A grassroots campaign
For British Jews disgruntled with an establishment that no longer speaks for them.
Why this campaign?The Board of Deputies of British Jews exists to speak for the community. For too many of us, it doesn't — because it's bureaucratic, clueless, and ineffective.
Process eats outcomes. Working groups, divisional reviews, statements about statements. Meanwhile communities want answers, and antisemites don't wait for sub-committee approval. The institution has learned to mistake activity for impact.
The mainstream British Jew is mostly proudly Zionist, mostly traditional, mostly fed up with anti-Israel agitprop. You wouldn't always know it from the floor of a plenary. The room often sounds like a Progressive Judaism caucus with a few stragglers — not the community as it actually is.
Heaton Park happened. Aston Villa banned Maccabi fans. Universities became hostile environments. Hate marches keep marching. The Board talks. Government nods. Nothing much shifts. We need an institution that can actually move the dial.
The Board of Deputies sets itself four headline jobs. Here's how it's been doing on each.
Stated goal
What's happened
The institution speaks in a register most British Jews wouldn't recognise as theirs. The 36 deputies who signed the FT letter — 27 from Progressive synagogues, 2 Masorti, 0 Orthodox — used that platform to put British Jewry's name to a position the demographic majority would never have signed.
Stated goal
What's happened
Antisemitism at record levels. Heaton Park, October 2025 — the most fatal antisemitic attack on British Jews since medieval times. Two academic years of hostile campuses. Weekly hate marches. The Board condemns. The needle doesn't move.
Stated goal
What's happened
Glastonbury 2025. The Hamas-linked documentary. The Chanukah bus mistranslation. The al-Ahli hospital reporting. A pattern that meets the threshold of institutional antisemitism, met with measured complaints and polite responses. Nothing actually changes between cycles.
Stated goal
What's happened
The institution's own posture has drifted leftward under sustained pressure from a vocal minority of deputies. The President now describes parts of Israeli government policy as “indefensible” — a position that wasn't on the manifesto he was elected on. BDS continues to advance in universities, trade unions, and cultural institutions.
None of this is invented. Every example is observable in any livestreamed plenary on the Board's YouTube channel.
A plenary runs four hours. Apologies, presidential remarks, divisional reports, motions, questions, AOB. By the time the chair gets to anything substantive, two hours have evaporated into procedure. The activists know this. They time their interventions for hour three, when the room is thinner, the chair is tireder, and the dissenters have started slipping out for trains.
Reading the Board's communiqués is a study in verbs that don't commit. The Board condemns. The Board calls on. The Board urges. The Board is deeply concerned. The Board notes with disappointment. None of these verbs has a deliverable attached. A minister on the receiving end of a Board statement knows precisely how much has changed: nothing.
The Board doesn't issue statements that hurt to receive. Antisemites are “of concern”; press bias is “regrettable”; hate is “noted with disappointment.” Compare with the sharp, named, pointed statements coming out of pro-Israel groups elsewhere — the contrast is brutal. The Board's tone is calibrated for no-one to take offence, so no-one takes notice. Polite gets polite. The moment requires hitting harder.
Handshakes at faith receptions. Walk-ons at charity launches. Coffee with a minister, captioned as “constructive dialogue”. Press release: “President meets X.” It plays well on social. It moves nothing measurable. The institution has confused being seen with making things happen. The diary fills up; the problems don't move.
When a hard issue arrives, the institution's first move is to convene a working group. The working group meets. The working group reports. The report goes to a division. The division refers it back to plenary. Plenary commissions a fresh review. Six months later the original issue has moved on, the working group has new terms of reference, and three more groups have been spawned to consider the working group's findings.
The Board has divisions, sub-committees, working groups, standing committees, and task-and-finish groups for every conceivable topic. Each holds its own meetings, produces its own minutes, and reports up. Some do real work. Some exist on paper. None can be wound up easily — everyone on a division would have to vote to dissolve themselves.
“We have a diversity of opinion. We air it. We air it constructively, positively. And I think we deputies are genuinely showing the model of the way to proceed.”
— Phil Rosenberg, President, January 2025 plenary
This is the leadership's standard formulation when the Board can't agree on a position. It's technically accurate. It is also, functionally, how the institution declines to take any position when one of its constituencies would be unhappy with whatever it said. Either pole gets to feel honoured. Neither gets a result.
And here's the part most people miss. Plenaries are livestreamed. Recordings are public. Anyone can watch. Almost nobody does. The activists know this. So do the deputies who turn up. The ones who don't know are everyone else.
