The new chair of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, David Ereira, says he senses “a lot of vulnerability” across the Jewish community as British Jews struggle to come to terms with huge issues such as Brexit, Covid, and, of course, more recently, the fallout from the October 2023 Hamas attacks and the ongoing war in Gaza.
But the organisation’s chief executive, Dr Jon Boyd, while noting that “people are in a lot of pain”, also points to communal “resilience” and an ability to “bounce back” from traumatic events.
In an in-depth conversation with Ereira and Boyd to mark Ereira’s first months as the JPR chair, the pair spoke about pressing issues which face the Jewish community — and how organisations can use JPR’s research in order to inform policy and planning for the next decades.
Ereira, with a long history of communal service behind him, ranging from service on the Jewish Adoption Panel to life president of Norwood, says he is convinced that “decisions” [taken by organisations] “should be based on facts, and not on theories”, and “that was one of the things which excited me most about joining JPR”. For the facts, he says, he relies on JPR’s data, and laughs when he says the organisation is often described as “the Jewish Office of National Statistics”.
Under his leadership, he says, “one of the things that I want to be pushing hard, is that we’re in a world now where no business would be making decisions on any change or any strategic re-planning, without having proper facts and figures”.
Boyd says that current JPR data reinforces Ereira’s assessment of vulnerability in the community. “People feel less safe: there’s a sense that the world feels a more insecure, uncomfortable, hostile place. But the place of antisemitism and the Holocaust in people’s Jewish identity is very strong, more so than Israel or religiosity. So our experience, both historically and contemporary, has a very strong bearing on our sense of Jewishness — particularly when you get out of the frum [strictly Orthodox] world.”
We are living in a time “when building bridges is more important than ever”, says Boyd. But first, it is vital to look inside the community and to that end JPR is about to unveil two important surveys — “Jews in Uncertain Times”, a major new study of the UK Jewish population which will focus on many of the key issues facing Jews today — and what Boyd and Ereira believe to be the first and largest in-depth study of the British Charedi community, with a feedback from more than 2,000 people, an unprecedented response from that sector of the community.
Dr Jonathan Boyd, executive director, Institute for Jewish Policy Research
Ereira says: “We will be publishing the Charedi survey later this year and I think it will be quite fascinating. One of the things that [mainstream] British Jews don’t focus on, is that Charedim comprise 25 per cent of the community… and are growing.” Boyd, noting that nearly half the Charedi community are aged under 16, says that JPR did “two years of prep” to persuade potential respondents of the benefit of participation, and he admits that they were hoping for 1,000 responses, and were certainly not expecting twice that number.
Elsewhere, JPR research shows that rather than mirror the wider community, where people are moving out of the big conurbations into smaller areas in the countryside, the opposite is true for Jews. If anything, says Boyd, “we are seeing people clustering together more, geographically, and socially, so we are seeing a greater concentration of people in north-west London, in parts of Manchester, Gateshead. Essentially, those people who want to live some kind of Jewish life, need Jewish infrastructure around them… schools, kosher butchers, care homes, shuls — any kind of Jewish services. If you care about that stuff, you will tend to gravitate to places where those things already exist or are in development”.
Both nationally and internationally, JPR observes, Jews are gathering together in ever more concentrated areas. “Half the Jews in the world live in five cities: Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa, New York and LA. And in Britain, around half the Jews live somewhere between St John’s Wood and Swiss Cottage and Bushey, Elstree and Borehamwood.”
Additionally, says Boyd, not only do Jews cluster together because of social infrastructure, as by the very nature of Jewish practice, “we need a minyan, you can’t do Judaism on your own” — but also because “post-October 7 people are more likely to feel closer to their Jewish friends.” Ereira says this could be because of a desire for “safety”, but it is, both men say, “the direction of travel”.
The high level of Jewish social interaction, that is one of the building blocks of our community, offers lessons for how British Jews dealt with the Covid pandemic. JPR research will provide, Boyd and Ereira say, a blueprint for how to deal with any similar medical emergency in the future — ‘basically, we will need to go into lockdown earlier, as the high level of mortality we suffered during Covid meant that we had become superspreaders without realising it”, because of the pattern of Jewish communal life.
It was reassuring, however, to note that we had “bounced back” and that the internal mortality rates had ultimately become even slightly lower than the general population.
David Ereira smiled and adjusted his trademark baseball cap. He is looking forward to many JPR challenges, he says.
