Hatch End High School pupil Sophie Lipton has opted to go straight to university to avoid the rise in fees. She plans to take Middle Eastern studies at Manchester University.

Mitchell Cohen, a 17-year-old Hasomean pupil from Bushey, is taking Bnei Akiva's Torani scheme and will study at Yeshivat Hakotel for the year.

"I have had a Jewish education my whole life and wanted to take it further," he says. "It's so important before you socialise with the wider world to learn more about Judaism and Israel advocacy. The experience is something I will never get again.

A coalition of communal organisations has launched a 10-week mini-gap year experience to attract those giving up the traditional gap year in Israel to start university before the rise in tuition fees.

Youth movements are concerned that those trying to beat the increased fees of up to £9,000 annually, effective from 2012, will miss out on the gap year experience.

A university has pledged to take action after the Israeli Foreign Ministry's most senior Muslim diplomat faced a student mob which shouted him down and called him a Nazi.

Ishmael Khaldi had to be surrounded by security guards as he began to speak at Edinburgh University last week.

Protesters marched towards him screaming "Viva, Viva Palestina" and "boycott Israel" as they unfurled Palestinian flags.

At one stage the mic was ripped from his lectern and a demonstrator shouted: "We don't discuss with the Ku Klux Klan, why should we discuss with this thug?"

The president of the National Union of Students (NUS) was the target of antisemitic abuse as he attempted to speak at a student fees protest.

Aaron Porter, who is not Jewish, was escorted away from the demonstration in Manchester last Saturday as protesters chanted “Tory Jew scum”.

The Union of Jewish Students has condemned the abuse, which is thought to have been started by a group of five to 10 protesters before others joined in.

The political campaigner who accused police of pulling him from a wheelchair during last week’s student protests in London has a long history of anti-Israel and anti-western activism and has described Israel as a lunatic and racist state.

In August, on his personal blog Jody McIntyre, London-born but whose great-grandparents came from Lebanon, wrote of “the system of apartheid that Israel is imposing on the Palestinians”.