainstream discussion. It speaks urgently and understandably about physical survival, but it has far less patience for those speaking about spiritual survival. It assumes the only serious language is that of enlistment quotas, legal rulings, and enforcement tools. A Jewish state should know better.

Courts can strike down arrangements. Generals can warn of shortages. Politicians can pass laws. None of that, by itself, resolves the deeper conflict. A legal ruling may end an exemption regime, but it cannot create trust. A manpower report may expose a military shortfall, but it cannot define the place of Torah in the life of the state.

That is also why talk of draft dodgers may vent frustration, but it solves nothing. It entrenches resentment, deepens estrangement, and confirms the haredi fear that what is being demanded is not only shared sacrifice, but cultural surrender.

The government deserves criticism if it is merely drifting. A problem this serious cannot be managed forever through coalition maneuvering and delay. But seriousness does not mean defaulting to the bluntest instrument available. It means building credible frameworks that increase participation in national responsibility without treating Torah life as expendable.

Israel needs soldiers. But it also needs wisdom. The goal cannot be merely to squeeze out higher enlistment figures at any cost. The goal must be to strengthen national resilience without tearing open one of the country’s deepest internal fractures.

That is the challenge. And crackdowns alone will not meet it.

The writer is the chairman of the Coalition for Jewish Values of the United Kingdom and the International Liaison of Coalition for Jewish Values in the US. He also serves as the chairman of Eretz Hakodesh UK at the World Zionist Congress.

As government sought to fit Britain’s yeshivot into a regulatory framework designed for schools, an unexpected defender emerged in the House of Lords: the Bishop of Manchester, who understood that a yeshivah is not a failed school, but a different moral and educational world.

At nearly ten o’clock on a winter evening in the House of Lords, one of the clearest public defences of Britain’s yeshivot came not from a rabbi, a Jewish communal spokesman, or a campaigner, but from the Bishop of Manchester.

He rose to warn that a proposed legal definition of “full-time education” risked misclassifying institutions devoted solely to religious instruction. In the midst of a debate clouded by bureaucracy, suspicion, and the habits of the modern regulatory state, he grasped something simple but profound: a yeshiva is not merely a school with too little secular study. It is a different kind of institution altogether.

That mattered.

For much of the past year, parts of Britain’s Charedi community had pursued the issue of under-16 yeshiva education in a highly visible and often troubled way, with protests outside Parliament reflecting a deep sense that there was no meaningful route through to government. The argument had become stuck in a weary cycle of accusation and mistrust. On one side stood policymakers, officials, and campaigners convinced they were confronting educational neglect. On the other stood religious communities convinced that the state neither understood them nor particularly wished to.

The shift began when the issue was reframed not merely as an educational or regulatory dispute, but as a question of religious liberty. It began to be raised in Parliament through the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Freedom of Religion or Belief under the Coalition for Jewish Values banner, before the Bishop of Manchester later took it up in the House of Lords. That helped move the issue out of a narrow bureaucratic frame and into a broader constitutional and moral one.

Then, unexpectedly, the Bishop of Manchester altered the atmosphere.

This was not entirely accidental. Bishop David Walker’s residence lies close to Bury New Road, the main corridor running through the heart of Manchester’s Orthodox Jewish areas, and the Greater Manchester Faith and Community Leaders Forum meets regularly at his home, bringing together senior representatives of the region’s religious communities. He was therefore not approaching the issue as a distant observer, still less as an ideological partisan. He knew enough of the community, and enough of religious life more broadly, to recognise that the state was in danger of making a category mistake.

That distinction is the heart of the matter. A yeshiva in the British Charedi world is not, in the ordinary sense, a school. It was never established as a school, does not present itself as a school, and should not be regulated as though it were simply an unconventional version of the mainstream educational system. It exists to provide intensive Torah learning within a wider communal and familial framework in which parents retain primary responsibility for their children’s broader education.

The first thing to recognise is that the Charedi world is not educationally monolithic. There are, broadly speaking, two pathways. One is a Torah im derech eretz model, in which boys receive a fuller general education alongside serious limudei kodesh. The other is the yeshiva ketanah model, in which the teenage years are given over primarily or exclusively to intensive Torah learning. Public debate too often flattens these distinctions. Yet the present controversy is bound up especially with the second path, because it does not see itself as a variant of the mainstream school model at all, but as a different form of formation.

