UK government funds pro-genocide University Jewish Chaplaincy
“Spiritual” guides have close ties to illegal settlements.
First published by The Electronic Intifada.
By David Miller and Asa Winstanley
Exactly one year on from the start of the genocide in Gaza, the British government announced that it would allocate almost $9 million toward tackling alleged anti-Semitism in education.
Almost $638,000 of this funding has been awarded to the University Jewish Chaplaincy (UJC) in order to fund “welfare support for Jewish students.”
But what is the UJC? Just a kindly Jewish religious organization devoted to the welfare, pastoral and spiritual needs of Jewish students?
Unfortunately, that’s not the case.
Just days after the government’s announcement, the University of Leeds fired two Israelis, Ariel and Sonia Pariente, as the UJC’s chaplaincy couple on campus. They had only recently been installed in their post.
Shockingly anti-Palestinian and Islamophobic posts had been found on their social media pages, leading to the outcry which resulted in their sacking.
The posts – mostly made by Sonia rather than her husband – included her view that Israeli lives were more valuable than those of Palestinians.
She approvingly posted a statement that read: “After October 7 [2023] I don’t differentiate between Hamas and so-called ‘Palestinians’ … For the next 10 to 20 years, the Palestinian people will pay the bill that Hamas set today. And this bill will be paid in blood.”
After exposure of the pair’s racism by Palestine solidarity activists who decried their statements online, some of their internet comments were deleted.
A document uploaded on the UJC website in September stated that the pair were “looking forward” to starting their role. This suggests that they were in post only a matter of weeks.
It was not the first time that the rabbi for Leeds university had been the source of high profile controversy. The Parientes were in post for such a short period that the Leeds Jewish Society – a student group – had not even yet removed the names of the previous incumbents from its Facebook page before the next pair were fired.
These were chaplains Rabbi Zecharia Deutsch and his wife Nava.
In November 2023, it was widely reported that Zecharia Deutsch had circulated videos of himself in the uniform of the Israeli occupation forces.
He had briefly left Leeds for occupied Palestine to participate in Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians.
“What Israel is trying to do,” he said, “is to destroy the evil – which is the most moral thing possible.”
Among those with whom he shared the propaganda videos were Jewish students at Leeds and the wider northern region. The Leeds-based chaplaincy is also responsible for six other universities: in York, Huddersfield, Sheffield, Bradford and Hull.
The UJC defended Deutsch’s video messages.
Chief executive Sophie Dunoff told The Jewish Chronicle, “Since [he was] in Israel, Rabbi Deutsch has been keeping in touch with the students in his care, updating them and sending messages of goodwill via WhatsApp. None of these messages were inappropriate in any way.”
She went on: “Some have since been spread beyond the closed WhatsApp and this has resulted in an outpouring of hate, anti-Semitism and lies.”
She did not prove that any such “hate, anti-Semitism and lies” had actually taken place.
There was, however, outrage that a university chaplain had whitewashed the genocide to students for whom he had a duty of care.
Israeli settler fanatics on British campuses
What is the UJC and how is it related to the Zionist movement?
The University Jewish Chaplaincy is formally registered as a charity under British law.
It says that it has around 13 different chaplaincy posts across the country. In practice, however, some chaplains cover two posts and these are often filled by a married “chaplaincy couple” – such as the now-sacked Ariel and Sonia Pariente.
As well as the University of Leeds, there are significant numbers of other British campuses with extremist connections to the genocidal occupation forces or to illegal settlement initiatives.
Though the webpage of Ariel and Sonia Pariente has now been deleted from the UJC website, archived copiesdetail the pair’s Israeli connections.
“Ariel is Israeli, with a special connection to Leeds as his mother and grandparents grew up and live there,” it stated. “Sonia, originally from Russia, made aliyah to [i.e. settled in] Israel in 2015.”
Ariel was trained at an establishment named Yeshivat Karney Shomron.
This yeshiva – or religious school – was established in 1981 as part of Israel’s Hesder yeshiva program. This network of religious-military boot camps combines the study of religious texts with arms training and active service in the Israeli army.
The yeshiva boasts that its rabbis and students “serve in elite combat units of the IDF [Israeli military] in the famed Golani and Givati brigades, some as officers.”
Pariente’s yeshiva is located in an illegal settlement, south-west of the city of Nablus in the occupied West Bank. The school notes that the students “also carry security … responsibilities in Karnei Shomron, forming a first line of defense and emergency assistance.”
In other words, these religious students often join the armed settler militias.
These groups are involved in many abuses against local Palestinians such as the occasion in March 2023 where a settler shot dead a local Palestinian man. Or the occasion in July 2023 when Jewish settlers from Karnei Shomron attacked the residents of the Qufr Selis area with stones, causing four injured Palestinians to be injured – two of them seriously.
According to the deleted UJC web page, Ariel’s wife Sonia previously worked in the Israeli government press office.
A document still available (at the time of writing) on the UJC website states only that she worked as a “press officer” but omits any mention of Israel.
“Obliterating Amalek”
Zecharia and Nava Deutsch, the previous Jewish chaplains at Leeds, were no better than the Parientes.
Both claimed on the UJC website to be from “Efrat, Israel.” However, Efrat is not in Israel but in illegally occupied territory in the West Bank.
Nava is a recent settler-colonist, having grown up in Zurich, Switzerland. Zecharia studied at the yeshiva in Maaleh Adumim, a large settlement in the illegally occupied West Bank.
Like the religious school Ariel Pariente attended, the yeshiva is also part of the Hesder program which, as previously noted, combines religious study with military training.
