Let Strictly Orthodox Jews in the UK decide how to educate their own children

It’s fine to be Jewish in the UK of 2025. As long as you are not too Jewish. As long as you sign up to educating your children, as some, such as Lord Finkelstein, have noted, in the basic secular standards and conventions of British life, so they can be British Jews, not just Jews. The government and lobby groups such as Humanists UK are concerned about strictly Orthodox (Charedi) mainly Chassidic communities, mostly in Stamford Hill, who under present educational laws are allowed to let their children study mainly just religious texts from the age of about 14. Ofsted, the schools inspectorate in England, some in parliament, and campaigning secularists have argued for this to change in a concerted campaign over the last ten years. It has always been unclear though who is being harmed here in wider society or why the state should dictate how strictly orthodox Jewish children should be brought up.

Now, however, the new government’s proposed Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill will close the loopholes allowing this, making sure that all Jews are brought up in their terms to be good British Jews. But, I have to wonder, what exactly are the parameters of the basic standards and conventions that a Jew and his children have to sign up to be classified as British? What fits and what does not? How about the custom of some Chassidim, including Chabad, of specifically not learning Torah on only one night, the night of 24^th December? One rationale for this is not to give succor to the forces of idolatry when they are at their strongest. In other words, they don’t accept that Christmas is just some mulched up holiday of big fat men dressed in red handing out presents. They don’t think that there’s no harm in Jews joining in this most basic convention of British life. Rather, they contend that the first part of the word Christmas is the important part, i.e. that it celebrates the birth of Christ, an incontrovertible heresy for Jews that the Divine could be born as flesh and bone. And that’s something they want to be very very clear they are having absolutely nothing to do with. That’s without getting into the long collective memory of being murdered in the past by Christian communities on Christmas Eve.

Now, personally I have no problem with joining in, to a limited extent, with the general goodwill of the festive season and I am strongly in favor of, as of course are Chabad in practice, good interfaith relations between Jews and Christians in the modern era. I am just pointing out that many Jews, for principled reasons, do not want to engage with the Christmas holiday, surely in “modern Britain” a basic convention, in any way. Taking another example – what about strictly Orthodox Jewish Rabbis refusing to allow Charedi children or indeed their communities as a whole to have television, smartphones, or access to social media? It seems that a pretty basic secular standard and convention of British life, at least since 2007, has been to give your kids a smartphone when they reach age 11. No matter that this has meant, according to a 2023 UK survey, that 22% of 14- to 18-year-old teens watch porn regularly, with the average age that they start being twelve. Is letting your twelve-year-old child watch porn one of the secular standards that Charedim should sign up to, if they want to be considered good British Jews? Along with the mindless TikTok videos and child deaths from cyberbullying?

Many like to talk about “the Charedim”, as though they are a problem to be solved. Those weird, strange Jews who don’t fit into some people’s notion, including the government, of what it means to be British. Well, I’m not so convinced that they are the ones who are the problem. Perhaps other Jews as well as society as a whole might actually have something to learn from them about things like community, faith, duty, responsibility and indeed the very idea of childhood. Jonathan Sacks pointed out that the Jewish faith and tradition, was and is always revolutionary, always standing against the tide. Always posing problems for the societies around them. For the British and their grand departments of state, “the Charedim” are the round peg in the square hole of modern Britain – a problem to be solved. The government may indeed be well intentioned in their desire, as governments often are, to solve such problems. But I don’t see problems. I just see fellow Jews holding fast, with incredible tenacity, to a shared faith and history. Some other British Jews might think of course that what strictly orthodox Jews in Stamford Hill, with their, to them, exotic clothes, and exotic hats, do with their kids and schooling has nothing to do with the rest of us. I would not be so sure. The elites of British society, and their grand departments of state, can just as easily turn their gaze to those contraventions of the conventions of British life, with their “unscientific” bases, that we do see as part of our identity as Jews. Circumcision. Shechitah. Much else beside. In the end, we are all inescapably intertwined together.