That legal and cultural context is crucial. British law has long recognised parental responsibility in education and has long allowed considerable flexibility in how that responsibility is discharged. Home education is lawful. The law has never required that every legitimate form of education replicate the assumptions, curriculum, or institutional model of the state school. The present controversy arose in large measure because some in government seemed tempted to collapse those distinctions and force a form of Torah education into a framework designed for something else.

To many outside the Torah world, the issue may appear baffling. Why should a religious community resist being drawn into a more regulated educational structure? Why not simply accept the language of “schools,” submit to the relevant oversight, and move on?

But that question itself reveals the problem. It assumes that the school is the natural and universal template for all serious forms of learning. It is easy to frame the matter as though the only alternatives were neglect on the one hand or full assimilation into the mainstream regulatory model on the other. But that is a false choice. A free society ought to be capable of insisting on child safety while still making room for forms of religious formation that do not fit the assumptions of the secular state.

Too much commentary on this issue also assumes something else: that a child is only being properly educated if he is being formed above all for eventual independence from his inherited community, measured against the norms and expectations of the wider secular culture. But that is not a neutral standard. It encodes a substantive moral judgment about what education is for. Torah communities, by contrast, understand education not primarily as preparation for exit, but as initiation into a covenantal life of obligation, learning, family, and belonging. That does not remove the state’s duty to protect children from harm. But it does mean that the state should hesitate before treating continuity itself as evidence of coercion or educational failure.

A yeshiva begins somewhere else.

Its purpose is not merely to convey information but to shape a human being through disciplined immersion in Torah, sacred texts, obligation, reverence, and a way of life. Its task is not simply academic formation but covenantal formation. It transmits not only knowledge, but belonging; not only literacy, but identity; not only skills, but the habits of mind and soul required for a life under Torah.

That is why the attempt to treat it as a species of school is not a neutral act of administrative tidying-up. It misunderstands the institution at its core.

Of course, none of this means that the state has no legitimate interest in child welfare. Safeguarding is real. Safety matters. Abuse must never be hidden behind the language of religious autonomy. Every serious religious community has an obligation to protect children, and Jewish communities should say so clearly and without hesitation.

But safeguarding is not the same as standardisation. Child protection is not identical with the imposition of one cultural and educational model on every community. A government serious about both safety and liberty should be able to distinguish between protecting children and flattening difference.

Nor is it obvious that “success” in education can be defined only by the extent to which a child is prepared to leave behind the world that formed him. A liberal society may reasonably wish to ensure that no child is trapped in abuse, ignorance, or neglect. It is a far more radical claim, however, to say that the state must require every community to educate as though departure were the norm and inherited belonging a problem to be overcome. That is not merely safeguarding. It is the imposition of a moral anthropology.

What made the bishop’s intervention so important was that he saw this larger picture. He recognised that the issue was not whether Torah communities should be above the law, but whether the law itself was being framed with sufficient intelligence to recognise the realities before it.

As Rabbi Rashi Simon later remarked to me, the Bishop’s intervention recalled an earlier moment in European history — the moment, more than five hundred years ago, when Johannes Reuchlin defended the Jews’ right to preserve and study the Talmud. At a time when others demanded confiscation and burning, Reuchlin argued that these works represented a profound intellectual and religious tradition deserving respect rather than suppression. The circumstances are, of course, very different. But the underlying principle is recognisable: a society confident in its own traditions need not fear the learning of others.

That, in its quieter way, is part of what made the Bishop of Manchester’s intervention so striking. He saw that to misclassify a yeshiva is not merely to inconvenience a religious minority. It is to reveal a broader incapacity within the modern state: the inability to recognise forms of life that do not fit its preferred categories.

And that should concern more than Jews.

A liberal democracy cannot measure its commitment to religious liberty merely by whether it allows houses of worship to remain open. The real test comes when religious communities seek not only to pray differently, but to educate differently, order family life differently, and pass on a thick moral and spiritual inheritance that does not align neatly with prevailing assumptions. If the state can tolerate religion only when it is thin, private, and culturally compliant, then what it is tolerating is not really religion in any historic sense at all.

