How not to choose our leaders

I've said it before. I'll say it again. The Jewish communities of the UK are run by some of the best brains in the land: captains of industry; giants of commerce; leading lights of the learned professions; men and women who are at the tops of their respective trees. But when it comes to running the affairs of British Jewry this experience and wisdom disappears, to be replaced by (at best) cack-handedness of a high order or (at worst) plain unadulterated foolishness of the rarest vintage.

Take the Spanish and Portuguese Jews' Congregation, whose leadership (the women and men of the ruling Mahamad) could not have made a more perfect mess of the appointment of a spiritual head if they had set out with the express intention of creating one and then wantonly wallowing in it.

The current spiritual leader is Rabbi Dr Abraham Levy, son of an illustrious Gibraltarian family and much esteemed (though not - to be frank - universally so) amongst the venerable S and P families, some of whom can trace their own descent to the Iberian Jewish refugees permitted to dwell here by Oliver Cromwell. Levy is not only a consummate religious leader. He is also a shrewd businessman and a most successful fundraiser. But the highly successful Naima preparatory school which he created in west London is not formally part of the S and P's "cathedral" synagogue at Lauderdale Road, nor is his prestigious semicha programme. Levy will reach his contractual retirement age as spiritual leader, but not as head of the school or the semicha programme, in two-to-three years. Until then he is the S and P's sitting tenant: immoveable, well beyond the Mahamad's control. Nor should we forget that Lauderdale Road has its own synagogal head, Rabbi Israel Elia - another hard-working and widely-respected sitting-tenant.

Was it wise, therefore, for the Mahamad to have sought to appoint a successor to Levy - and, moreover, to have sought for this Rabbi David Bassous, around whom controversy appears to swirl like a whirlpool? A sizeable section of the paid-up S and P membership evidently thought not. In the recent electoral process Bassous attracted not quite the requisite two-thirds of valid votes. A prudent Mahamad would have withdrawn his nomination. Instead his supporters are trying to steam-roller him through, which will do no good and which will surely arouse only further enmity from the Levy camp.