On Sunday November 15, the Jewish community will hold its annual Mitzvah Day, mitzvah generally translated as a “good deed” but more accurately “a commandment”.
Synagogues, schools and Jewish charities across Britain - and for the first time in France, Poland, Israel and South Africa - will bring together over 15,000 members and supporters to do a good deed for the day: give blood, sing to the elderly, repair a school playground, collect food for the homeless and so on. In fact the only thing it won’t do is raise money: it’s all about hands on action.
In a number of cases – appropriately on a day that will mark the start of the UK’s first nationally organised interfaith week – Jewish groups will work in partnership with the local church, mosque or temple. The Langdon Community in Prestwich, a Jewish charity supporting people with learning difficulties, for example, will be working with members of the local parish to help clear up their churchyard.
In Manchester, children from the Jewish youth movement, Habonim Dror, will work with Muslim youth leaders on an arts and crafts project, creating wares for a Jewish and equivalent Muslim care home. And in Bristol, the campus multifaith chaplaincy will provide the focus for students of all faiths to launch a ‘collectathon’ for unwanted glasses for VisionAid.
Perhaps the most interesting collaborations on Mitzvah Day are those between the Jewish and Hindu communities: children from Moriah Jewish Primary school in North West London will be popping round to the neighbouring Krishna-Avanti Primary school – the first state-funded Hindu school in the UK – to help create a vegetable patch. Meanwhile, Northwood and Pinner Liberal Synagogue will be tidying up a park in Borehamwood with monks and other volunteers from the nearby Hindu temple.
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It is not the number of such collaborations between Jews and Hindu which is particularly interesting, but the closeness of the two communities. Their experiences as immigrants have in many respects run parallel to one another. Both groups, for example, worked hard on their arrival in Britain, starting in the inner cities and working their way out, often along London’s metropolitan line, to the leafier suburbs. Taking jobs first in retail and later on in the professions, fortunes have been made in both communities primarily in property and finance.
Both communities also place a high value on family and education, as they climb the ladder of British society. Many of London’s top independent schools which traditionally attracted large Jewish intakes now find themselves attracting even more applications from Hindu children.
The primary difference between the communities, however, is that the Jews got here first. The major waves of Jewish immigration to Britain occurred in the early part of the last century, although even then there were a large number of well-established and prominent Jewish families in Britain. The latter may have been embarrassed by their poor East End relations, but played a major role in helping them to begin the climb out of poverty and learn to integrate.
In contrast, there was little immigration from the subcontinent until after the Second World War and Indian independence. This in turn was boosted by the migration of East African Asians to Britain in the 1960s and 1970s.
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To begin with, as the Jews had before, the Hindus generally kept their heads down and themselves to themselves. But as the community has grown in confidence they have looked to the success of the Jewish community with respect and desire to learn from those that have gone before.
A case in point was the slaughter by the RSPCA in 2007 of Shambo, a black Friesan bull, which had been adopted as a sacred animal by the Hindu community near Llanpumsaint in Wales. The animal had contracted bovine tuberculosis and was considered (rightly or wrongly) a risk to other local cattle. In a similar case, later that year a lethal injection was administered by the RSPCA to a sick cow being cared for at Hindu temple near Watford against the will of the local Hindu community.
There was a widespread feeling in the Hindu community that the RSPCA and the politicians that supported them would never have behaved in such a cavalier fashion towards Jewish communal concerns. It seems they have a point: Jewish communal organisations have successful turned back numerous threats over the years to outlaw their ritual slaughter practices on grounds of animal cruelty, whatever the merits of the case.
Partly in response to the Shambo incident, Hindus have turned to Jewish community for advice and support in a whole range of areas: the Hindu Forum of Britain works closely with the Board of Jewish Deputies and is frequently represented at its events. The communities share intelligence on communal security with each other and with the police, and the backers of a new Jewish school in Barnet are now lending their support to their neighbours in efforts to promote a similar Hindu secondary school in the borough.
The Jewish community has been happy to oblige, welcoming a partnership which not only shares cultural attitudes and values, but also adds significant weight of numbers to a group all too aware that it is shrinking rapidly and mindful that its influence might wane concurrently. So this is a relationship of potentially mutual benefit.
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Back at Mitzvah Day, the founders are now advising the charitable Sewa (meaning ‘selfless service’) International on how to set about organising a day of social action by British Hindus. Now plans for the UK’s first Sewa Day are advancing fast with a provisional date set for January 2010.