In that respect, the yeshiva debate reaches far beyond one community and one clause in one bill. It touches the future of religious freedom in the West.

The challenge in Britain now is to move beyond confrontation into something better: serious, legally literate, morally intelligent engagement in which government comes to understand what a yeshiva is, and Torah communities articulate clearly both their commitments and their responsibilities.

The Bishop of Manchester did not solve the problem. But he did something rare and important. He recognised that a yeshiva is not a failed school. It is a different moral and educational world.

And in a Britain often unsure whether serious religious difference is a problem to be managed or a good to be preserved, that recognition may prove more important than it first appeared.

Cover image: limud in the yeshiva or elhanan tiberya by מנחם מנחמי, accessed via Wikimedia Commons with CC BY 2.5 deed

Recent developments surrounding the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill have understandably caused concern within parts of the Jewish community, particularly among those connected to yeshivah education.

In recent days, however, a clearer picture has begun to emerge — not least through the intervention of the Bishop of Manchester, who has been closely engaged in discussions with ministers and civil servants.

His involvement has helped clarify a crucial point: that yeshivot are not schools in the conventional sense, and should not be regulated as if they were.

That intervention is itself noteworthy. Based on Bury New Road in Salford, at the heart of one of the UK’s largest Jewish communities, the Bishop has longstanding relationships with local rabbonim and communal leaders. Through forums such as the Greater Manchester Faith and Community Leaders’ Forum, he has developed a close familiarity with the character and ethos of yeshivah education.

For many families, yeshivah education is not merely an alternative educational model. It is a deeply held way of transmitting values, discipline and identity across generations. At its core lies an intensive commitment to Torah study – “vehagita bo yomam valayla” (“and you shall meditate upon it [Torah] day and night”) – a tradition sustained for centuries. The study of Torah – encompassing Chumash, Mishnah, Talmud and the vast corpus of commentaries and halachic works – shapes not only knowledge, but character and communal belonging. Its distinctiveness is not a deficiency to be corrected, but the very reason families seek it out.

At the same time, it should be recognised that within the Torah community, there exists a range of legitimate educational models. Some institutions, following the tradition of Torah im derech eretz, integrate provision for general studies alongside Limudei Kodesh (the study of Jewish sacred texts). Others — including the yeshivah ketanah framework — pursue a different, equally rooted pathway, in which the formative years are devoted more exclusively to Torah study. These are not competing claims to authenticity, but distinct expressions of a shared commitment to Torah life. Any regulatory framework must therefore be sensitive to this diversity, rather than assuming a single model as normative.

The most immediate clarification is that yeshivot will not be designated as “schools” under the new legislation. This removes a central concern: that they might be brought wholesale within the regulatory framework designed for mainstream educational institutions, including the imposition of the National Curriculum and independent school standards.

Instead, the Government is proposing a new category — “Independent Educational Bodies” — under which settings such as yeshivot would fall. The detail of how this category will be regulated has yet to be determined and is expected to be developed through consultation.

At first glance, this may appear to be a concession. In reality, it is better understood as a recognition of a longstanding position.

Under-16 yeshivah education has not operated as part of the statutory school system. It has historically existed within the framework of elective home education, under which parents retain primary responsibility for their children’s education. That framework has never required adherence to the National Curriculum and has long accommodated a wide range of educational approaches, including those rooted in intensive religious study.

What the Bill sought to do was introduce greater structure into this space — particularly through registration and oversight — without fully resolving how settings such as yeshivot should be classified. Recent discussions have, in effect, required Government to confront that question more directly.

The emerging approach — treating yeshivot as a distinct category rather than as schools — is therefore not a matter of special pleading, but of appropriate classification.

At the same time, this is not the end of the process. It marks the beginning of a new phase.

Over the coming months, key issues will need to be addressed, including the number of hours children spend in yeshivah settings, the nature of safeguarding arrangements, the relationship between yeshivah attendance and home education, and questions surrounding relationships and sex education.

These are not peripheral matters. They go to the heart of how yeshivot function — not as conventional schools, but as part of a broader educational and communal framework in which formal study, family responsibility and community life are closely intertwined.

