Senior Sephardi rabbi to oversee Jewish studies in new free school

The head of Britain’s Sephardi community is to be the religious authority overseeing any new Jewish free school, if the proposed secondary gets the go-ahead.

LA-born Rabbi Joseph Dweck, who is the Senior Rabbi of the Spanish and Portuguese Sephardi Community, will now work with the newly-merged team bidding for permission to create a new Jewish school in north London.

Dweck, of Syrian Jewish origin, served as headmaster at a large Jewish day school in New York before moving to the UK, and now says he wants to help increase the quality of Jewish education here.

“It is my honour to serve as Religious Authority,” he said. “Jewish Education has been my passion and profession for over 20 years. I look forward to helping raise the quality and level of Jewish Education in England. The Torah is our collective inheritance and we owe it to our children to deliver it to them faithfully and clearly.”

The team behind the free school bid finally agreed to merge earlier this year after two rival bids – Barkai and Kavanah – were announced last year, after the government removed a 50 percent faith-based admissions cap.