England’s Golders Green Congregation Turns 100

Now a major center of Britain’s Orthodox Jewish community, the London suburb of Golders Green was first settled by Jews a century ago. The story of its first synagogue, as told by Helen Fry, is one of joining the fashionable middle class:

The Jews who moved into Golders Green at the turn of the century were primarily from the middle classes, . . . rather than [the working-class immigrants of] the Jewish East End. By the 1920s, Golders Green became a very fashionable place to live and its high street was described as having “the finest shops outside the West End of London.”

The nascent Jewish community began in 1915 with only twenty members, but in its heyday rose to a membership of around 1,500.

From 1915 until 1922, the early congregation rented St. Albans Hall from the local Anglican Church for Shabbat services and all the major festivals. . . . By 1918, the congregation was able to purchase a plot of land in Dunstan Road but . . . could not build the synagogue before 1922 because the government had reserved the land as allotments to feed the nation after the food shortages of the Great War.

Read more at Jewish News

More about: British Jewry, History & Ideas, London, Synagogues, World War I

 

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF