From the heroic actions of Prince Philip’s mother – who saved a Jewish family in Nazi-occupied Greece – to Prince Charles’s efforts today, on Holocaust Memorial Day, to keep the memory of survivors alive, the relationship between the Royal family and British Jews runs deeper than the odd speech or plaque unveiling. It’s a connection between the Crown and a community that has been embedded in the fabric of Jewish cultural life in Britain for generations and which still matters a great deal to British Jews in 2022. 

This week, the Prince of Wales unveiled a “living memorial” of seven portraits of Britain’s remaining Holocaust survivors. They will remain in the Royal collection as a way to honour “the six million innocent men, women and children whose stories will never be told, whose portraits will never be painted”.

Unveiling the portraits, the Prince met 98-year-old Lily Ebert, who showed him the tattoo forced on her in Auschwitz, telling him: “Meeting you, it is for everyone who lost their lives”.

The Prince insisted: “But it is a greater privilege for me.”

For Rabbi Jonathan Romain, a historian and writer, the relationship between the Crown and the Jewish community in Britain is vitally important. Monarchy, he says,  has been a “symbol of stability” for Jews in this country for centuries. As Jews fled to the UK in search of safety over successive waves of immigration “whether it was in the 1850s from central Europe, or the 1880s from Russia, Poland and Eastern Europe, the 1930s from Nazi Germany and Austria”, Romain says the monarchy has always been steadfast in its efforts to welcome Jews to Britain. “There has been a very strong sense of Britain opening its doors and being welcoming and actually, despite the hiccups here and there, being a very tolerant society,” he says.

“Yes there have been some hiccups, with Corbyn recently and every now and then you get an anti-Semitic incident, but by and large, I think most Jews would say this is one of the best countries, maybe in the top two or three in the world, for Jews to be in, feel at home, live at ease, and be part of society and very integrated into the wider community. That is all represented by the monarchy.”