For that reason, any regulatory approach that simply imports the assumptions of the school system is unlikely to be either effective or appropriate.

The opportunity now lies in the consultation process. If approached constructively, it offers the possibility of developing a framework that both addresses legitimate safeguarding concerns and respects the distinctive character of yeshivah education.

What has been achieved so far is not a final settlement.

It is the establishment of the right framework — within which the real work must now begin.

Photo Credit: בית המדרש של ישיבת נר זרח by Abaye123 via Flickr with CC BY-SA 4.0 Deed

Keir Starmer keeps saying that this is “not our war”. But wars of this kind do not remain neatly where they begin. Vulnerable ceasefire or not their consequences travel. They reach beyond borders, beyond alliances, beyond the battlefield itself.

Iran is not merely a difficult regime in a volatile region. It is a revolutionary state that has spent decades defining itself in opposition to America, Israel and the West as a whole. Its hostility to Britain is not incidental. It is woven into the regime’s worldview. As ConservativeHome rightly argued this week, Britain cannot sensibly pretend that the outcome of such a struggle is of no concern to us.

But there is another reason why it matters, one that is less often acknowledged.

The issue is not only strategic. It is also moral, cultural and psychological.

When an anti-Western regime appears strong, defiant and able to withstand or humiliate its opponents, the effect is not confined to the region in which it acts. Such moments are watched closely across Western societies, including our own. They shape the atmosphere in which politics is conducted. They affect whether the West appears serious or irresolute, confident or embarrassed, resilient or exhausted.

That matters in Britain.

Most British Muslims are peaceful, law-abiding citizens, and any serious argument must begin by saying so plainly. But it is also true that Britain contains currents of Islamist sympathy, separatist sentiment and anti-Western grievance. These attitudes are not created by events in Tehran. Yet they can undoubtedly be reinforced by them.

When Iran appears bold while the West appears hesitant, it strengthens the impression among some that Western civilisation is weaker than it once was, less sure of itself, less capable of defending its interests, less confident in the values that shaped it. It encourages the thought that ideological certainty and historical momentum lie elsewhere.

That has consequences at home.

A nation is held together not only by laws, police or institutions, but by a more intangible confidence: a belief that its way of life is legitimate, worth sustaining, and worthy of loyalty. When openly hostile regimes appear to expose Western weakness, the effects are felt domestically as well as internationally. They enter public debate, communal relations, and the wider question of whether Britain still possesses the confidence to speak in its own civilisational voice.

Conversely, the weakening of a regime like Iran’s would carry a message of its own.

It would not solve Britain’s internal difficulties overnight. It would not remove the need for stronger leadership, clearer integration, or a more self-assured public culture. But it would demonstrate that the West is not powerless, that extremist ideologies are not irresistible, and that democratic nations are still capable of resolve.

That matters because political life is shaped, in part, by what people think is ascendant. States teach not only by what they say, but by what they defeat.

If Iran continues to project strength unchecked, many will draw the conclusion that the West is in retreat. If Iran is decisively weakened, a different conclusion becomes possible: that the free societies of the West are still able to defend themselves, and that anti-Western militancy is not the future to which Britain must quietly reconcile itself.

That is why Iran’s defeat would matter in Britain too.

Not because British Muslims should be judged by Tehran. They should not. But because Britain’s internal life does not stand apart from the wider struggle between civilisational confidence and civilisational doubt.

The stronger anti-Western forces appear abroad, the harder it becomes to sustain confidence at home. The weaker they appear, the easier it is to reaffirm that Britain is not merely a place where different groups happen to reside, but a nation with a history, an inheritance and a moral centre of its own.

Harry Phibb’s ConservativeHome article was right to insist that Iran’s aggression is not something Britain can regard with indifference. The strategic reasons are plain enough. But the domestic reasons matter too. The outcome will affect not only deterrence abroad, but confidence at home.

And confidence, in the end, is never merely a foreign-policy matter. It is a national one.

When a European government sends soldiers onto its streets to protect synagogues and Jewish schools, it is tempting to describe the move as a tough law-and-order response.

It is not.

It marks a more serious shift: from policing a society to defending it.