Hesder yeshivas are a device to recruit religious Zionists into the military – especially the traditionally reluctant ultra-orthodox Haredi Jews.
According to one Zionist account there are over 80 such religious-military training schools, with over 10,000 recruits and “in the current war, thousands of Hesder students have fought for the IDF [Israel’s military].”
Zecharia and Nava Deutsch both reportedly trained for two years at the Straus-Amiel Institute in the West Bank. The couple’s departure as “emissaries” to Leeds was proudly announced by the institute in July 2021.
In October 2023, the institute’s president, Rabbi Kenneth Brander, visited Israeli troops bombing Lebanon and wrote a genocidal message on a rocket, stating that the munition’s purpose was “to fulfill the mitzvah [religiously commanded deed] and mission of obliterating Amalek.”
“Amalek” is a name for a people who, in the mythical Bible narrative, were completely obliterated by the invading Hebrew armies.
There are many other such connections between Jewish religious establishments on British campuses and the genocidal Israeli entity.
At the University of Bristol – David Miller’s former employers – the current chaplaincy couple Asaf and Atara Forges are said to have “come from Israel.”
However, both trained at the same genocidal Straus-Amiel Institute as Zecheria Deutsch. The institute is based in the occupied West Bank.
One of the previous chaplaincy couples was Rabbi Alex and Rebbetzin Ahuva Tsykin (2017-19) both of whom were settler colonists in Palestine, he from Melbourne, Australia and she from Costa Rica.
The university website noted at the time, “The Tsykins previously lived in Israel, teaching and supporting the community in Gush Etzion after realising their passion lay in Jewish education.” Gush Etzion is not in Israel either but in the illegally occupied West Bank.
The pair studied at Yeshivat Har Etzion in the West Bank, one of the largest Hesder yeshivas – the place where the idea of combining religious study with participation in the occupation military first emerged.
The UK’s “chief rabbi” Ephraim Mirvis also studied at an institute in the West Bank – Har Etzion, in the 1970s. He is president of the UJC according to a copy of its headed notepaper from 2021 – though this is not mentioned on its website.
A similar picture obtains at many of the other British campuses with Jewish chaplains.
Genocidal religious extremism
In Birmingham, chaplain Rabbi Fishel Cohen is a disciple of the extremist Chabad sect. Chabad is also associated with The King’s Torah, a book which justifies the slaughter of Palestinian children – even babies – on the grounds they may one day grow up to threaten Jews.
According to the Shin Bet, Israel’s secret police, the followers of an extremist Chabad rabbi are responsible for most so-called “price tag” revenge attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank.
In Cambridge, chaplain Atira Baruch moved from New Jersey and settled in occupied Palestine as a teenager and later undertook national service. Her husband Ben went to a Hesder yeshiva in occupied East Jerusalem“for his gap year.”
In Glasgow and Edinburgh, chaplain Ayalah Shabo is from the illegal settlement of Efrat in the West Bank. She attended Shalem College in occupied East Jerusalem.
Shabo’s husband Eliran attended the Yeshivat Machanaim, in Migdal Oz, next to Efrat. This yeshiva is another one of the Hesder military-religious boot camps.
In Nottingham, chaplain Uriya Dvir attended two Hesder military-religious yeshivas in the West Bank for a total of six years.
In Oxford, the recent chaplain Michael Rosenfeld-Schueler trained at Yeshivat Hamivtar, in Efrat in the occupied West Bank. His wife Tracey was a leader of the racist Zionist youth group Habonim Dror.
Ideological partisans of genocide
Overall, the vast majority of the couples chosen by the UJC to minister to the needs and welfare of Jewish students appear to be ideologically extreme Zionists, who have often had direct experience as West Bank settlers.
There is also a particular preponderance of trainees from the genocidal Straus-Amiel Institute, and they are often recruited from Hesder religious-military training schools.
The charitable objectives of the UJC state that the group aims to advance the “social welfare, spiritual and educational needs” of Jewish students. This allegedly contributes towards the “public benefit” which all charities are obliged by UK law to demonstrate.
The UJC is thus arguably breaching this obligation in knowingly employing extremists who have been in breach of international law. They have done so by studying or training in illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank and by taking part in war crimes with Israeli occupation forces.
The UJC also appears to have endorsed the participation of some of its staff in the ongoing genocide in Gaza, by allowing them to serve in the occupation forces during their employment with the UJC.
Jewish students should not be forced to take guidance from chaplains who are ideological partisans of genocide.
If it was possible for the University Jewish Chaplaincy to disassociate itself from the Zionist movement, drop its insistence of ideological purity for its chaplains and refuse to appoint chaplains who have been educated on illegal settlements, it might be possible for the organization to be reformed.
This seems an unlikely outcome.
If such simple reforms cannot be done, the UJC must be shut down. It is breaching its requirements under British law to demonstrate a benefit to the general public.
But the UJC is only one key node in a network of organizations forming a Zionist radicalization conveyor belt in Britain.
This extremist network is taking young British Jews and turning them into hardened advocates of genocide – sometimes even into active recruits in that genocide. That can be seen from credible reports that hundreds – perhaps thousands – of British citizens are fighting for the Israeli occupation forces.
The British government is therefore indirectly supporting the genocide in Gaza via its funding of the UJC.
The UJC did not respond to a request for comment on the issues raised in this article.
David Miller is a broadcaster, journalist and academic. He produces and regularly appears on the weekly show Palestine Declassified. Asa Winstanley is an associate editor with The Electronic Intifada.
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