She added that Ms Formby “was not given the kovod” (honour) of a meeting with either the Jewish Leadership Council, Community Security Trust — or an official meeting with the Board itself.
The revelation that Mrs van der Zyl, the community’s most senior representative, has broken the united stand with other communal bodies angered many of the Jewish Labour MPs and activists who have led the fight against antisemitism in their party.
A senior figure at the JLM spoke of the body’s “dismay” at Mrs van der Zyl’s meeting with Ms Formby — although its chair, Ivor Caplin, is also believed to have met the Labour general secretary last year.
Under Mr Corbyn’s leadership the JLM has come under increasing attack at Labour branches across the country.
Senior JLM officials said they were especially angry that Mrs van der Zyl had discussed JLM’s role in antisemitism training with Ms Formby, and would have expected to have been alerted in advance to any meeting with senior Labour figures which involved discussions of their organisation’s affairs.
A senior Labour MP told the JC: “The Board increasingly seem to believe they have the right to act alone on any issue they feel like getting involved with,” adding that her decision to meet Ms Formby was “diabolical”.
Another Labour MP said that Mrs van der Zyl would be “eaten alive” by experienced Labour operators like Ms Formby.
But an influe ntial and long-standing deputy defended Mrs van der Zyl’s conduct, claiming she was right to “hold a ladder” towards the Labour leadership. The deputy also said it was appropriate for Mrs van der Zyl and the Board to act on their own, independent of Labour MPs and other communal organisations, in a bid to resolve the antisemitism crisis.
There was further confusion on Wednesday after the JC revealed that the Board’s senior vice president Sheila Gewolb had held another, until now secret, meeting with Jenny Rathbone, the Welsh Labour politician currently under investigation by Labour after claiming Jewish people’s security fears were “in their own heads”.
JLM only discovered that the meeting had taken place when it attempted to plan an antisemitism training course for Ms Rathbone with senior figures in the Welsh Labour Party.
Details of the secret meeting between Mrs van der Zyl and Ms Formby emerged after the Labour general secretary told a stormy meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) on Monday evening how, even though Jewish communal groups “haven’t felt that it’s appropriate to engage with us in such a way”, she had nonetheless “spoken with individuals who are in the organisations - and I’m not talking about people who are in fringe groups.”
The JC subsequently contacted the major communal organisations to ask them to clarify Ms Formby’s remarks.
The JLC and CST said they had been contacted by Ms Formby but neither agreed to a meeting.
Jonathan Goldstein, chairman of the JLC, said that he was phoned by Ms Formby who asked “to continue discussions. I made it clear that I was not prepared to do that until there was progress from the leader and we had seen none since our meeting on 24 April.
“She did raise the question of education and I told her that I would do nothing other than in coordination with the JLM. That was my only contact.”
CST’s Mark Gardner said there had been a text exchange last September in which Ms Formby asked for “links to articles and publications so as she would better understand antisemitism” and he supplied such links.
Labour MPs and peers at Monday’s meeting demanded that Ms Formby get to grips with the backlog of disciplinary cases involving antisemitism and also expressed anger over the collapse of a series of high-profile cases of alleged antisemitism. Ms Formby said: “I don’t think anyone can ever say that we can eradicate antisemitism completely.”
One Wednesday Labour’s Deputy leader Tom Watson publicly berated Ms Formby over her comments. “As deputy leader of the party, our goal should be to completely eradicate antisemitism,” he said.
Mr Watson said Ms Formby must publish data the party holds on the number of allegations of antisemitism involving members, how they have been dealt with and what the sanctions are, to build trust with the Jewish community.
Jewish Labour MP Luciana Berger said of Ms Formby’s performance at the PLP meeting: “In a decade of these meetings I have never seen a general secretary behave with such contempt towards Labour MPs.”
Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott, shadow chancellor John McDonnell and party chairman Ian Lavery watched on in silence as backbench MPs openly voiced their anger at the general secretary’s lack of progress on the issue. Mr Corbyn did not attend.
The successful motion, which had been proposed by Newcastle North MP Catherine McKinnell, demanded answers from the leadership in one week. It was unanimously passed without any opposition by the PLP at the packed meeting in Westminster.
Resentment increased after Ms Formby confirmed she would not be able to provide a full report answering all eleven questions relating to Labour’s disciplinary processes over antisemitism.
Describing Ms Formby’s address as “platitudinous, dismissive and far from acceptable”, Ilford North MP Wes Streeting said: “In not giving us data, she’s ruled out any possibility of Jewish members and Jewish constituents having confidence in the Labour Party’s ability to tackle it.”
Dame Margaret Hodge said: “I’ve never heard such a vacuous argument, if one really does want to kill that terrible cancer of people feeling we’ve become institutionally antisemitic.
“The most important thing you can do is provide the information and data.”
Another Labour MP later told the JC: ”We appear to have gone from zero tolerance to zero concern for antisemitism in our party.”
A letter sent by Ms Formby to all Labour MPs ahead of the meeting in which she said she was “proud” of the way she had dealt with the problem since becoming general secretary last April further inflamed tensions.
In a separate development, Labour sources told the JC that the party leadership was planning to hire Prof David Feldman from the Pears Institute to write the material for the party’s antisemitism training. Prof Feldman was vice-chair of the much criticised Chakrabarti inquiry into Labour antisemitism.
But Prof Feldman told the JC: “The Pears Institute has not agreed to write materials for antisemitism training for the Labour Party.”
However, he added: “The Institute is part of Birkbeck, University of London. Birkbeck and the Labour Party have had a preliminary discussion about whether Birkbeck could develop a teaching module (not a training course) on antisemitism.”
