Does school row expose 'Charedi coup'?

The first Hackney Gazette of 2012 features a letter and a news story both of which raise concerns about schools for ultra orthodox Jewish (Charedi) children which have opened illegally in and around Stamford Hill.

Some of these schools have been granted retrospective planning permission but usually with conditions attached.

A Google search suggests at least three similar cases (any more please let me know and I will amend if there are any updates.)

Torah V'Yirah, 91 Amhurst Park.

Beis Trana, at 186-194 Upper Clapton Road. (Both discussed in a Jewish Chronicle piece )

The Gur school in Fairholt Road (Another Jewish chronice piece).

The Gazette's news story covered the Gur school which got its planning permission in July but with conditions that it has failed to meet. The Gazette said: "The council has since served several enforcement notices which have been ignored."

The school has now appealed against the conditions of the temporary planning permission.

The letter in the Gazette is about another school, the Torah V'Yirah at 91 Amhurst Road (The Gazette originally wrote this story on December 16). On Tuesday 10 January the Council's planning committee will vote on whether this school should be granted retrospective planning permission too.

Council officers have recommended refusing permission and under normal circumstances this matter would not have gone before a committee. But a petition of 10 councillors has forced it on to the agenda on Tuesday.

Two councillors who sit on the committee (Ian Sharer, Leader of Hackney Lib Dems and Michael Levy, Leader of the Conservative Group) ) have put their names to the petition calling for the schools argument to be heard and not refused on the basis of the officer recommendation.

Nigel Lewis' letter to the Gazette also referred to a meeting with Hackney Councillors in June 2011 - this included Abraham Jacobson (Lib Dem), Ian Sharer (Leader of Hackney Lib Dems), Simche Steinberger (Conservative), Michael Levy (Leader of the Conservative Group) and Benzion Papier (Conservative) as well as Linda Kelly (Conservative) and Dawood Akhoon (Lib Dem) who have all signed the petition.

Lewis' letter described the June meeting as "a Charedi-run closed shop determined to stifle local democracy".

He added that: "The recent petition likewise appears to be the prelude to an intended coup, in which large areas of Hackney's planning will henceforth be managed with Charedi interests uppermost, irrespective of other people."

This may sound a bit insensitive but tensions around planning and  the Charedi community have dogged Hackney politics for years. During the last Mayoral election Andrew Boff, Conservative member of the London Assembly and candidate for Mayor of Hackney, criticised this blog for suggesting that the Conservative party sometimes behaved like an ultra orthodox Jewish lobby group in Hackney: Reply to Andrew Boff.

A couple of years ago Mayor Jules Pipe criticised Cllr Simche Steinberger for putting the interests of the Charedi community ahead of other Hackney residents.

This is how he described it later in an interview with Blood and Property: "I believe that it was the adopted principle of the entire Hackney Conservative group to oppose the Council’s clarification of planning policy regarding residential extensions. In my opinion, in attempting to negotiate the removal of the item from the Cabinet agenda in return for his acquiescence to allowing an urgent item that lowered council housing rents, he put furthering his group’s political position above operating correctly as Chair of Overview and Scrutiny."

The other side

The debate about ultra orthodox Jewish education facilities has been rumbling for a while in Hackney and the Council has been criticised for not acknowledging the problems faced by its fastest growing community.

Rabbi Abraham (Avraham) Pinter, a regular spokesman for the community and principal at Yesodey Hatorah School led a campaign to turn the site of an old Hackney School into a school for ultra orthodox Jewish pupils rather than turn it into residential homes.

At the time he told the Jewish Chronicle that the site represented "a unique opportunity for the Charedi community in Stamford Hill to have improved purpose-built educational facilities. More than 20 per cent of Hackney's under-16s come from the Charedi community and many of our existing schools are old fashioned, sub-standard residential buildings.

He said: "It is an absolute scandal that the educational needs of the fastest growing part of Britain's Jewish community are being ignored by Hackney Council," he claimed. In other words something needs to be done about schools in the community and until then illegal ones will probably keep popping up.


