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Rabbi Abraham Levy, influential leader among Britain’s Sephardic Jews, dies at 83
(JTA) — British Jews are mourning Rabbi Abraham Levy, who led London’s historic Spanish and Portuguese community for decades, building up multiple institutions serving Sephardic Jews in the process.
Levy died Dec. 24 at age 83, a decade after becoming emeritus spiritual head of the S&P Sephardi Community in London, following a 32-year period serving as the head rabbi.
“He was a man of God. A leader of religious life. And he did it with a great deal of conviction. He was a leader who was courageous and had integrity,” his successor, Rabbi Joseph Dweck, said during a special session held to memorialize Levy during the annual Limmud Festival of Jewish learning in Birmingham, England, which was underway when he died.
Levy had played a role in building the annual festival to its current status when, in its early days in the 1980s, his participation was unusual among Orthodox rabbis. Now, the festival is seen as an exemplar of pluralism.
“It is a huge loss for the whole of Anglo Jewry — he built our collective Judaism,” Dweck said. “He represented the Jewish community with such grace and eloquence. I am not sure how we replace that. When we were not sure what the Spanish and Portuguese custom was there was only one person we would ask — and that was him.”
Born in Gibraltar to an Orthodox family, Levy trained as a rabbi at London’s Jews’ College and also completed a doctorate at London University. He ascended to the top spot in London’s Spanish and Portuguese community in 1980.
During his tenure, Levy was responsible for opening Naima Jewish Preparatory School, the first Sephardi school in London since the early 20th century. He remained until his death the honorary principal of the school, which was located in London’s West End and enrolled a mixture of Anglo-Sephardi Jews, Ashkenazi Jews, and burgeoning numbers of Jews from Iran, Iraq and France in the late 1980s.
Levy is also credited with retaining Orthodox rabbinic ordination in England under the auspices of the Montefiore Endowment, after the body that had ordained him stopped minting new rabbis. He additionally created a leadership program for young Jews whose early graduates included Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Britain’s chief rabbi for 22 decades and a towering figure in contemporary Judaism.
Rabbi Abraham Levy led the S&P Sephardi Community in England for more than three decades. He is seen in prayer after his retirement. (Courtesy of Rabbi Joseph Dweck)
Rabbi Raphael Zarum, a graduate of the Montefiore rabbinic training program who is now dean of the London School of Jewish Studies, said Levy was gifted at integrating religious and secular ideas. There was, Zarum said, “a natural overlap for him… He would say, ‘We Sephardim do our jobs, we are part of the world and we are also close to our faith.’”
Levy took a lead role in Sepharad 92, the effort by the World Sephardi Federation to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the Jewish expulsion from Spain and Portugal. His role included meeting heads of state and visiting Sephardic communities in Spain and Portugal.
As a member of England’s Council of Christians and Jews, Levy helped to foster positive relations between the faiths. Queen Elizabeth awarded him the OBE, Britain’s second-highest national award, for his interfaith relations work in 2004.
“Rabbi Levy will be profoundly missed, but his message of tolerance and his work toward interfaith dialogue hold enduring lessons for us all,” King Charles said in a statement. He said Levy had been his host when Charles visited the Bevis Marks Synagogue, the largest associated with the Sephardic community, for its 300th anniversary in 2o01.
“I knew him both as a kind and towering figure in his community and as a greatly respected and admired teacher across communities,” the king said in his statement.
Tributes also poured in from elsewhere in England, from British Jews of all backgrounds and even from the deputy mayor of Jerusalem, Fleur Hassan-Nahoum, who was a cousin. Hassan-Nahoum tweeted that Levy was “a great and proud Sefardi leader — who will be greatly missed.”
“Our community mourns the sad loss of Rabbi Dr Abraham Levy,” said the United Kingdom’s chief rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, in a statement. He “made his mark well beyond the Sephardi community. A committed rabbinic leader and outstanding scholar, he made a deep impact in interfaith relations and education.”
Levy was buried Dec. 26 in a cemetery in Golders Green, a predominantly Jewish neighborhood of London, after a funeral procession that included stops at the Naima school and the Lauderdale Road Synagogue, also part of the Sephardi community. He is survived by a son and four grandchildren.
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UCLA student government condemns campus Hillel for hosting former hostage
A campus event featuring freed Israeli hostage Omer Shem Tov drew the condemnation of UCLA’s student government on Tuesday. In an open letter, the UCLA Students Associated Council said that bringing Tov to speak to students “served to legitimize and normalize” atrocities in Gaza and Lebanon.
Shem Tov, 23, was kidnapped from the Nova music festival in Southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and held hostage in Gaza until his release in a prisoner exchange in February 2025. UCLA hosted him on April 14 for a Yom HaShoah event.
“While we affirm the humanity of all people impacted by violence, we reject the selective platforming of narratives that obscure the broader reality of ongoing state violence,” the student government letter wrote in the letter, which was addressed to the UCLA administration and UCLA Hillel among others. “Israel is currently continuing to carry out what has been widely identified by human rights advocates as a genocide in Gaza, while also expanding its illegal military campaign into Lebanon.
“In this context, elevating a single narrative, absent of critical political and humanitarian framing, serves to legitimize and normalize these ongoing atrocities.”
Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller, UCLA Hillel’s director emeritus, called the statement “completely ridiculous.”
