12th May 2025
Dear Mr Rosenberg,
Thank you for your very quick and courteous reply to the PJJIP letter. We understand the code of conduct process that is now under way, but the letter also refers to your statement of April 17th and that of the chief executive, who on the 18th accused the 36 of “sowing confusion about the position of the community as a whole, [creating] a short-sighted and dangerous precedent”. Our position is the opposite: we maintain that it is confusing, both to the outside world and to “the community as whole” itself, to continue to represent it as united on the issues of the letter when, as we explain, the situation is in fact very different.
So we welcome your assurance that the Board will work on balancing diversity of opinion with a clarity on who speaks on behalf of the Board. As members of British synagogues, we would be very happy to contribute to this process.
However, I am also writing to you to let you know about something else concerning our letter. In my covering note, I omitted to say that in 10 cases, signatories did not make it totally clear as to whether their affiliation referred to the congregation they may belong to, or only to the town they live in. Six of those ten were included in the letter that I sent you last night. They represent a very small fraction of the total number of signatories (a quarter of 1%), but we want to be accurate in our claims of support, so we thought it right to remove them from the public list and to let you know that we are uncertain about the affiliation of this very small number. My apologies for not including this information in my original covering note.
Yours sincerely
Maurice Naftalin