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The rabbi giving thousands of gifts on Christmas Day
Leeds minister Rabbi Albert Chait set up A Time to Say Thank you
December 24, 2025 11:33
Leeds minister Rabbi Albert Chait set up A Time to Say Thank you
December 24, 2025 11:33Rabbi Albert Chait has a running joke that his synagogue gets as many visitors on Christmas as it does on Yom Kippur.
Because every Christmas morning since 2018, some 800 volunteers have been coming to the United Hebrew Congregation in Leeds to take part in #ATimetoSayThankYou, a project Rabbi Chait founded for the Jewish community to show their gratitude to frontline, emergency and healthcare workers.
“For many years, my wife and children and I have been taking stuff to the local fire station on Christmas Day; the difference with this is that we have empowered other people to do it too,” says Chait, the senior rabbi at UHC in Leeds.
Bearing hampers of cakes and goodies, volunteers visit hospital wards, fire stations, police stations, pharmacies, care homes, women's shelters and homeless shelters – “all these places that don't stop just because it's Christmas, where the people working there are missing out on their own day of celebration because they're serving everyone else,” he says. “So, we created this organisation as a thank you.”
Since starting in Leeds, the initiative has spread to London, Manchester, Glasgow, Liverpool, St Anne’s and even Melbourne, where members of the Jewish community noticed the project on social media and asked to join in.
“We're hopefully getting close to 5,000 volunteers this year, which I think is potentially one of the biggest single projects in the Jewish community,” says Rabbi Chait. “But what I love about it most, genuinely, is that it's only for the wider community.”
At a time when Jews face unprecedented levels of antisemitism, Chait says the project is also a way to “reintroduce ourselves to the wider community as who we've always been and who we really are, and this is an amazing way to do it.”
He adds: “There are no borders with this, no politics, no agenda - it's just about love and gratitude, which is the most simple, inexpensive, valuable commodity that we've always had in the Jewish community, but I think it's more powerful now more than ever.”
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