That distinction matters.

Police operate within a functioning civic order. Their presence assumes that public life, however imperfect, is broadly governed by law, consent, and deterrence.

Soldiers are different. Armies are not instruments of civic management; they are instruments of defence. They are deployed when the threat is no longer simply criminal, but organised, ideological, and resistant to the normal authority of the law.

When soldiers stand guard outside synagogues, a line has already been crossed.

I have seen this before.

In France, following the attacks on a kosher supermarket and the murders at a Jewish school in Toulouse, troops were deployed to protect Jewish institutions. I encountered this directly a year later, attending a gathering of the Conference of European Rabbis in Toulouse. The synagogue and community buildings were guarded by young soldiers, barely out of training, cradling automatic weapons.

It was, in one sense, reassuring.

But it also raised a more troubling question: how had things reached the point where even armed police were no longer sufficient, and the state had to reach for the army?

For decades, attending such gatherings across Europe, security had always been present — police outriders on motorcycles, flashing blue lights, traffic briefly halted, the visible choreography of the state in control. But that was policing. This is something else.

For years, rising antisemitism across Europe has been treated as a social problem to be managed rather than a threat to be confronted. The response has been familiar: statements of concern, educational initiatives, intermittent enforcement — accompanied by a marked reluctance to address the sources of hostility directly.

The result is a recognisable pattern: hesitation, escalation, and then emergency measures.

We are now seeing elements of this closer to home.

In recent days, even Hatzola ambulances — volunteer emergency responders whose sole purpose is to save life — have come under attack. When those providing medical assistance become targets, it is no longer credible to describe the problem as marginal.

Last Yom Kippur in Manchester, my colleague Rabbi Daniel Walker was forced to defend his synagogue from a violent attacker. The outer gates had already been rammed and breached before the confrontation reached the entrance itself. This was not a distant or abstract threat. It was immediate and physical.

In the days that followed, King Charles III visited the site and later became patron of the Community Security Trust — a welcome and important signal of national support.

But it also reflects a harder truth: that protection is increasingly required where once it was assumed.

The lesson for policymakers should be clear.

If threats of this kind are treated merely as issues of community relations or low-level disorder, the response will always lag behind reality. By the time soldiers are required, the failure has already occurred.

The task is not only to respond at the point of crisis, but to restore the conditions in which ordinary policing is sufficient.

That means:

• enforcing the law decisively
• confronting sources of incitement without hesitation
• and reasserting that public space in Britain is governed by law, not intimidation

A society in which people can worship freely without armed protection is not a luxury. It is a basic test of civic health.

Once that assumption begins to fail, restoring it is far harder than preserving it.

Cover Image: Dohány Street Synagogue by Jon Elbaz, accessed via Flickr with CC BY 2.0 Deed

On a recent winter evening in the House of Lords, close to ten o’clock at night, peers were still debating the government’s Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill when an unexpected voice rose to defend Britain’s yeshivos.

The speaker was not a rabbi or a Jewish communal leader, but the Anglican Bishop of Manchester.

In Britain’s constitutional system, senior bishops of the Church of England sit as members of the House of Lords, and their voices often carry particular weight when questions of religion and public policy arise.

Addressing peers during the debate, the Bishop warned that a proposed legal definition of “full-time education” risked misclassifying institutions devoted solely to religious instruction. In doing so, he suggested that Parliament might unintentionally force a centuries-old form of Torah education into a regulatory framework designed for conventional schools.

For Britain’s chareidi community, the moment was striking. After years of disputes surrounding chinuch, a new front had opened — this time over the future status of certain yeshivos ketanos.

For those familiar with long-running debates over the place of Torah education within Britain’s regulatory system, the government’s introduction of its Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill appeared to reopen questions many had hoped were already settled.

The controversy did not arise in a vacuum. In recent years, advocacy groups like Nahamu (not too dissimilar from groups in the US like Yaffed) have campaigned for greater regulatory oversight of certain yeshivos. These activists argue that stronger supervision is necessary to ensure educational standards. They helped bring the question of under-16 yeshivah education into the national debate and increased pressure on government to clarify how such institutions should be treated.

Against this backdrop, concerns began to grow within the chareidi community about the implications of the new legislation.

