Association of Jewish Ex-servicemen and Women: Remembrance Parade and Ceremony

Alex Chalk Excerpts

Friday 18th November 2022 Commons Chamber

[The Minister for Defence Procurement (Alex Chalk)]

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) for his excellent speech, and for securing this important debate. He has been a powerful advocate for the Jewish community over his many years in Parliament. When I was doing my research for the debate, I looked at his website and saw that he had recently teamed up with the Stanmore and Canons Park synagogue volunteers to clear up Canons Park, which is but one small fixture in his many years of service. He is rightly proud to have attended the remembrance parade held by the Association of Jewish Ex-Servicemen and Women every year since his election.

As my hon. Friend said, last year’s parade was the 100th anniversary of the first wreath-laying by Jewish veterans at the Cenotaph. As he also said, it is also 100 years since the publication of the British Jewry Book of Honour, marking the Jewish military contribution between 1914 and 1918 and beyond. Both are significant milestones, and I am so pleased to have this opportunity to mark them—not least because, significant as the contribution of the Jewish community to our armed forces has been, I am sorry to say that on some occasions it has not been as well celebrated as it should have been. This is an excellent opportunity to commemorate, celebrate and salute those Jewish soldiers, sailors and aviators who served and sacrificed to preserve our freedom, and did so with such distinction.

More than a century ago, Jewish soldiers fought in the Boer war, and Jewish chaplains even arranged annual Chanukah parades for troops. In Aldershot synagogue there is a plaque with an inscription that reads:

“To the glory of God and in loyal and patriotic memory of the soldiers of the Jewish race and faith who lost their lives in the service of their country”.

I think that that simple inscription speaks to the very point that my hon. Friend made. These were brave service personnel who lost their lives in the service of their country.

Tens of thousands then fought in the first world war, many signing up voluntarily to play their part, with five winning the Victoria Cross: Frank de Pass, Issy Smith, Leonard Keysor, Jack White and Robert Gee. Frank de Pass is honoured in a memorial paving stone outside the Ministry of Defence, having served in the Indian Army. Let me put this in context. Of the 6 million men who fought, only 578 received the Victoria Cross—less than 0.01%. What that tells us is that Jewish soldiers served with conspicuous gallantry.

However, not only Jewish men but Jewish women volunteered. Among them was Florence Greenberg, who bravely served on board a hospital ship during the devastation of the Gallipoli campaign. Not only did she save countless lives, but she wrote a diary about her experiences so that future generations could learn from the horrors she witnessed. I read some excerpts from the diary this morning when I was preparing for the debate. In one she described caring for a soldier who had been shot in the chest but was ultimately saved by his Bible, which was in his breast pocket. She reported that an inch of the cover had been shot away, and the top of the first page, which had been exposed, was from the Book of Exodus, recounting the delivery of the people of Israel from Egypt.

I also found it striking to look at what the Jewish recruiting committee had done during the first world war. In 1916, it took out a full-page advertisement in The Jewish World, declaring that there must be “no Jewish slackers”. It certainly secured its wish—as indeed it did in the second world war, when more than 100,000 Jews served in all branches of our armed forces. They included Lieutenant Commander Tommy Gould, who famously saved the lives of his fellow submariners on board HMS Thrasher. After discovering an unexploded 100 lb bomb lodged in the side of the gun emplacement, he spent 50 minutes carefully moving it with his bare hands, while lying flat on his back as he squeezed past deck supports and machinery, before eventually throwing it safely over the side. He received the Victoria Cross for those heroics, and his cross remains on display today at the Jewish Museum in Camden.

This year we heard of the sad passing of Bernard Maurice Levy. He was just 19 when he helped to liberate Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in April 1945, before going on to support the trials of 45 high-ranking Nazi officials at the Lüneburg military tribunal. I saw some footage of his visit to those camps this morning—it is still on YouTube—and it was unbelievably moving.

Indeed, the Jewish contribution extended far more broadly. Jewish personnel served as secret agents behind enemy lines and even as codebreakers at Bletchley Park. A former director of GCHQ in my constituency wrote an article in 2017 titled “The Jewish codebreakers who won the war”—praise indeed.

In particular, we must remember the crucial role played by Jewish women in the Special Operations Executive, not least Vera Atkins, who was part of the team which evacuated Poland’s Enigma codebreakers to Britain, and later ran a network of intelligence agents across France. After the war, she joined the search for those being investigated for war crimes. There was also Krystyna Skarbek, the longest-serving of all Britain’s female agents, whose resourcefulness and success on operations in eastern Europe convinced officers to recruit more women, including some of the 10,000 Jewish refugees who had arrived from Germany and Austria as refugees.

