Prince Charles hosted a special reception to celebrate the UK Jewish community at Buckingham Palace on Thursday 5th December 2019.
JSCN Director Ed Horwich was honoured to be one of the guests. “I was extremely pleased to be able to take representatives of two other small communities with me, Marian Prinsley from Norwich and Fiona Frank from Lancaster.”
There were several other small communities present including Sheffield, Southport, Milton Keynes and Cardiff.
Amongst the 400 or so people there it was impossible to be aware of everybody who was present.
The event was held in the ballroom, which is where many investitures also take place.
In addition to the communities, community organisations and charities, the Palace had also invited all the religious leaders of the Orthodox, Reform and Liberal communities, along with a number of celebrities like Howard Jacobson, Robert Peston, David Baddiel, Simon Schama and many more.
There was no press and no photos, because of the unexpected proximity to the general election.
The event was two years in the making. It was instigated by Simon Sebag Montefiore, who worked along with Marie van. der Zyl, president of the Board of Deputies, to make it happen..
Benjamin Crowne writes:
Prince Charles made a rather generic, very apolitical speech on Thursday evening, with the exception of one pretty good joke which was also a veiled rebuke of the UK’s diplomacy to Israel. I’ve not seen anyone else mention it, so here goes:
The Prince talked a little about his grandmother, Princess Alice of Greece – who sheltered a Jewish family during the Nazi occupation and is acknowledged in Yad Vashem as one of the Righteous Among the Nations. Princess Alice became highly devout and a little eccentric in her later years, and after the 1967 military coup came to live in Buckingham Palace (as people who have watched Season 3 of The Crown will know).
Alice arranged to be buried on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, and Prince Charles said, “When she announced her intention of being buried in Jerusalem, we all wondered how on Earth we were going to be able to visit her grave” – only for Alice to respond: “There’s a very good bus service from Athens”.
So, this is a fine joke (especially by royal-family-public-speaking standards) and one I’m not sure had been told publicly before – but one with some subtext…
Between memories of the Mandate, and the obvious contemporary geopolitical sensibilities, the Foreign Office for decades would never allow a formal Royal Visit to Israel (this has somewhat relaxed only in the last couple of years). So the question of visiting Alice’s grave was not so much a logistical issue as a political one – how could they visit a place when any trip would be so fraught and contentious by its nature?
Seen in this context, Alice’s response is rather more pointed: if it’s politically OK to go to Athens (whose junta was backed and armed by the British government as an anti-communist bulwark), what’s so much more difficult about Jerusalem?
Anyhow, it was a nice reminder of the deep institutional memory of the monarchy, and the way in which things which are ancient history for most of us are their lived experience.