Prominent rabbis in the UK have launched a campaign calling on the British government to step up pressure on Israel to lift its two-month total blockade preventing food and humanitarian aid from entering Gaza.
Demanding “an end to starvation in Gaza”, the rabbis accuse the Israeli government of using the denial of food as a “tool of warfare”, and of abandoning Israelis still being held hostage by Hamas.
The SOS – Sending Our Selfies – campaign is being led by Laura Janner-Klausner, the former senior rabbi for Reform Judaism, and Warren Elf, a rabbi at Southend and District Reform Synagogue.
They are calling on rabbis and religious leaders from other faiths, and others who choose to take part, to send messages to British Foreign Secretary David Lammy every Tuesday at 6pm with photographs of themselves citing a line of scripture in English, Hebrew or Arabic from the Book of Psalms which reads: “To save their souls from death, and to keep them alive in famine.”
Both Janner-Klausner and Elf are highly regarded figures who are regularly involved in interfaith and community cohesion work.
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In 2019, Elf was awarded an MBE in recognition of his former role as a community leader in Manchester, where he earned praise for reassuring communities in the aftermath of the deadly 2017 Manchester Arena bombing.
In a statement, the rabbis said: “We call on the Foreign Secretary to convey to the British and Israeli governments that there are religious leaders here who reject the cruelty of the denial of food and humanitarian aid to Gaza as a tool of warfare: and who are distraught at the desertion of the hostages there. This blockade must be broken.”
‘What is happening in Gaza is completely against core democratic values and what I would call Jewish values that we are all made equal in the sight of God’
– Laura Janner-Klausner
They said their campaign would continue “until the situation changes”.
Speaking to Middle East Eye, Janner-Klausner said she hoped the campaign would convey the message that a majority of British Jews opposed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the resumption of the war in Gaza, and the denial of food and aid to Palestinians.
She said there was a growing sense of urgency felt by many in Jewish communities of the need to express their outrage at the situation.
“There are many mainstream Jews who are seeing this as a complete moral and humanitarian disaster,” she said.
“What matters is that the Foreign Secretary and his team see what he already knows, which is that the Jewish community is not represented by the voice that says there is unity and we must all support the Israeli government, whatever it does”.
The campaign comes after the Board of Deputies of British Jews, which describes itself as “the voice of the British Jewish community”, last month launched disciplinary action against 36 members who condemned the Israeli government’s conduct of the war in a letter published in the Financial Times.
That was followed by a further letter to the newspaper by rabbis mostly from Reform and Liberal Judaism backgrounds, voicing support for the dissident deputies and also condemning the war.
Support for the deputies has also come from prominent members of Israel’s anti-government protest movement, including Ami Ayalon, the former head of the Shin Bet intelligence agency.
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Janner-Klausner said the SOS campaign had so far been backed by a number of rabbis from the Reform and Liberal Judaism movements – which are currently in the process of a proposed merger into a single movement known as Progressive Judaism – but said she hoped others from other backgrounds would join them.
“What is happening in Gaza is completely against core democratic values and what I would call Jewish values that we are all made equal in the sight of God,” she said.
“My Orthodox rabbinic colleagues are people of integrity and I’m hoping that they will step up.”
Israeli forces continued their assault on Gaza on Wednesday with at least 60 people killed in overnight strikes, according to local media reports.
More than 52,000 people have been killed in Gaza, according to the Palestinian health ministry, since the start of the war in October 2023, following the Hamas-led attacks in southern Israel in which about 1,200 people were killed and hundreds taken hostage.
On Tuesday, an international hunger monitor used by United Nations agencies warned that Gaza was on the brink of famine and said about half a million people were at risk of imminent starvation.
