Board of Deputies announces launch of a new British Jewish Culture month

Today, 25 May 2025, Board of Deputies President Phil Rosenberg has announced the launch of a new British Jewish Culture Month.

At last year’s Limmud Festival, the Board of Deputies president announced that this would be annual event starting in 2026.

Today, he has for the first time given dates, saying that next year it will take place from 16 May to 14 June, which corresponds to the Hebrew month of Sivan.

Jewish Culture Month will provide a focus on all that’s best in our country’s Jewish culture. The month will feature a range of aspects including comedy, food, music and literature.

Its components will include:

• Giving a platform to key Jewish cultural institutions
• Encouraging wider British cultural institutions, public bodies and schools to celebrate British Jews
• Supporting local Jewish centres, including synagogues, schools, and charities, to open their doors to visits from local schools and other groups.
• At a time when the Jewish community has been suffering from record levels of antisemitism, Jewish Culture Month will accentuate the positive experiences of Jews in this country and the positive contribution British Jews have made to our nation’s society, economy and culture.
• Highlighting the contribution of high-profile Jewish people to British public life.

Jewish Culture Month will supplement crucial initiatives like Holocaust Memorial Day and Holocaust education with a wider, more upbeat lens on Jewish life in this country.

We want Jews and our friends and neighbours of different faiths and beliefs to experience all the light, creativity and laughter of Jewish life in the UK.

Speaking at today’s Board of Deputies Plenary Meeting, Phil said:

“This will be a major change for the UK Jewish community. A strategic rebrand, which proclaims: ‘less oy’, and ‘more joy’. I have long felt that it cannot be right that the only public commemoration of Jewish life is Holocaust Memorial Day. And the only compulsory education about Jews is Holocaust education. Of course, both of these are crucially important. But we do not want the British public to know only of Jewish death, and Jewish pain. We want them to know about Jewish life and Jewish joy”.