King Charles III Lends British Jews a Royal Hand

The announcement that King Charles III will serve as patron of a charity that protects British Jews offers one more reason to welcome His Majesty to speak to Congress this spring. The association with the Community Security Trust was disclosed just hours after four Hatzola ambulances were burned in an arson attack at Golders Green. The attack is being investigated as an act of antisemitism and possibly terrorism. Now the Crown is taking a stand for the Jews.Bravo, we say. King Charles is no stranger to British Jews. He is the patron of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust and last year traveled to Auschwitz to mark the 80th anniversary of its liberation. This new association, part of a review of royal patronages, was announced by Lord Finkelstein, who once edited the Times of London. It suggests that there are yet Britons, including royals, who are unwilling to let their kingdom grow putrid with prejudice.The president of the Machzike Hadath synagogue, the house of worship where the ambulances were parked, called the king’s support “enormous news, absolutely fantastic. To have the King standing shoulder to shoulder with us is really something.” The British historian Simon Sebag Montefiore calls this “an example of the immense symbolic moral power of the British monarchy deployed to protect and reassure” Anglo-Jews.The king, long a friend to the former chief rabbi, Lord Jonathan Sacks, would surely know that every Sabbath in nearly every synagogue British Jews pray for the Royal Family, an orison that asks the King of Kings to put into the king’s “heart and into the hearts of all his counsellors, a spirit of wisdom and understanding that they may uphold the peace of the realm, advance the welfare of the nation, and deal kindly and truly with all Israel.”The Biblical benediction was around Charles from his first moments as king. Like many monarchs, he was drizzled with oil from the Mount of Olives and sanctified at Jerusalem. The coronation featured an anthem that recalls the anointing of King Solomon by Zadok the Priest. The anointing, which Westminster Abbey calls “the most sacred part” of the ceremony, made Charles not only king but also head of England’s Church.The link between the kings of London and those of Jerusalem, though, has not always yielded succor for Britain’s Jews, who arrived on the island following the Norman Conquest of 1066. England’s signal contribution to antisemitism, the blood libel, originated there in the 12th century. A Plantagenet king, Henry II, enacted the punitive Statute of Jewry in 1253, and in 1290 King Edward I expelled the Jews. They would not return until 1655. Now a new wave of antisemitism is surging in Charles’s realm. The prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, appears unable or unwilling to arrest its spread. The organization to which Charles has extended his patronage has discovered some “3,700 instances of anti-Jewish hate across the UK in 2025.” When King Charles, as part of his first state visit to these shores, addresses a joint meeting of Congress next month, even Americans could have reason to cheer for this king.

King Charles III Lends British Jews a Royal Hand

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