In March 2025, as the bill progressed through Parliament, a briefing prepared by the Yeshivah Liaison Committee began circulating among policymakers and religious leaders. Shortly afterwards, the Bishop of Manchester, Dr. David Walker, raised the issue during debate in the House of Lords on his own initiative, framing it as a matter of religious liberty.

At that stage, however, the chareidi community was still struggling to secure direct engagement with government. We could not get a meeting with the education minister responsible for the legislation.

Around the same time, I had begun working with well-known askan Shimon Cohen on the issue. Through my involvement with the Coalition for Jewish Values, on whose rabbinic board I serve as international liaison, I had recently begun participating in the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Freedom of Religion or Belief. I brought the question of yeshivah education to their attention as a matter of religious liberty, and a number of exploratory meetings were subsequently hosted in Parliament under the auspices of the APPG to examine our concerns.

In that context, Shimon Cohen contacted me with a practical question: Did I happen to know the Bishop of Manchester?

For many years, I’ve participated in the Greater Manchester Faith and Communities Leaders Forum, meeting regularly at the Bishop’s residence with senior representatives of the region’s faith communities to discuss issues of public concern. Through that forum I had come to know the Bishop.

A meeting arranged last May among the Bishop, Shimon Cohen, and representatives of the Stamford Hill yeshivah community proved to be a turning point. During the meeting, the Bishop asked simply how he could help. Shimon Cohen replied that the community had been unable to meet with the education minister.

“I will arrange the meeting,” the Bishop responded immediately.

For a community navigating the issue on its own, the Bishop’s willingness to intervene proved to be decisive.

The debate centers on Clause 37 of the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill. At first glance it appears to be a technical provision defining “full-time education.” In practice, however, that definition could have significant implications for parts of the yeshivah system serving boys under the age of 16.

The Torah community’s concern extended beyond regulation into the realm of classification. If a yeshivah is legally treated as a school, it becomes subject to an entire regulatory framework for institutions whose purpose is academic instruction. Yet the purpose of a yeshivah is to promote immersive religious learning, operating alongside the parental responsibility for education that British law has long recognized.

Here a brief transatlantic clarification is needed. In the United States, the term yeshivah usually refers to a full-day Jewish school combining Torah learning with secular studies. In the United Kingdom, however, the term typically refers to institutions devoted exclusively to Torah study. They are not structured as general schools and do not present themselves as such.

Within parts of the chareidi community, boys devote most weekday hours to intensive Torah study within a yeshivah framework.

At the same time, British law places responsibility for a child’s education primarily upon parents rather than on institutions. Elective home education is therefore lawful and widespread. The law does not prescribe a national curriculum for home-educated children, requiring instead that parents ensure their children receive a “suitable education,” leaving considerable flexibility in the form that education takes.

This reflects a longstanding principle of British education law: The state may set minimum expectations, but the primary responsibility for a child’s education rests with parents. Within the chareidi community, this legal framework has allowed parents to retain responsibility for their sons’ broader education while yeshivos provide intensive Torah learning.

While public discussion has often focused on the large chassidic communities of North London, where boys enter yeshivah ketanah immediately after bar mitzvah and devote themselves fully to Torah study from the age of 13, the picture across Britain’s Torah world is more complex. In many litvishe communities, boys typically remain in school until around age 15, often completing several GCSE examinations before entering yeshivah ketanah for full-time learning between the ages of 15 and 18.

Because of this difference, some litvishe yeshivos hoped the legislation might not affect them. However, the legal requirement that young people remain in full-time education until the age of 16 could still have implications for those yeshivos serving boys under 16.

As awareness of the legislation grew, discussions began to take place in Gateshead, Manchester, and Golders Green, bringing together roshei yeshivah, rabbanim, and askanim to hear detailed briefings from Shimon Cohen and to consider how the legislation might affect their institutions.

The question of “safeguarding” has also played a role in the debate. In recent years, some yeshivos in Stamford Hill have been reluctant to adopt “safeguarding” frameworks linked to the Ofsted inspection regime. Those frameworks are ostensibly designed to ensure children’s safety and well-being in mainstream schools; but they are often tied to expectations surrounding Britain’s “protected characteristics” legislation. For institutions devoted exclusively to Torah education, those requirements raised serious religious concerns.

