Gibraltar is to become the sixty-eighth nation whose Jewish community will become a full affiliate of the World Jewish Congress, the United Kingdom office of the WJC announced here today.
Gibraltar’s 600-member Jewish community will be represented in the WJC by the Managing Board of Jewish Communities, the central representative body of the country’s Jewish community. Details of the community’s affiliation were finalized by Dr. Stephen Roth, director of the WJC British office, during last month’s initial conference of the Common wealth Jewish Council in Gibraltar. The conference, brought together 42 delegates representing 22 nations of the British Commonwealth. The conference met in Gibraltar at the invitation of its chief minister, Sir Joshua Hassan, himself a patron of the Council. He is to be the first recipient of a newly-created council award to a personality who has made an outstanding contribution to the Commonwealth and to its Jewish communities.
The initial activities of the Council concentrated on “establishing links between member countries, helping to create access for communities at the highest governmental level, providing a central representative voice for them, and seeking ways to strengthen individual communities.”
Summing up the conference, its chairman, the president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, Greville Janner, said: “In the view of every delegate, it was hugely successful, enabling them to share common concerns, to seek remedies and to feel that, however small their communities, they are part of a large and important Jewish family. Further contacts with small communities, particularly in the West Indies, are gradually being established.”
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