General tension

The ultra orthodox Jewish community seems to have a rocky record in terms of community cohesion. It is often criticised by the mainstream Jewish media here. Between Christmas and New Year the BBC reported stand-offs in Israel as the wider Israeli population protested against demands for gender segregation.

At the end of last year Geoffrey Alderman, historian and columnist for the Jewish Chronicle, raised tensions when he claimed it was "well known that charedi men are notorious harassers of the opposite sex." (Republishing this comment has offended a reader - see comment below - but the context and a response from Rabbi Pinter are included in the link, I'm hoping that's enough to justify repeating Alderman's claim which is not there because I believe it but to demonstrate that this debate has become very heated within the Jewish community itself. Anyway, if you have a problem with this please let me know via comments below.)

Justified or not, is there any way to usefully address these issues before the effects of a poorly performing economy fray tolerance levels?

A must read for Hackney politics

The Jewish Chronicle published this piece yesterday: Hacking off Hackney voters.

It sheds light on a debate that Hackney politicians tend to avoid: Do ultra-orthodox Jewish councillors put the interests of their community ahead of the rest of the borough?

Last week its author Geoffrey Alderman wrote this critique of ultra-orthodox Jewish politics: Religion or mere self interest? Last week Blood and Property asked him to comment on the relationship between ultra orthodox Jewish councillors and the Conservative Party.

In Hackney there are nine ultra-orthodox Jewish councillors, six of them in the Conservative Party.

Alderman said: "All I would say is that the ultra-orthodox communities in Hackney are much less interested in party dogma than in what the parties can do for them. That's not to say that they aren't interested in dogma, rather that it's a secondary consideration."

Planning restrictions have been the community's main concern as they prevent large families from extending their homes. This issue also consumes a lot of the energy of Hackney's Conservative Party.

The issue is likely to heat up again after a planning victory for Ultra Orthodox Jewish families living in Haringey. One commentator told the Jewish Chronicle "It sets an excellent precedent" adding that she hoped Hackney Council would do something similar.

Professor Alderman refers to Blood and Property's interview with Jules Pipe and a stand-off the Mayor had with Cllr Sime Steinberger over exactly this issue (links in the interview).

Alderman also noted Pipes comments about communal voting. The mayor told Blood and Property: "... personally I think communalism is very unhealthy. People should be looking at the manifestoes and candidates of the different parties and voting for the ones who seem to have the best ideas, qualities and relevant experience. It is unhealthy for democracy if people vote for candidates from their own community for that reason alone and not on merit. It is also unhealthy for community cohesion – whilst there are specific communities within Hackney, we are all part of one wider civic community."

This seems to clash slightly with MP Meg Hillier's views on the issue. In her interview with Blood and Property, she said that self interested communities is what politics is about.

"Blood and Property: Do you expect communities to be self-interested for a multicultural system to work?

Meg Hillier: We have a party system in this country and people will look at what policies work for them. People don’t necessarily vote down ethnic lines. They wouldn’t necessarily vote for a Vietnamese councillor because they are Vietnamese or for a Turkish councillor because they were Turkish or African councillor because they were African. People tend to vote more for the party of their choice and I think that’s healthy.

Blood and Property: And if they weren’t doing that, would you say it was unhealthy?

Meg Hillier: Lots of people vote for parties, but of course a lot of people don’t have parties, they float, and there are many factors in their decisions. There are lots of people who will vote for the same party, not necessarily mine, for years and years. Others vote for one party one year and another the next and they have different reasons for voting. Rarely is it a personality decision. My view is that there is very little personality voting and it is more on the big issues and wider concerns.

Blood and Property: Does it matter if you have large, politically active communities, that do act with a certain level of self interest – or promote issues that affect this community?

Meg Hillier: That’s what politics is about."

Geoffrey Alderman concluded his piece in the Jewish Chronicle with this warning: "Jewish "communalism" is a major trigger of anti-Jewish prejudice. It may look clever but its victories, purchased at a high price, are invariably short-lived."