It keeps happeningSame story, different week. The national broadcaster gets it wrong. The community complains. The Board issues a measured response. Nothing changes. A month later it happens again.
Glastonbury, June 2025. The BBC live-streamed a set in which the act Bob Vylan led the festival crowd in chants of “Death, death to the IDF.” The broadcast was not cut. The BBC apologised. The director-general expressed regret. The Board issued a statement. The pattern continued.
Hamas-linked documentary, February 2025. The BBC commissioned and broadcast Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone, narrated by a child later confirmed to be the son of a Hamas deputy minister. The connection was not disclosed to viewers. The film was pulled. The BBC apologised. A review was commissioned. The pattern continued.
The Chanukah bus, December 2023. A Chabad-run Chanukah bus in central London was the target of abuse from people outside it. The BBC's initial reporting suggested the Jewish passengers had themselves used an anti-Muslim slur — a claim later shown to be a misreading of Hebrew shouts that were in fact pleas for help. The framing briefly inverted the incident: the victims were broadcast as the aggressors. The story was eventually corrected. By then, the original framing had already circulated.
Refusal to call Hamas “terrorists,” October 2023. In the immediate aftermath of the 7 October massacre, the BBC refused to describe Hamas as terrorists in its own reporting voice, citing the corporation's impartiality framework. The position was defended publicly by senior BBC editorial figures. It changed only after sustained external pressure.
The al-Ahli hospital story, October 2023. The BBC reported the explosion at al-Ahli hospital in Gaza as an Israeli airstrike on the basis of Hamas-controlled Health Ministry claims. Subsequent intelligence assessments from the US, UK, France and others attributed the explosion to a misfired Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket. The original reporting was not retracted with anything close to the prominence of its initial broadcast.
Gary Lineker. The BBC's longtime highest-paid presenter posted Israel-related material on social media that drew sustained complaints from Jewish community organisations over years. The complaints were treated as personnel issues. He eventually left the BBC in 2025. The structural question — what the BBC's editorial culture permitted in the first place — was never properly answered.
The BBC's coverage of Hamas chants, statements, and street demonstrations has, repeatedly, softened or reframed them. Calls to violence translated as “resistance.” Antisemitic slogans contextualised away. Phrases that mean one thing in Arabic rendered as something blander in English. The Board issues a complaint. The BBC issues a clarification. The next coverage cycle does it again.
Israeli actions get headlined. Hamas actions get contextualised. Casualty figures from sources with documented credibility problems get cited unqualified. Footage from one side gets checked carefully; footage from the other side runs with thinner sourcing. The pattern is too consistent to be accidental and too durable to be fixable by another formal letter.
Spokespeople presented as neutral experts whose public record is plainly otherwise. Activists with documented anti-Israel histories booked as commentators on Israel-related stories. When the Board points it out, the BBC concedes editorial standards on a case-by-case basis — and books the same kind of voice the following week.
Journalists with public social-media histories of pro-Hamas, pro-BDS, or anti-Israel sentiment kept on flagship Middle East coverage. The Board raises it through formal channels. The BBC reaffirms its impartiality framework. The same names appear in the same stories the next month.
A pattern this consistent has a name. Senior figures who know the BBC from the inside — former cabinet ministers, former BBC executives, former presenters — have used it: institutional antisemitism. The Board has been slower to find the vocabulary. It needs to. The national broadcaster's editorial culture isn't going to fix itself, and politely-worded complaints to the BBC's complaints department aren't going to fix it either. The institution that speaks for British Jewry should be willing to name what is happening at the institution that speaks to twenty-six million Britons every day.
Each individual failure gets a Board statement. Each Board statement gets a polite BBC reply. Nothing actually changes between cycles. That isn't accountability — it's choreography.
Enough strongly-worded letters. The Board has tools it isn't using: Ofcom, Parliament, the licence-fee debate, the press, the public. Time to use them.
Case in pointIn April 2025, a tiny fringe group of just 36 deputies — barely 10% of the Board of Deputies of British Jews — staged a pathetic act of betrayal.
They signed a letter to the Financial Times that viciously slammed Israel's actions in Gaza. They whined that they could “no longer stay silent.” They claimed Israel's “soul is being ripped out.” They smugly declared its policies ran “contrary to our Jewish values” — all while slyly signing as Board members and issuing a press release that made it sound like an official communal statement.
“Israel's soul is being ripped out.”
