Hope’s hit

A video to promote Chief Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks’s CD, Home of Hope, marking Israel’s 60th anniversary, has received more than 134,000 hits on YouTube since its launch last month. Sir Jonathan sings on one track, Oseh Shalom.

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FCO to host antisemitism conference

The first conference bringing together parliamentarians from all over the world who lead the fight against antisemitism will be held in London next February, co-hosted by the Foreign Office.

The other co-host will be the newly formed Inter-Parliamentary Coalition for Combating Antisemitism (ICCA). Sessions of the conference will be held at the Houses of Parliament and the Foreign Office.

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Chief backs training scheme

Chief Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks has agreed to be a patron of a new training  programme to encourage young lay and clerical religious leaders in the UK. Successful applicants in their 20s will be given free places on the £11,000-per-head Faith in Leadership scheme.

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Memorial service for chazan Chaim Graniewitz

More than 200 Stanmore and Canons Park Synagogue members attended a memorial service for chazan Chaim Graniewitz, who died in January, aged 77. United Synagogue leaders joined the congregation and a letter was read out from Chief Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks, recalling Rev Graniewitz’s “passion and pride in Judaism and the Jewish people. He had the ability to empathise and to bring a smile to faces in difficult times.” Tributes were also paid by Stanmore senior minister Rabbi Mendel Lew and Rev Graniewitz’s sons David and Steven.

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'A different kind of rabbi' hailed by Chief

Edgware Synagogue’s new minister is “a very different kind of rabbi”, Sir Jonathan Sacks told a 600-strong congregation on Sunday.

Addressing the induction service for Rabbi David Lister, the Chief Rabbi remarked that there were few ministers who could claim to be “adept on the violin and guitar, versed in French literature, astronomy and quantum physics, as well as author of a forthcoming book entitled Inter-Galactic Judaism, or whose induction sermon for his former Muswell Hill congregation had embraced an ode to a Harley-Davidson motorbike.”

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Sacks calls for action over campus hate

Chief Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks has called on university vice-chancellors to take greater action to defend Jewish students who are made to feel like “pariahs” on campuses around the UK.

He told the JC this week that vice-chancellors “must defend freedom of speech on all sides and all arguments. It must never be students of this or that faith who feel vulnerable or at risk or like pariahs on a university campus.

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Sacks gives talk to Reading Hebrew Congregation

More than 70 people attended Reading Hebrew Congregation to hear the Chief Rabbi Sir Jonathon Sacks give a talk about Israel. He spoke of how his great-grandfather had made aliyah from Lithuania in the 19th century and settled in Petach Tikva, where he built the town’s first house. Sir Jonathan then took questions from the floor.

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It's Sacks, bagels and rock 'n roll

In the same London studio in which the cream of British pop urged us to feed the world for Band Aid 24 years ago, a new anthem was being prepared this week.

But instead of Bob Geldof, George Michael and Sting, cue a trio of chazans, the men of the Shabbaton Choir, a couple of dozen pupils from the Moriah Jewish Day School from Harrow and Chief Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks.

For an Anglo-Jewish gathering, the studios of leading producer Trevor Horn in bohemian Ladbroke Grove may have been off the beaten track.

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Sacks gives Pesach address to Woodside

Chief Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks gave a Pesach-related address to over 100 members of Woodside Park Synagogue adult education committee. Sir Jonathan’s talk was the final in a season which also featured Lady Jakobovits, Lord Trimble and Israeli ambassador Ron Prosor.

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Chief joins Trevor Horn for a kosher Live Aid

Look out, Sir Bob Geldof. The Chief Rabbi is to make a live recording of his recently released CD, Israel — Home of Hope, in the original studio used to record Live Aid.

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