FOR REFERENCE:
Last week Blood and Property interviewed Geoffrey Alderman (I have yet to write it up). He lived in Clapton (Walsingham Road) from 1946 to 1973 and was educated at Hackney Downs School (He is the school's official historian) before going to Oxford. Alderman now holds several academic posts in the UK and the USA. Try geoffreyalderman.com or his reference in Wikipedia which includes controversies he has sparked over Islam, Palestine and Harold Pinter.

On page 364 of his book Modern British Jewry (1992), Alderman writes: "The UOHC and kindred ultra-orthodox communities have also grown in size. The most visible manifestation of this expansion has been the post immigration, particularly from Communist eastern Europe, of adherents of various pietistic (and, some would say, excessively narrow-minded and anti-intellectual) chassidic sects, each following a particular rabbinical dynasty, all reconisable by a very distinctive style of dress... and each family doing its very best to bring into the world as many children as possible."

Until relatively recently, in Hackney and the UK in general, the distinctively dressed ultra orthodox Jew was a rarity. In Modern British Jewry, Alderman noted how most Jewish historians paid them little attention: "Who, at the time of Sir Israel Brodie's retirement (1965), would have predicted that Lubavitch chassidim would have found employment within the United Synagogue, or that "Lubes" would have featured, as they clearly must, among the opinion-formers of British Jewry?"

Hackney council in new row with Orthodox Jewish community

The Jewish Chronicle reports a campaign by Hackney's Charedi community to prevent a former school being turned into residential property. Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks is among those supporting the campaign.

According to Abraham Pinter, former Hackney Councillor, headmaster of Yesodey Hatorah Senior Girls School, 20% of Hackney's under 16s are from the Charedi community.

The dispute could reignite debate over planning restrictions in Stamford Hill. Bad feelings still linger after a personalised row - back in April 2009 - when Mayor Jules Pipe said that Conservative Councillor Sime Steinberger - head of the borough's scrutiny committee - had been prepared to "withhold money from 23,000 households" in order to push the Orthodox Jewish call for looser planning rules in Stamford Hill. Pipe described it as an "incredible abuse of his position" and that "23,000 people could have had their rent decreases delayed and you used that as a bargaining chip."

Cllr Steinberger replied: "What Mayor Pipe said is not what happened. I got a call in the morning saying what about this item. I hadn't seen any paper work and I asked officers what it was about." He said that Pipe had not returned his calls.

Blood and Property recently stole another Jewish Chronicle story: Hackney Council tells Orthodox Jew to demolish his home - which illustrates how severe this planning issue has become in some instances.

Meanwhile should there be concern about the state of democracy within the Orthodox community?

Pipe: The message must be clear, not true

Hackney's politicians kicked-off last week's Full Council meeting with an argument about the minutes of the April meeting. This was in relation to Mayor Jules Pipe's accusation that Conservative Cllr Steinberger had abused his position as chair of Hackney's Overview and Scrutiny committee. The Conservatives wanted to change the minutes.

Later, during a seemingly pedantic exchange between Mayor Pipe and Conservative Cllr Harvey Odze, Odze attacked the Mayor's long-running claim that Hackney has no tube stations, pointing out that Manor House tube is in the borough.

Pipe replied that while Odze was technically correct and that, yes, a few staircases from underground stations did surface on the fringes of the borough, he thought it best not mention them in case it confused the clear message that Hackney has no tube stations.

Pipe could be forgiven for maintaining his 'clear' message but there was something disturbing about the ease of his confession that Odze's facts would only have confused newspaper correspondents and government officials who needed persuading. These facts did not fit in with the image of Hackney that he was promoting. It would be interesting to know where else Pipe may have applied this clear message policy.

May be his speech at the council meeting was an example. The Mayor spent his alloted time telling councillors the good news about Hackney as set out in - Place Survey England - Headline Table Results 2008 which appeared to show that Hackney residents love their borough.