— the 36, in their letter to the Financial Times
The backlash was swift and humiliating. The Board's leadership condemned the stunt as unsanctioned and misleading, triggering an immediate complaints procedure against every single one of the 36 for breaching the code of conduct and bringing the organisation into disrepute. An extraordinary executive meeting suspended the Vice Chair of the International Division on the spot.
36 deputies sign the FT letter; complaints filed against all 36; Vice Chair of the International Division suspended.
5 formally suspended. 31 issued official notices of criticism.
Appeal panel upholds the sanctions in a final ruling.
The 36 self-indulgent rebels stand exposed as a loud but irrelevant minority — stripped of credibility, disciplined by their own peers, and left looking like naive troublemakers who prioritised virtue-signalling over solidarity with Israel and the vast majority of British Jews. Their “principled stand” achieved nothing except public embarrassment and a permanent black mark on their records.
See the 36The deputies who signed — appointed to the Board by progressive synagogues, movements, and affiliated organisations. Their constituents deserve to know who they are.
Of 29 signatories sent by synagogues and denominational bodies (full deputies and Under-35 observers combined). The other seven signatories came via affiliated organisations — youth movements, the student union, advocacy and educational groups — and don't carry a denominational label.
Source: On the Dark Side — The constituencies of the deputies who signed the mendacious FT letter (16 April 2025).
The Board doesn't just talk to itself. It talks to government, the media, and the world — in your name. That's why it matters who's writing the script.
When the Board issues a statement, it doesn't say “in the view of the people who showed up.” It says “British Jews.” Politicians, journalists, the Foreign Office, Whitehall — they read those statements as the community's verdict. If that verdict is being shaped by a small, ideologically homogeneous group, then the community is being misrepresented in our name, and decisions are being made in Westminster on the basis of that misrepresentation.
The activist left in the community is a real constituency. They have every right to organise. The problem is that they're the ones who turn up, fill the divisional roles, sit on the working groups, and write the letters. Most British Jews don't know what their deputy said last week. Most synagogues elect their deputies in low-turnout AGMs against no opposition. The script gets written by whoever shows up. And the people who show up have been winning by default.
No amount of writing strongly worded responses changes a vote. No amount of complaining at the Shabbat kiddush changes who sits in the room. The Board's structure is set: synagogues and member organisations elect deputies, deputies elect the leadership, the leadership speaks. The leverage point is the seat. Take the seats and the script changes. There is no other way.
Phil Rosenberg was elected President in 2024. He didn't run on a manifesto of public criticism of the Israeli government. The drift came later, under sustained pressure from a vocal cohort of deputies. His own words, at successive plenaries, track the trajectory.
The President described the warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant as “very alarming” and a “weaponisation of international law” against Israel. The Board issued a formal condemnation.
The President began publicly naming Smotrich and Ben-Gvir as ministers of “great concern”. He stated that food and humanitarian aid “should not be a weapon of war.”
A clear shift from the November position.
The President acknowledged on the record that there was “serious hunger in Gaza” and that this was “a consequence of political decisions by the Israeli government.”
“We cannot defend the indefensible. We will not defend the indefensible. And some of the things we see in terms of the West Bank, in terms of this discriminatory death penalty, are unacceptable.”
— Phil Rosenberg, April 2026 plenary
The President in April 2026 is a different politician from the President in November 2024. We're not in a position to know whether he'd describe the change as growth, recalibration, or pressure. What is observable is that the Board's posture has moved measurably in the direction the activist left of the room has been pushing.
The room produced this drift. A different room would produce a different drift — or no drift at all.
All quotes verified against livestreamed plenary recordings on the Board's YouTube channel.
How this happensThe “loud minority” framing isn't paranoia. It's the predictable output of an opt-in system. Here's the mechanic.
The Board has roughly 300 seats. Each is filled by a constituency — a synagogue or eligible member organisation. Each constituency runs its own selection process. Most look like this:
An AGM is held, often poorly attended. The synagogue's board calls for nominations for the deputy role. Nominations close, usually with one candidate, sometimes none. The candidate is approved. They serve a three-year term, attend or don't attend at their discretion, and are essentially guaranteed re-election if they want it.
The opportunity cost of a deputy who turns up never, says nothing, and votes occasionally with the room is: a deputy who could be turning up always, saying things, and shifting votes.
Multiply this by 300 seats and the pattern emerges. Synagogues whose members are highly mobilised — with active organising cultures, dedicated political networks, and deputies who treat the role as serious work — punch far above their demographic weight at plenary.
Synagogues whose members are demographically larger but politically less networked punch below theirs. Their seats are filled, technically. The seats are also frequently silent.
