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This report touches on multiple themes, including the economic needs of disadvantaged households, how best to maintain the Jewish charitable sector, the importance of supporting local synagogue communities and Jewish schools, how to address the potential harmful effects of the pandemic on the community’s informal educational infrastructure, health measures that should be considered to help protect lives, intracommunal relations, and issues around the use of technology to help support and bolster Jewish life.

In September, the London School of Jewish Studies is introducing a new programme combining leadership skills and Jewish studies. The Teach to Lead programme, based on the Teach First model, will develop high-calibre Jewish studies teachers across primary and secondary schools. The new cohort will be tasked with re-envisioning Jewish education for the 21st century to ensure we don’t only replicate old methods and approaches but bring new perspectives and solutions. They will have the opportunities to learn from practitioners around the Jewish world. They must be able to think creatively about what our young people need today to respond to Jewish ideas and how to nurture thinking Jews who are strong in their identity, knowledgeable about their heritage and passionate about their Jewish faith.

In the UK, most ultra-Orthodox schools operate as public institutions and are therefore subjected to frequent scrutiny by the Office for Standards in Education (OFSTED). Recently this has caused particular friction because these schools refuse to comply with requirements that they teach elementary-school students about homosexuality, transgenderism, and so forth. Ḥaredi schools have received frequent surprise inspections during which students were asked invasive questions about sex and “lifestyle choices,” to the consternation of teachers, parents, and administrators. Thus British Ḥaredim are understandably relieved that OFSTED ruled last month that their elementary schools would no longer be under pressure to teach about same-sex marriage.

Based on interviews and focus groups with parents, students and senior staff, this article investigates how England’s one pluralist Jewish secondary school has, in contrast, attempted to accommodate various forms of Jewish practice and facilitate students’ agency to determine their Jewish identities as desired. It reveals that students enjoy opportunities to actively negotiate Judaism, but that their autonomy is not without limits, and issues inherent to pluralism exist in executing an ethos accommodative of diverse, personalized expressions of Jewishness.