Amid a shocking rise in antisemitism, David Floyd visits Jewish community centre JW3 and talks to chief executive Raymond Simonson
It’s a year of celebration for JW3, the groundbreaking Jewish community centre which opened its doors in 2013 just over the borough border in Camden.
Chief executive Raymond Simonson, who has led the organisation throughout that time, explains that on reaching the age of 13, the centre decided to hold a Bar Mitzvah.
He tells me: “It’s this coming of age and this big celebration and we thought that was a really appropriate thing for us to mark as a milestone.
“It’s been a particularly tough few years. What people need is a bit of joy, a little bit of joy in their lives. So we wanted to celebrate.”
This special programme of activities includes: “JW3’s Barmy Mitzvah, which is a live performance piece with acrobatics.”
This stark contrast between the centre’s joyful mission and the painful situation facing Britain’s Jews is a recurring theme as Simonson takes me on a brief tour of the building, excitedly describing its diverse, positive activities before sitting down to discuss the past, present and future of JW3.
After hearing about and, in some cases witnessing, its huge range of activities from cinema to theatre, a foodbank to a nursery, a museum to martial arts classes, I ask Simonson about the centre’s mission.
He says: “We’ve always said we want to create open, welcoming, Jewishly-infused spaces that bring different kinds of people together, that help strengthen people’s identities and that build community – and we think that we can do all of those things through the medium of arts and culture, through education and importantly through social action as well.
“One thing I’ve often said to people as a sort of a shorthand is that we exist to increase the quality, the variety and the volume of Jewish conversation.”
A Jewish perspective
“Often we focus a lot in the Jewish community on issues around Holocaust, antisemitism and around Israel.”
While Simonson says this is understandable, he emphasises: “There is a Jewish perspective on everything from the environmental crisis to the plight of refugees to art and music and poetry and you name it, then there is a Jewish lens with which we can look through it and we always wanted to bring Jewish life and Jewish culture alive in a three dimensional way.
“We want to offer people multiple entry points into the community, into Jewish life. So, if you’re interested in food, you can come and learn to bake a challah or you can help with the foodbank or you could celebrate Jewish festivals through the foods that we eat.
“If what you’re interested in is film, then we show mainstream films and Jewish films. We’re a home for the Jewish Film Festival every year where we are the cinema that has more screenings than any other.”
While the centre is proud of its Jewishness, there is also a clear focus on reaching beyond the Jewish community, to share Jewish culture with others. I ask Simonson about how the centre engages with people who are not Jewish.
He responds: “I’m so glad you picked up that point because it would be quite easy to say, well, we’re a Jewish community centre built by the Jewish community for the Jewish community and that’s it, and especially these days where there’s a nervousness in Jewish community”
Simonson explains that Dame Vivian Duffield, the philanthropist who had the initial idea for the centre and provided the funding to build it, there was always an aim to engage with non-Jews, in a similar way to Jewish community centres in the US.
Open to all
He adds: “We wanted to do something different that meant that non-Jewish people would interact with Jews and with Jewish life and Jewish ideas, again in a three-dimensional way.
“There’s a big sign in the JW3, magenta colours on the outside of the building that says open to all, and we’re always encouraging of everyone, but we don’t ask people who they are.”
Although visitors are not asked who they are as part of each visit, the centre does do an annual survey of users. The most recent of these showed that 20% of those answering said they weren’t Jewish, 89% of those non-Jewish visitors saying participating at JW3 “helped increase their understanding of Jewish culture and helped them feel more connected to the Jewish community”.
While the vast majority of those attending Hebrew language classes are Jewish, Simonson says: “Krav Maga classes, which is a self-defence class, it’s about 80% not Jewish”.
He adds: “In our Jewish festival celebrations, unsurprisingly, most people are Jewish, but there’s always people that contact us and say, I’m not Jewish, I’d like to see how you celebrate Hanukkah or Purim, is that okay? And we always say yes.”
Given Simonson’s clear enthusiasm for everything the centre does, I expect my question about his highlights from the past 13 years to produce a long list. He does not disappoint. From the overall achievement of reaching one million visitors much earlier than anticipated in 2018/19 to memories of big name speakers including David Beckham whose visit “could have stopped the traffic” and Tom Hiddlestone, who had a queue of fans waiting all day to get in. With a mixture of pride and bemusement, Simonson remembers: “Some of them had painted pictures for him or knitted things for him.”
A royal visit
The individual stand out moment, though, took place in December 2022: “The King’s visit was really on a different level to anything I’ve experienced, because he’d only become King a month or two before. It was one of his first visits anywhere as King. It was his first visit as King into the Jewish community.”
King Charles joined local teenagers to help them wrap Christmas for local children in hospital – and made a donation of food to the centre’s foodbank while meeting the volunteers.
“He was supposed to be here for about 40 minutes, he was here for about an hour and a half, the last stop we went into our main hall, our main auditorium, and we had been doing an event for Holocaust survivors: a Chanukah tea with some food and live klezmer music and the King walked in.