This is not a conspiracy. It's the predictable result of an opt-in system where some constituencies opt in harder than others. The cost is that the institutional voice of British Jewry skews toward whichever sub-community organises best — and right now that is, observably, a relatively narrow band of the community.
The way to rebalance is not to demand fewer voices from the active end. It's to add voices from the underrepresented end. Stand. Get your synagogue to take its seat seriously. Show up to plenaries. Use the floor. Vote. Run for divisional roles. Run for honorary officer.
The script is written by whoever shows up. We're going to show up.
The left has spent years organising. Whipping votes. Putting candidates on the ballot in synagogues no-one else paid attention to. That's how a fringe minority ends up signing letters in your name.
This campaign exists to change that. We're recruiting clever, right-leaning British Jews to stand for election as deputies — and building serious campaigns behind them.
If you're a member of a synagogue or affiliated organisation entitled to elect a deputy, you can stand. We'll help you win — with strategy, messaging, organisation, and people on the ground.
Every winning campaign needs a team: researchers, organisers, fundraisers, comms, donors. If you can't stand yourself, help us put serious people on the Board.
Criticism without a plan is just complaining. Here's the plan we'll push for — from outside the room now, and from inside it once we have deputies. Five reforms. None require rewriting the constitution. All require leadership willing to stop confusing motion with progress.
Lead with Israel's right to defend itself — as the headline of Board statements, not the closing footnote. Plain English. Specific demands, on specific recipients, with specific timelines. “Deeply concerned” is not a deliverable. “We expect a public retraction within fourteen days, a corrections protocol within thirty, and a policy review within ninety” is.
Adopt and use the IHRA definition as a working tool, not a diplomatic gesture. Treat anti-Zionism as the antisemitism it almost always is. Take BDS on directly — in universities, in trade unions, in cultural institutions — with the Board's political weight, not its forbearance.
Every plenary vote on the public record, by deputy and by constituency. Members of synagogues should be able to see how their deputy voted on the issues they care about. Measurable goals on antisemitism casework, university policy, broadcaster accountability, and faith school protection — with quarterly progress reports. Stop counting press releases as deliverables.
Stop writing letters to BBC complaints and waiting for the polite reply. Use Ofcom. Use Parliament. Use the licence-fee debate. Use the press. Use the public. Make the corporation's editorial culture the corporation's problem to fix, not the community's burden to keep complaining about.
Time-limit working groups. Sunset clauses on every committee. Stop spawning new bodies to consider the work of old ones. Then go and recruit deputies from where the talent already exists but doesn't show up — mainstream Orthodox synagogues, regional communities, professionals who've never thought of standing. The pipeline is the problem. Build it.
None of this requires a new institution. It requires the existing one to start taking its job seriously, and a room willing to demand it. That's the campaign.
More on standingThe left has won by turning up. The only way to change who speaks for British Jewry is for serious people to stand — and win. Here's what that actually means.
The Board of Deputies of British Jews is the elected representative body of the UK Jewish community, founded in 1760. Around 300 deputies are sent by synagogues, communal charities, student bodies, and other affiliated organisations to speak for British Jews — to government, to the media, and to the public.
Deputies meet in plenary several times a year to debate motions, set communal positions, and elect leadership. The real work happens in committees — international affairs, defence and group relations, education, interfaith, communal grants, and others. Some deputies are deeply engaged. Many turn up rarely. The activists shape outcomes precisely because most deputies don't.
If you're a member in good standing of a synagogue or affiliated communal organisation entitled to elect a deputy, you can be nominated. Most candidates stand through their own synagogue. You don't need to be a veteran lay leader — you need to be willing to put your name forward.
A handful of Sunday afternoons a year for plenaries, plus committee work if you want to do more. It's voluntary and unpaid. You set the dial — contribute steadily or contribute heavily — but turning up is the price of being heard.
The next triennium starts in 2027. Constituency elections happen in the months before, and synagogues are already starting to think about who they'll send. Decide now, talk to your shul board now, and let people know you're available, and you'll be on the slate when nominations open. Wait, and the seat goes to whoever else shows up — exactly as it has for years.
The April 2025 FT letter — and the disciplinary crisis it triggered — proved how much damage a small, organised minority can do when nobody else is in the room. Reversing it requires the other side to organise too. That starts with people willing to stand.
You probably already know all the reasons not to stand for the Board of Deputies.