Those refugees had been interned as “aliens”, potential enemies of the state, but only until their motivation to help the allied effort became clear. Nicknamed “the King’s most loyal enemy aliens”, they were trained and then deployed throughout the armed forces, with many ending up in the Intelligence Corps, eavesdropping on captured Axis officers who had been lulled into a false sense of security. By the end of the war, those listeners had amassed more than 74,000 transcripts of conversations from 10,000 prisoners, including Hitler’s generals.

That distinguished record of service has continued in more recent times. Jewish paratroopers served in the Falkland Islands 40 years ago, where Britain secured a decisive victory over a military dictator against all the odds. Among the fallen was paratrooper Private Jason Burt, from Hackney. After a gruelling march across country, he hid his trench foot on the eve of battle and took his place on the start line. He was shot and killed by an Argentine sniper just short of his 18th birthday during the battle of Mount Longdon, a mere two days before the end of the conflict. He was 17 years old.

Jewish soldiers were in Afghanistan too. Lieutenant Paul Mervis, 27, was the first British Jewish combatant to fall during the operation. At the time his family noted how,

“he was passionately committed to his men, far beyond mere duty”,

and how he went,

“with a genuine desire to help bring enough stability there to enable reconstruction to follow.”

I looked him up this morning. His commanding officer wrote of him:

“He read more about Afghanistan than anyone as we prepared for this tour and his empathy for the people of this fascinating country was exemplary.”

Today our Jewish troops remain an integral part of our forces. In the last 12 months alone, Jewish personnel have served on Operation Newcombe in Mali, in eastern Europe under Operation Orbital and in various continuing operations in the middle east. They have also been supporting their counterparts fighting in Ukraine by sending them their entire stock of kosher ration packs.

The truth is that the contribution of British Jews to the freedom and security of the UK has far outweighed the community’s comparatively small size. Remembrance Day is our opportunity—indeed it is our privilege—to recall that exemplary record of service and sacrifice.

I will say a little about AJEX—the Association of Jewish Ex-servicemen and Women—and its remembrance parade, which plays such an important role. Ever since those first marchers, to whom my hon. Friend referred, laid a wreath at the Cenotaph in 1921, AJEX has brought together people of all ages to pay tribute to Jewish personnel. Last year’s event was naturally very special, marking not just the 100th anniversary but the first full parade since the outbreak of the pandemic. More than 1,000 people participated in the march from Horse Guards Parade down Whitehall to the Cenotaph, with current personnel, veterans and the families of now-deceased veterans walking side by side. Many thousands more watched on.

This Sunday’s parade is set to be just as moving, and following the earnest, important and well received entreaties of my hon. Friend, I am pleased to be able to say that I will join him. I thank him very much for the strong representations that he made. It will be a duty and a pleasure to join him and, no doubt, several of his constituents.

The Jewish community is rightly proud of its history of service and loyalty. In synagogues across the country every Shabbat, a prayer is offered for the protection of His Majesty’s armed forces. As part of the respect and pride that we have in our Jewish personnel, we continue to do all that we can to ensure that the Ministry of Defence is considered by them a home from home, whether that is through the provision of kosher food packages, by ensuring that we grant annual leave for sacred holidays wherever possible, or by making places available to pray. We also have an armed forces Jewish chaplain, a Jewish champion and a thriving armed forces Jewish network.

I want to finish by reflecting on a pamphlet that I recently came across calling on Jewish people to volunteer for the armed forces in the first world war. In the preface, it asks them to

“join in unfaltering defence of the weak, and in vindication of those principles of justice, humanity and international good faith which they, as Jews, have so much reason to cherish, and from which they have still so much to hope.”

It seems to me that those words sum up the attitude exemplified by all our Jewish combatants over the last 100 years and beyond. It is an attitude that has invigorated every branch of our armed forces and helped us repeatedly triumph over our adversaries. As the marchers make their way down Whitehall on Sunday, it will be an opportunity to reflect on those words, to pay tribute to the immense endeavours of Jewish personnel on our nation’s behalf and to underline our sincere wish and expectation that that contribution in future will go only from strength to strength. Given the timing of the debate, I thank our Jewish friends and colleagues and wish them Shabbat shalom.

Question put and agreed to.