Some of the survey findings that weren't mentioned by Mayor Pipe were that: 47% of Hackney respondents think there is a problem with people not treating each other with respect and consideration; 56.4% of respondents "think that drug use or drug dealing is a problem in their local areas" - exceeded only by Newham and Tower Hamlets (60.7% and 60.5%); 41% of Hackney residents think that drink and rowdy behaviour is a problem in their area and 37% think that anti-social behaviour is a problem in their local area.

And yet the survey then claimed that 71% of Hackney residents "are satisfied with their local area as place to live" (In comparison to 56% in Newham and 69% in Tower Hamlets - 90% in Kensington and Chelsea and 92% in Richmond Upon Thames.)

In Hackney only 27% of the people who were asked to take part in the survey, took part. The report said: "where response rates are low (less than 30%) and confidence intervals are wide (outside +/- 3 percentage points) some caution may be necessary when using the results to set performance targets (for example as part of local area agreements), particularly when the target is linked to a financial reward." So may be the Hackney figures can't be trusted.

But the survey - and the Mayor's interpretation of it - should provide an antidote to figures published earlier this week by the Office of National Statistics which apparently show that Hackney kids, along with those in Tower Hamlets and Newham, get the worst start in life and are likely to be obese and living in households where every adult is unemployed.

Meanwhile comments made by security minister and Hackney resident Lord West of Spithead - that it is not safe to walk around Hackney with an iPhone - might not have fitted in with the borough's official image management either.

23,000 Hackney tenants used as a bargaining chip, Mayor claims

Someone was definitely playing politics at last night's full council meeting - but who?

I've got a feeling that the following report may be focusing on what Mayor Pipe wanted everyone to focus on - his allegations - rather than the passing of a controversial policy on housing extensions. According to some at tonight's meeting, this piece of local legislation has jammed up swathes of council officers for at least three years. (I don't know, most of this stuff was new to me)

It was also claimed that the council's position on this issue could prompt legal challenges from representatives of Stamford Hill's orthodox Jewish community who have been calling for looser planning rules in their communities to allow large families to modify their homes.

The council's position has been described as racist in the past - although such claims were not made last night, but feelings were high.

However the strongest comments came from Mayor Pipe, who accused Cllr Simche Steinberger - one of the champions of the orthodox cause - of abusing his position as chair of the borough's overview and scrutiny board.

In his statement to the council Pipe said that he had had to invoke emergency mayoral powers to ensure that 23,000 hackney house holds had their rents cut in line with government guidelines. The cuts will see these households save an average of £140 in rent per year.

Pipe claimed that efforts to push the decreases quickly through the council could have been hampered by Steinberger who, Pipe said, had refused to include the item in the formal council process unless certain conditions were met.

Pipe told the council that Steinberger refused to help unless his concerns about the handling of the controversial Residential Alterations and Extensions policy were addressed.

Pipe said that Steinbeger had been prepared to "withhold money from 23,000 households" in what he described as an "incredible abuse of his position." He said: "23,000 people could have had their rent decreases delayed and you used that as a bargaining chip." He asked what would have happened if he had not had special powers allowing him to by-pass the process.

Steinberger said: "What Mayor Pipe said is not what happened. I got a call in the morning saying what about this item. I hadn't seen any paper work and I asked officers what it was about." He said that Pipe had not returned his calls.

Cllr Coggins defended his fellow Conservative saying that Steinberger had a legitimate complaint about the way the council had dealt with the Residential Alterations and Extensions Policy. He said that he did not know that the item in question was related to rent decreases.

The council passed its recommendations on the extensions policy but not before a recorded vote was called. 34 passed the recommendations, 11 voted against and there was one abstention.

Guardian: Do Stamford Hill Jews need intergration?

And there's an interesting, but old debate at http://theshaigetz.blogspot.com/ in a piece called Yellow Brick Road.

Other stuff:

The deputy business editor of the Times thinks Hackney has made good progress and believes it is a beacon for enterprise: The success story that Labour is writing off.

And then there's the government commendation for the borough's homelessness team.