Leading Jewish Ukip members have defended the party’s defence of its alliance with an MEP whose party leader makes racial slurs and questions the Holocaust.

Nigel Farage’s Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy group in the European Parliament recruited Polish MEP Robert Iwaszkiewicz.

Mr Iwaszkiewicz is a member of the Congress of the New Right led by Janusz Korwin-Mikke.

Jeremy Zeid, the Jewish chairman of Ukip’s Harrow branch, said Mr Iwaszkiewicz was a “distinctly unsavoury person”.

“I will be keeping an eye on this especially with the rise in Jew hatred.

“Am I happy about it, no, but I am not at the coalface in Europe. This is purely a ‘marriage of convenience’, otherwise the EFDD group falls below the numbers to get funding and offices.”

Shneur Odze, Ukip's only strictly Orthodox candidate in May's European elections, took a similar view.

He said: "We have invited one person to join and not the leader. The man that has joined us said he wanted Hitler dead, he is no closet fascist.

"I understand for some people that this is a difficult pill to swallow, and people do not understand the nuances and intricacies of European politics."

A Ukip spokesman said: "Robert Iwaszkiewicz was the only Polish member asked to join the EFDD group. The only comment he made on Hitler was that he was an evil man who should have been executed.

“Korwin-Mikke is not a member of our group. Both Ukip and the EFDD group abhor and reject any scent of antisemitism. Number four on the Ukip North West MEP list is Jewish, as is its former Party general secretary.

The spokesman said all European Parliament groups included “very odd bedfellows”.

Board of Deputies vice-president Jonathan Arkush said: “The Board is gravely concerned by reports that Ukip may sit in the same parliamentary grouping as a far-right Polish MEP in a bid save its funding.

"Robert Iwaszkiewicz belongs to an extremist party whose leader has a history of Holocaust denial, racist remarks and misogynistic comments.

"For UKIP to choose such a figure as Robert Iwaszkiewicz as a bedfellow, apparently for money, is beyond belief. Nigel Farage now has some very serious questions to answer. He has placed in issue the credibility of Ukip."

Mr Korwin-Mikke has previously said that Jewish efforts to win back property stolen during the Second World War often amounted to a “Holocaust industry”.

“We are against returning property that belonged to one Jew to another Jew. It is a Holocaust industry,” he said.

The 71-year-old MEP also claimed that “Jews are very talented people, and therefore are our worst enemies, because they are talented communists.

“This is why the Poles have a specific image of Jews. They don’t know the real Jews, only the Communists ones who stayed here.”