‘We’re going to wear our Judaism out, loud and proud’

So quickly did the centre become part of the community architecture that it is hard to think we could have gone without it for so long. Its design and location made an immediate statement. Whereas many Jewish organisations were discreetly tucked away, without drawing attention to themselves, JW3’s name was blazoned atop its glass-fronted facade on one of the capital’s busiest streets.

Raymond Simonson shows Culture Secretary the JW3 (Photo: JW3)[Missing Credit]

And yet it is easy to forget the scepticism that surrounded the enterprise at its conception. Simonson, who joined a year before it opened, had demurred when offered the job. “I didn’t accept it immediately; it took me a few weeks,” he says.

Executive director of Limmud at the time, he wondered: “Am I going to take on something where people were saying it will open in a blaze of glory and close within a year?

“I remember when I started the job, doing a hard-hat tour of the building site with a bunch of community leaders, and one of them, a senior professional, said to me: ‘I look forward to coming back here when it’s turned into luxury flats.’”

People told him the idea was “too American, too brash” and asked: “Is it going to be the Jewish community’s Millennium Dome?” When he did accept the challenge and started touring synagogues and community groups to promote it, the questions tumbled out: “‘Where is the parking?’, ‘Why is there no swimming pool?’, ‘What food will there be?'”

That, ultimately, it did come to be was down to the single-minded vision of one woman above all, Dame Vivien Duffield, whose foundation contributed 80 per cent of the £50 million start-up costs. Perhaps because she was not part of “the old boys’ club” she was able to defy the naysayers and press ahead, Simonson ventures.

But some of the communal philanthropists who had initially expressed reservations came round, and within a year or two of its opening, had become donors.

The public’s response was swift. Tasked with reaching a “steady state” of 65,000 annual visits within three years, the centre recorded 200,000 in its very first year. “We reached our one millionth visitor after five-and-a-half years. We expected that after ten years.”

The JW3 (Photo: JW3)[Missing Credit]

Duffield’s foundation still contributes £1 million a year, with a further £1.9 million having to be raised through philanthropy, on top of £2 million from ticket sales, building hire and other commercial activities. “We’d love to be in a position to lower prices for even more events. We do a lot of free things; we’d love to do loads more,” Simonson says.

If only, he sighs, someone could underwrite the soaring cost of security, which has more than quadrupled from the start-up budget to over £600,000, given the current threat of antisemitism. While £200,000 comes from the government via the CST, the rest has to be privately funded.

“Imagine that £400,000. If we didn’t have the word ‘Jewish’ on our building, it… would be spent on frontline services, on the free activities we do for Holocaust survivors or for families. It would be spent on the food bank, on subsidising Friday night dinners for young adults, on Jewish culture. But instead, that money has to be diverted from programming to security. Without it, we wouldn’t be able to open the doors.”

But while they have to take more precautions, there are some things they are not prepared to do.

“Some people have said, have we thought about taking our sign off the front or taking the mural down? ‘Pull the blinds down’ is another one we get. And the answer is, ‘No.’

“I don’t say that in any blasé way. I can promise everyone we take security so seriously that I have been in more meetings [about it] and drills in the last few months than in the rest of my career,” he says.

JW3 is “not going to dial down the volume” on Jewish activity, he stresses.

“We are going to dial the volume up, even louder.”
To those trying to terrorise the community, “we are going to say: ‘You won’t win, you won’t scare us, you won’t make us hide our Jewishness under the table. You won’t make us, JW3, tuck our Magen David under our shirt. We’re going to wear it out, loud and proud.’”

Former hostage held in Gaza Noa Argamani next to the sculpture of padlocks from the Lovelock Hostage Bridge by Sandra Shashou at JW3, and in front of the mural by Leon Fenster (Photo: JW3)[Missing Credit]

But the climate of increased antisemitism has resulted in a dip in numbers over the past couple of months – generally “casual visitors”, who might have popped in for a bagel or decided to see a film on the spur of the moment.

Those who book tickets to events or attend regular classes and courses are continuing to come.

“In some areas, numbers are going up,” he says. For modern Hebrew, for instance, or for the self-defence discipline, Krav Maga.

“Almost every Hebrew class has got someone non-Jewish in it,” he notes – which might be someone with business in Israel, or a Christian supporter of Israel, or a person considering conversion. From surveys of ticket buyers, around 20 per cent of JW3 users are from outside the Jewish community.

“Eighty-nine per cent of non-Jewish visitors tell us they feel more connected to the Jewish community because of coming to JW3,” he observes. “It feels like the soft diplomacy bit of the fight against antisemitism.”