Community representatives have consistently emphasized that safeguarding itself — i.e., keeping children safe — is essential and nonnegotiable. The challenge has been to develop frameworks that protect children while respecting the integrity of Torah education.

The potential consequences of the legislation were not merely theoretical. Under the Bill’s unamended provisions, those responsible for running a full-time educational institution for children under 16 that was not registered as a school could face criminal liability, including the possibility of a criminal record.

One conversation last December with a senior official in the British Jewish community showed me how stark the expectations had become.

“The government will pass the legislation,” he said matter-of-factly. “There will be arrests. And a few days later the community will come to the table.”

That illustrated the misunderstanding that had developed between policymakers and the chareidi community. For many in government, the issue appeared to be one of regulatory compliance. For the communities affected, however, it touched on fundamental questions about the preservation of the Torah way of life.

The conversations that followed gradually helped narrow the gap. The quiet intervention of a bishop in defense of Torah education carries a similar resonance — when a voice from outside the Jewish community recognizes that protecting Jewish learning is part of protecting the moral fabric of society itself.

The coming months will determine how Britain balances safeguarding, educational expectations, and religious freedom. Yet the dialogue that has begun suggests that a more constructive understanding may now be taking shape.

For the chareidi community, the objective remains clear: to preserve the integrity of Torah education while continuing to live responsibly within the framework of British law and the society of which we are a part.

Rabbi Jonathan Guttentag is the founder and principal of the Whitefield Community Kollel in Manchester. He serves as international liaison on the rabbinic board of the Coalition for Jewish Values and has been involved in parliamentary engagement on issues affecting Torah education in the UK.

Britain rightly prides itself on pluralism. But pluralism is not the same thing as passivity.

A liberal democracy cannot survive if it refuses to defend its own moral boundaries. Yet in confronting Islamist extremism, we have too often substituted hesitation for clarity and process for enforcement.

Recent commentary, including Paul Goodman’s article in The Times, reflects a growing recognition that the problem is not a lack of legislation, but a lack of consistent resolve.

This is not a question of Islam as a faith, nor of British Muslims as citizens. Islam is one of the great Abrahamic religions, and the overwhelming majority of British Muslims seek nothing more than peaceful participation in national life. The issue is not religion, but ideology — and the state’s reluctance to draw moral red lines.

For years, Britain has oscillated between alarm and avoidance. After atrocities, there is urgency, rhetoric and review. As public attention fades, so too does resolve. What follows is drift — selective engagement, bureaucratic caution, and a reluctance to confront ideological actors directly.

Yet a liberal democracy cannot endure without moral red lines.

Where sermons, educational settings, charities or public-sector spaces are used to promote antisemitism, glorify violence, endorse terrorist organisations or intimidate others, the response of the state must be firm, consistent and impartial. Tolerance of such behaviour is not pluralism; it is abdication.

Pluralism does not require neutrality between democracy and those who reject it. Nor does it oblige the state to subsidise or legitimise organisations that undermine constitutional norms while operating just within the letter of the law. A confident society does not apologise for enforcing its own standards.

Britain’s counter-extremism framework has too often been weakened by three recurring failures.

First, confusion between religious sensitivity and political timidity. There is a legitimate desire not to stigmatise communities. But that imperative has sometimes paralysed enforcement against clearly ideological actors who promote segregation, grievance narratives, hostility to Jews, and sympathy for proscribed groups. Avoiding discomfort is not the same as promoting cohesion.

Second, inconsistency. Islamist extremism, far-right extremism and far-left extremism are all incompatible with a free society. Addressing one does not excuse or minimise the others. Yet enforcement has at times appeared uneven — cautious in one direction, reactive in another. The rule of law cannot depend on electoral arithmetic or media pressure.

From the perspective of Coalition for Jewish Values UK, several principles are essential if public confidence is to be restored.

Public institutions — schools, hospitals, prisons, universities and local authorities — must be neutral and safe spaces, free from intimidation and sectarian coercion. No pupil should feel unsafe because of their Jewish identity. No university campus should tolerate open endorsement of proscribed organisations. No publicly funded body should quietly outsource moral authority to groups that undermine democratic norms.