“You can’t present the narrative of your experience without it being called ‘one sided,’” Seidler-Feller said. “There has to be a counter-story to persecution. Is there a counter-story to killing people?”
UCLA Hillel executive director Daniel Gold dismissed the criticism in Tuesday’s letter as antisemitic.
“Hillel at UCLA and Students Supporting Israel UCLA would like to apologize…for absolutely nothing,” he wrote in a statement. “Members of UCLA student government have once again shown they are anti-dialogue, anti-learning, anti-truth, anti-student and antisemitic.”
The USAC did not respond to a request for comment.
As college campuses across the country became a hotspot for pro-Palestinian activism following the Oct. 7 attack, UCLA, with an activist history and a large Jewish population, stood out as a major flashpoint. Its student encampment was the site of a riot in April 2024 and eventually cleared by police in riot gear.
The USAC has sided with pro-Palestinian protesters throughout. In a Feb. 2025 letter titled “We Are All SJP,” the USAC, which is democratically elected by the roughly 30,000-member UCLA student body, condemned Chancellor Julio Frenk’s suspension of Students for Justice in Palestine. The letter referred to Israel only as “the Zionist state” or put the country’s name inside quotation marks.
The University of California has since been sued by the Department of Justice, which said that UCLA created a hostile work environment against Jewish and Israeli faculty in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.
The post UCLA student government condemns campus Hillel for hosting former hostage appeared first on The Forward.
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Trump extends ceasefire with Iran, even after Iran balks at new round of negotiations
(JTA) — President Donald Trump announced on Tuesday that he would unilaterally extend the U.S.-Israeli ceasefire with Iran, even though Iran had not agreed to his conditions or even to return to the negotiating table.
Trump announced the decision on Truth Social just hours before the two-week-old deal was set to expire. Citing Iran’s “fractured” leadership, Trump wrote that he had been asked by Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif to “hold our Attack on the Country of Iran until such time as their leaders and representatives can come up with a unified proposal.”
Vice President JD Vance’s planned trip to Islamabad, where talks were set to take place, was postponed indefinitely after Iran failed to confirm its participation in negotiations.
Trump added that the United States would maintain its naval blockade of Iranian ports in the Strait of Hormuz, despite Iran’s repeated calls for the restrictions to be lifted.
The announcement marked a sharp departure from the president’s statements earlier in the day, telling CNBC that, if a deal was not made before the deadline, “I expect to be bombing.”
In a statement Tuesday, Sharif thanked Trump for his “gracious acceptance” of Pakistan’s request to extend the ceasefire, adding that the country would “continue its earnest efforts for a negotiated settlement of the conflict.”
The announcement adds to uncertain about the war’s future, including for Israelis who lived through six weeks of Iranian bombing, and renews questions about Trump’s commitment to achieving his war goals, which have varied and included blunting Iran’s nuclear ambitions, achieving regime change, and destroying Iran’s stockpile of ballistic missiles. He said earlier this week that he was asking Iran to limit its nuclear program for 20 years, five years longer than was required by the deal struck by Barack Obama in 2015. Trump exited that deal in 2018.
Last week, Trump announced a different ceasefire, between Israel and Lebanon, on Truth Social, contradicting Israel’s claim that the Iran ceasefire would not apply to its fighting with Hezbollah, an Iran-backed proxy in Lebanon.
Trump’s announcement of the ceasefire extension came during the night in Israel, after Israelis began their celebration of Independence Day. It drew criticism from one of his staunchest pro-Israel supporters, the Zionist Organization of America, whose national president Morton Klein said in a statement that “interminable delay is the standard Islamic Iranian regime negotiating tactic” and that acceding to it represented a victory for Iran. The statement did not mention Trump.
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Alan Dershowitz quits Democratic Party, calling it ‘most anti-Israel party in U.S. history’
(JTA) — Alan Dershowitz, the prominent pro-Israel attorney whose clients have included Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein, announced on Monday that he was leaving the Democratic party and registering as a Republican.
Describing himself as a “lifelong Democrat,” Dershowitz wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that he had decided to “bite the bullet and register as a Republican,” citing Democratic support for an arms embargo on Israel last week and the Michigan Senate candidate Abdul el-Sayed’s anti-Israel rhetoric.
“There is no denying that the hard left, anti-Israel wing of the Democratic Party has moved from the fringe to the mainstream,” Dershowitz wrote, adding that “Republicans have their own antisemitic fringe, but for now it remains a fringe.”
The announcement formalized a political evolution for Dershowitz, who defended Trump during his first impeachment and has increasingly broken with Democrats over Israel in recent years.
In 2021, Dershowitz nominated Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, and Avi Berkowitz, Trump’s top Middle Eastern envoy during his first administration, for the Nobel Peace Prize over their hand in shaping the Abraham Accords.
Dershowitz — who has recently faced scrutiny over his ties to Epstein, and previously denied allegations of sexual misconduct made by one of Epstein’s accusers — panned the Democratic Party as the “most anti-Israel party in U.S. history” in the op-ed.
“I believe that the Democratic Party’s hostility to Israel represents a deeper and more dangerous shift away from the center and toward a radical approach that is bad for America and the free world,” Dershowitz wrote, adding that he intended to “work hard to prevent the Democrats from gaining control of the House and Senate.”
Dershowitz’s comments are in line with Trump’s statements about Jews and the Democratic Party. He has repeatedly expressed amazement at how any Jews could vote for the Democrats considering his own record when it comes to Israel.
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