JW3 has also taken some work out to the country, like the Great Yiddish Parade – about the early 20th-century Yiddish protest movement – which went to several art festivals.

“We forget there are millions and millions of non-Jewish people in this country who never encounter living Jews.

"They encounter Jews or Jewish community through the stories they see on social media, or on TV, or in the press.”

Post-October 7, the centre became a focal point for campaigns to raise awareness of the hostages, such as the Empty Shabbat Table or, most notably, the Lovelock Hostage Bridge. But it has also proved a welcoming venue for community organisations who struggled to rent space elsewhere.

The JW3's Empty Shabbat Table (Photo: Getty)AFP via Getty Images

“There are a number of events that we have hosted here, where we weren’t the first choice venue – people were looking for a fancy West End venue and found it hard in the last couple of years because the event might have had an Israel angle,” he says.

Its capacity to host events increased last year with the gift of a retractable pergola from one of its most steadfast supporters, Sir Lloyd Dorfman, which now enables its outdoor plaza – the venue for an ice-rink in winter and urban beach in summer – to be converted into a second hall. “Last year, we had a wedding on the beach,” Simonson says.

But October 7 posed one unexpected challenge. The centre had made a substantial investment in the production of its first pantomime, a Jewish take on a quintessentially British experience, for that December and needed to promote it. “It was a big gamble for us.” But JW3 felt it had to suspend its marketing push for several weeks in view of events in the Middle East.

The panto nonetheless proved a resounding success and has become a fixture on the communal calendar. “It’s like fusion cooking. You fuse into the recipe the very best of Jewish storytelling, Jewish music and Jewish humour. In every pantomime we’ve done, every song is a pastiche of a song written or made famous by Jews. It might be an Amy Winehouse or a Carole King [song] or something from Oliver!,” he says.

“Sometimes people would come in three or four generations… It had big groups of LGBTQ 20 to 30-year-olds, Jewish and non-Jewish, coming for the fun of it, along with Orthodox rabbis, their wives and children. It seemed to reach so widely across the community.”

Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Pig at JW3 (Photo: Getty)AFP via Getty Images

Over the years, the centre has greeted A-listers such as Sir David Beckham, Tom Hiddleston and Benedict Cumberbatch. But two events stand out for Simonson. One was the visit of chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov, who agreed to play matches against the Akiva School team that had made the finals of a national school competition that year. “I went backstage, and I said [to Kasparov]: ‘One of the children asked me, if he beats you, would that make him the greatest chess player in the world?’ And he said: ‘You tell him I have not lost an exhibition match since 1984.’ He was being deadly serious.”

The second was when King Charles, recently ascended to the throne, chose JW3 to pay his first visit to the community as sovereign during Chanukah 2023. “He was supposed to come for 45 minutes. He stayed for about an hour and a half because he wanted to speak to everyone.”

In the hall, Holocaust survivors were enjoying a tea party. “Shir, the klezmer group, had started playing To Life! and Eva Schloss – zichrona livracha – Anne Frank’s stepsister, who passed away this year, who obviously had met the King, reached out and took his hand and pulled him into the circle, and he – with no resistance – joined in.”
The image of the King of England dancing with survivors made front pages all over the world. “It was a moment I will never forget,” Simonson says.

King Charles III dancing at JW3 in December, 2022 (Photo: Getty)Getty Images

But “probably the thing I am most proud of” was when the centre ran programmes online during Covid and launched a food bank, among other things. “We could have just closed the doors and put everyone on furlough, but we felt we had a responsibility to help the community,” he says.

One area being developed this year is encouraging civil intra-communal discussion on divisive issues, at a time when conversations on Israel, for instance, have become “quite strained… I have heard of people storming out of Seder night, and, this year, I’ve heard people saying: ‘We didn’t all get together across three generations like we normally do…’ That, for me, is heartbreaking.

"It is so tragic for the Jewish people if we get to a point where we cannot sit around the same table as mishpochah, despite differences.”

Simonson has variously been abused as “a kapo” or as an “agent of Mossad” over something at the centre that someone has objected to.

“We are trying to reach the broadest tent we can within the Jewish community of people… I think that in any given year, there are 3,500 events and activities and programmes going on, so everyone can find something they like. I’m sure most people can find something they don’t like – so don’t go to that one!”

On the lighter side, JW3 has recently received an Arts Council grant to create a new interactive performance called JW3’s Big Barmy Mitzvah, the story of a barmitzvah gone wrong.

The hub is also inviting families to send in photos of their own bnei mitzvah, which will form the content of a big exhibition. “It will be good to turn our attention to celebration. We need to as a community.”

For more information on JW3’s b’mitzvah celebrations, go to: jw3.org.uk or click here