“Ava Schloss, who sadly passed away this year, who was the stepsister of Anne Frank, had met the King before, and she grabbed his hand and pulled him into the circle.”
At that point, with his security team looking concerned: “he joined in the Jewish dancing with them and then the video, and it went around the world, it was on television news in South Africa and America and Australia and all over, this image of survivors that Hitler and the Nazis tried to wipe out, and there you have nearly 80 years later, dancing with the King of England in such joy. I don’t think that moment could ever be topped in my career, in my life.”
From the joy of the Royal visit, we move on to the unavoidable question of how JW3 responds to the recent rise in antisemitic attacks, both in Barnet and beyond.
Difficult few years
Simonson says: “The last couple of years have been the toughest, I’ve worked in the Jewish community for over 30 years, and we’ve been through some tough times before, but nothing, nothing at all like this.
“In the last month or two, it has reached a level I never thought I’d see in my life, where you’re finding Jewish venues targeted, a number of them within Barnet, synagogues, Jewish charities, I mean, blowing up ambulances, it’s just unthinkable.”
As part of the wider problem facing the community, the rise in hatred creates specific, direct problems for JW3 itself. Simonson explains: “JW3 had that call to tell us that our building had been on the list that some people that had been arrested on suspicion of working on behalf of the Iranian regime, and those people lived in Barnet, in Finchley, had been conducting hostile surveillance of our building, that’s a call that no one should ever get.
“That suddenly triggered a whole series of things that meant I was spending more time in meetings with counter-terrorism, with the Met Police, the Community Security Trust, with our security company.
“I’m a community and youth worker, that’s my qualification, I started off as a youth worker in Redbridge, and what we do here is about strengthening people’s identities and building community, we shouldn’t have to be in meetings worrying about security.”
The stark reality of this situation is literally reflected in the centre’s security bill. “We now spend over £600,000 a year on security, I can’t get my head around that figure.
“We have to raise just under £2million a year, of which £600,000 has to be spent on security. If we didn’t have the word Jewish on our building, but we did all the kinds of things we do, it would cost us £50,000-£60,000.
“Imagine all of that money we could be spending on our frontline activities, on our foodbank, on our free activities for the elderly, on our arts and culture and our youth programmes and everything else we do, and instead it has to be spent on security 24-7, just because we’re Jewish.”
Beyond the financial implications, there is the personal impact on those who work at the centre. Simonson says that this “puts a level of pressure on people”. He adds: “We have to brief our staff and we have to brief our volunteers, and some people get quite badly triggered by these kinds of things, because they shouldn’t have to be fearing that, in a place that has a nursery and has antenatal classes and a cinema and people playing bridge and bingo.”
While Simonson is an unusually positive person, his anger at this situation facing the Jewish community is clear: “It’s a ridiculous, unfathomable thing, and there are days where I think, why isn’t the entire country standing up and saying this is madness and this is wrong.”
Doubling down on community
What JW3 is definitely not doing in response to this is either giving or shutting up. Simonson explains that “it would be much easier right now to say because of that we are going to dial our volume down a bit, be a bit less out loud and proud Jewish”.
More specifically: “We could also say now isn’t the time to be doing Jewish Muslim activities, now’s not the time to be doing a food bank that reaches non-Jewish people, Syrian refugees, Afghan refugees, Muslims, Christians, now’s not the time to do that, let’s retreat into a corner, let’s dial the volume down, let’s only be for Jews, let’s not allow anyone in, let’s lock the gate and have a buzzer and you have to show your identification.”
But “we had those conversations and they didn’t last more than a moment because we said that’s not who we are”.
As an example, Simonson describes recent Iftar celebrations held at the centre, during which Muslims break their fast during Ramadan: “Six weeks ago we had the most incredible Iftar here we’ve ever had: 140 people here, roughly half were Muslim, roughly half were Jewish, the rest were neither Muslim nor Jewish. It was moving and incredible, we gave space to our Muslim friends to pray as the fast went out and our volunteers, Jewish and Muslim, came together and cooked kosher halal vegetarian food for them and it was beautiful.”
Describing the point in our tour of the building where I witnessed one of the centre’s community projects, he adds: “You saw today when we went up to the demonstration kitchen, Jewish and Muslim women came together to cook meals for a local refugee centre. Now could be the time where we don’t do any of that [but] what we’re doing is doubling down on that.”
Asked to looking beyond the centre’s Bar Mitzvah, to its next 13 years Simonson says: “You can have strategies and planning but then reality hits and at the moment a lot of what we do has to react to the context we find ourselves in”.
However, he says: “We want to get to a point sooner rather than later where that is not the context: war in the Middle East and the impact of that growing antisemitism.”
Then the focus: “is about turning up that joy, dialling it up even further, building the buzz in and around JW3 so more and more people can be unashamed and proud and out there with their Jewishness”.
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