Charitable status, public funding and access to ministers are privileges, not entitlements. They must be contingent on basic standards of conduct. Where organisations repeatedly platform extremist rhetoric, promote antisemitic tropes or blur the line between activism and legitimisation of violence, consequences should follow — transparently and proportionately.

Clarity of language is also indispensable. Islamism is not synonymous with Islam. It is a political ideology that seeks to order society under a particular interpretation of religious authority, often hostile to pluralism and liberal democracy. Pretending this distinction is too delicate to articulate only strengthens those who exploit ambiguity.

A democratic state can respect religious liberty while rejecting theocratic political projects. Indeed, the defence of religious liberty depends upon that distinction. British Muslims who wish to practise their faith peacefully are ill-served when the state fails to confront ideological actors who claim to speak in their name.

The Jewish community’s experience is instructive. British Jews are deeply committed to pluralism and flourish in an open society. But when antisemitism is tolerated — whether on the far Right, within radical left movements, or in Islamist networks — it is rarely an isolated phenomenon. It is often a warning sign of democratic erosion. Historically, societies that struggle to defend Jews from ideological hostility struggle to defend liberal norms more broadly.

For Conservatives in particular, this should not be peripheral.

Ordered liberty depends on moral boundaries. A nation is not defined solely by markets or administrative competence, but by shared civic standards and the impartial rule of law. Where those standards are eroded incrementally — through intimidation, ideological capture of institutions or selective enforcement — the damage is cumulative.

What is required now is not another buried review, nor a temporary initiative designed to quiet headlines. It is a cross-cutting framework that restores confidence that Britain can be both pluralistic and serious.

Such a framework would include:

• Consistent enforcement of existing extremism and terrorism legislation.
• Clear conditionality for public funding and charitable status.
• Transparency in government engagement with community organisations.
• Protection of public institutions as ideologically neutral spaces.
• Equal application of standards across Islamist, far-right and far-left extremism alike.

None of this is radical. It is simply the application of equal standards.

Britain can be tolerant without being naive. It can defend religious freedom without indulging political extremism. It can welcome diversity while insisting on common civic norms.

But it cannot sustain those goods indefinitely without drawing clear moral red lines — and enforcing them.

A confident democracy enforces its standards not in spite of pluralism, but in order to preserve it.

Cover image: Thousands join No Kings protest in Downtown Minneapolis.jpg by Chad Oliver, accessed via WikiMedia Commons with CC BY-SA 4.0 Deed

Last week’s article in the JC, “Being a female Orthodox rabbi is a start-up job” was written with admiration for its subject and sympathy for the obstacles she faces.

But by framing the issue as one of innovation and entrepreneurship, it misunderstood something fundamental about Orthodoxy – and about the nature of rabbinic authority.

This is not a debate about ability, commitment or sincerity. Nor is it a question of whether women can, or should, play serious leadership roles within Jewish life. They already do, and have done so for generations.

The real question is whether the term “Orthodox rabbi” is a flexible label open to reinvention, or a halachically defined category with clear boundaries.

From the Orthodox perspective, the answer is unambiguous. A rabbi is not simply a communal professional, nor a role defined by pastoral function.

Rabbinic authority emerges from a halachic system with defined parameters – including semichah, responsibility for psak (halachic decision-making) and participation in a continuous chain of religious authority that has never included women. This is not a historical accident or a cultural lag. It is a structural feature of Orthodox Judaism.

For this reason, leading rabbinic bodies across the Orthodox world have addressed the issue directly. The Coalition for Jewish Values and the Conference of European Rabbis have both issued clear statements rejecting the conferral or adoption of rabbinic titles for women and rejecting what is often described as “Open Orthodoxy”.

In fact, there is no mainstream Orthodox rabbinic body anywhere in the world – including the Orthodox Union, the Rabbinical Council of America, the National Council of Young Israel, the Chief Rabbinate of Israel, the Office of the Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, or the London Beth Din – that recognises women, or those ordained by Open Orthodoxy, as rabbis.

Rabot by תמי גוטליב, accessed via Wikimedia Commons with CC BY-SA 3.0 Deed