The British Hindu community salutes Lord Sacks

This week, as thousands of British Hindus celebrate Diwali (albeit virtually due to Covid-19), many will also be paying tribute to Lord Jonathan Sacks who was an inspiration to us all for the role he played in promoting community cohesion.

On behalf of the British Hindu community, I wish to pay tribute to my dear friend Lord Sack’s extraordinary life and the things we shared as a community. The weight and warmth of his words reached far beyond the Jewish community, to all in society. He was an intellectual and moral leader; a champion for coming together and understanding one another in a society increasingly fixated with one’s self.

I connected with Lord Sacks over the strong commonalities between the British Jewish community and the British Hindu community. My family and I came to this country from Uganda more than forty-five years ago to escape a brutal dictator, and Britain welcomed us. For us, British Jews were a positive example of what immigrants can achieve by integrating fully into society. In them, we saw people who not only survived horrific persecution but also thrived despite it. Our two communities live side by side, and we have a number of shared values. Each attaches importance to hard work, education, enterprise, family and faith. We also share an unshakable loyalty to this great country, the United Kingdom.

With characteristic eloquence, Lord Sacks echoed this point about loyalty to our country: “I grew up here and I love Britain. I think to be a Jew in the last 1,800 years is to learn how to be faithful to your Jewish heritage while interacting with another culture, in my case the English culture in which I grew up and to which I’m very attached to.” There is no better advert for integration in a society extremely divided on many fronts.