You're busy. Sundays are family time, or shul time, or the only chance you get to sit on a sofa with a cup of coffee and read the paper. The Board's plenaries can run four hours, and the agenda often reads like a government department's risk register translated into Hebrew. You're not a politician. You're not even particularly political. You don't want to be on a WhatsApp group. You especially don't want to be on a WhatsApp group of people who run for things.
We know.
Here's the case for doing it anyway.
When The Times wants to know what British Jews think about an antisemitism story, they ring the Board. When the Foreign Office briefs a minister on the community's position, they brief from Board statements. When Hamas-sympathisers demonstrate outside synagogues and a council needs to know who to call, they call the Board. This isn't a debating society. It's the institutional voice of British Jewry to the British state, and it has been for two and a half centuries.
This is the part most people don't quite absorb. When the Board puts out a statement, it doesn't say “in the view of those deputies who happened to be in the room on Sunday afternoon.” It says “the Jewish community.” Politicians read it that way. Journalists report it that way. So if you've ever read a Board statement and thought “that's not what I think” — congratulations, you've discovered the misrepresentation problem. The only solution is more deputies who think what you think.
There are about 300 deputies. The activist left of the community has been disproportionately good at filling those seats and showing up to use them — not because they're some kind of hostile takeover but because they actually do the work of being deputies. Most synagogues elect their deputy in a low-turnout AGM, often unopposed. If a serious candidate stands, the seat is theirs. The barrier to entry is lower than it should be, and that cuts both ways.
This sounds like a poster slogan but in this context it's literally true. A deputy who turns up, asks the right questions, builds relationships across divisions, and runs for honorary officer in three years' time can shift the institution materially. The Board is small enough that one persistent voice carries. We've watched deputies who barely cracked a hundred votes in their constituency reshape the Board's debate on serious issues. You will not be a small fish in a big pond. There is no big pond. Just a room full of Sundays.
The next triennium starts in 2027. Constituency elections happen in the months before, and synagogue boards are starting to think about who they'll send. If you decide now, talk to your shul leadership now, and let people know you're available, you'll be on the slate when nominations open. If you wait, the seat goes to whoever else shows up — the same dynamic that produced the current room.
This campaign exists to recruit candidates and back them. Practical support: help with the case to your synagogue, talking points on the issues, a network of people who've stood and won and lost and stood again, and the comfort of knowing that when you take an unpopular position in a plenary you'll have allies in the room who turned up for the same reason you did.
Roughly one Sunday a month for plenary. A couple of evenings if you join a division. More if you take on a real role. Three-year term. It's a serious commitment but it's not a job. Most deputies hold it down alongside everything else.
Direct involvement in the institutional life of British Jewry. A network of people doing serious communal work. The satisfaction of voting on things that matter. The ability to look your kids in the eye in five years' time when they ask why nobody did anything about whatever's happened by then, and being able to say: I did the boring thing. I turned up.
Some Sundays. Some inbox. Occasionally being heckled at kiddush by people who didn't bother to stand. A WhatsApp group you'll mute within forty-eight hours.
Small cost. Large potential impact. The institution is not in great shape and the easiest moment to influence its direction is right now, before the next triennium calcifies the room for another three years.
If you've read this far, you're considering it. Stop considering. Decide. We'll help you do the rest.
We'll back you with strategy, messaging, organisation, and people on the ground.
Ways to get involved — coming soon.
If you're one of the 36, or an Honorary Officer of the Board, this campaign exists because of decisions taken in our name. Two notes in particular.
To deputies of this politics
Deputies who'd sign the next FT letter; who use the floor to push positions the demographic majority of British Jewry don't share; who treat the Board as a vehicle for advocacy rather than representation. You have every right to organise. Your seats are democratically held. They are also democratically lost. The next triennium is in 2027. Expect contests in places previously left uncontested.
To the Honorary Officers
The Board's response to the FT letter was the right one — leadership condemned it, the disciplinary process ran, the sanctions were upheld on appeal. That matters. The harder problem sits beneath it: a vocal minority dominating the floor, mainstream Orthodox voices absent, the BBC pattern recurring without consequence. The tools you have — Ofcom, Parliament, the licence-fee debate, the press, the public — are real. Use them. The community will measure the leadership against outcomes, not statements.
If you're a member of the community
Send the email. We've drafted a polite, structured note to the President setting out the campaign's core suggestions — on Israel, anti-Zionism, BDS, broadcaster accountability, and the structural absence of mainstream Orthodox voices. It's signed off generically; sign with your own name if you'd like, then send.
Email the PresidentDid you send it?
Thanks. Numbers add up.
