Let our people go! Union of Jewish Students pleads with UK government to bring hostages home
Ahead of seder night, Jewish Society presidents from campuses including Durham, Surrey, Sheffield, Bath, Edinburgh, Oxford, Dundee and Leeds pen letter to foreign secretary
The union representing more than 9,000 Jewish university students across the UK has written to the foreign secretary asking the government to “redouble” efforts to free the remaining 133 hostages in Gaza.
Signed by more than 50 individual Jewish Society (JScoc) presidents, together with UJS president Edward Isaacs, the letter to Lord David Cameron comes ahead of the first night of Passover on Monday evening.
It says that as UJS and Jewish students prepare to join communities around the world to tell the story of the Exodus from Egypt, “we don’t just retell the story of our people’s journey from slavery to freedom, we relive it. We do so because we recognise that freedom isn’t merely gained at a single point in time. Rather, it must be fought for and acknowledged year on year”.
But, it adds, for Jewish students, this Passover will be different.
“Reciting Moses’ plea to Pharaoh to ‘Let my people go’ will have extra significance this year. As we celebrate our freedom, we so painfully know that 133 hostages, who over six months ago were so cruelly taken captive by Hamas, will be unable to celebrate their freedom this Passover”.
UJS, “knowing how precious and fragile freedom is”, asks the British government to stand with them in “allyship” to campaign “for Hamas to ‘Let our people go’, so that our brothers and sisters held hostage can be brought home to their families.
“We are particularly thinking this year of the British hostages held by Hamas in Gaza and those with very close British family connections”.
Together with several communal organisations, UJS is asking families to keep a seder seat free this Passover for a hostage.
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