Israel Information Office in Scotland

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Israeli information office in Glasgow

The Israel Information Office in Scotland was an information office in Glasgow run by Ezra Golombok, the former editor of the Jewish Echo. In 1999 The Herald described it as "an offspring of the Israeli embassy in London", with Golombok as its director, working from "a tiny office in the Giffnock area of Glasgow". Its main output was a news website, isrinfo.demon.co.uk, which Golombok had set up about four years earlier.[1] The website was headed "News from Israel / Israel Information Office in Scotland" in 2000 and was still described as "Updated daily by Israel Information Office in Scotland" in 2005 and 2011.[2][3] In 2008 the Glasgow Jewish Representative Council listed the Israel Information Office among the occupants of the Jewish Community Centre at 222 Fenwick Road, Glasgow, G46 6UE.[4]

Golombok, born in 1922, edited the Jewish Echo from 1948 until it closed in 1992, and afterwards produced a weekly online newsletter until his death on 9 April 2022, aged 99.[5] The Centre for Israel and Scotland Relations, founded in 2015, later had the same address.[6]

History

  • October 1994: the Jewish Chronicle reported that Ezra Golombok, former editor of the Jewish Echo, had been "appointed director of the Israel information office in Scotland".[7]
  • About 1995: Ezra Golombok set up the office's news website, described in July 1999 as created "four years ago".[1]
  • 1997 - Listed as the Israel Scottish Information Service.[8]
  • January 1998: the earliest archived capture of the website, isrinfo.demon.co.uk, gives the heading "Israel Information Office in Scotland, Glasgow" and Golombok's name with a telephone and fax number.[9]
  • September 1998: the Jewish Chronicle described Golombok as "director of the Israel Information Office attached to the Israeli Embassy".[10]
  • 1999: The Herald described Golombok as the office's director, working from "a tiny office in the Giffnock area of Glasgow".[1]
  • May 2000: the Jewish Chronicle described Golombok as "director of the Israel Information Office in Giffnock".[11]
  • January 2005: from this capture onwards Golombok's name no longer appears in the visible text of the home page, which carried the line "Updated daily by Israel Information Office in Scotland".[3]
  • 2008: the Glasgow Jewish Representative Council listed the office among the occupants of the Jewish Community Centre at 222 Fenwick Road, Giffnock.[4]
  • December 2010: a Jewish Chronicle item referred to the "Scottish israel information office".[12]
  • February 2012: the earliest archived capture of the website at its new address, isrinfo.org.[13]
  • August 2012: Rabbi Jeremy Rosen wrote that "nowadays" Golombok was "the director of the Glasgow-based Israel Information Office".[14]
  • 2015: the Centre for Israel and Scotland Relations was founded and later gave the same address.[6]
  • December 2019: the website still carried the line "Updated daily by Israel Information Office in Scotland".[15]
  • April 2020: a capture of 12 April 2020 shows the page "Updated SATURDAY 11 APRIL", the last dated update found in the archived captures.[16] By 30 April the home page said: "The Webmaster is unwell ( not COVID 19 ). It is hoped to resume regular updating of this website soon".[17]
  • June 2020 to April 2022: the home page read "Researched by Israel Information Office in Scotland" and linked to other news sources.[18]
  • 9 April 2022: Golombok died, aged 99.[5]
  • August 2022: isrinfo.org showed the notice "This domain has expired".[19]


The website of the Israel Information Office, 30 December 2008.
The Korean Embassy in Zimbabwe wanted the address of an office in Israel; a business man in Nairn needed an Israeli company's letters translated into English; a man in Brazil wanted news about the Middle East in Portuguese, and a man in Guatemala wanted to know if it was true that the Ark of the Covenant had been found. (Calling Harrison Ford!)
So where do you get the answers to such a disparate load of questions? On the Internet of course, where else? OK, but where on the Internet? Not from a multimillion pound (or dollar) communications group but from a tiny office in the Giffnock area of Glasgow.
That's where Ezra Golombok, a short, grey, frizzle-haired geriatric computer nerd (his words) sits at his phone and computer and digs (or should it be surfs?) out answers to questions like the above.
E-mailers also ask him about visas, air flight costs and tourism. Pilgrims ask him for details of Christian hospices in Israel. That's not all he does. He arranges meetings between Israeli diplomats and other bigwigs and Scottish newspaper editors, politicians, academics, and trade unionists, finds schools for visiting Israeli children to tour, and helps to keep the world informed about what is being said and written about Israel and where.
Golombok is director of the Israel Information Office in Scotland, an offspring of the Israeli embassy in London. The service he provides is based mainly on the Internet website he created to draw together all the current news items I could find relating to Israel'.
That was four years ago and if Golombok's website (http://www.isrinfo.demon.co.uk) is not the best of its kind anywhere, many of the people who use it think it's not far from it.
'Truth is in the eye of the beholder and it comes as no surprise that what purports to be the same Middle Eastern news item varies in emphasis and detail according to its origin, he says in characteristic understatement.
For that reason and to show his objectivity and to demonstrate his integrity as a journalist (he's a former editor), Golombok includes not only links to English-language news stories originating in Israel, but 'visitors' to his site can also get links to the reports and views of correspondents on the other side of the Middle East conflict, in Lebanon and Syria, Egypt and Jordan. There are also links to the BBC and international news agencies like the Associated Press, Reuters, and UPI.
For the more adventurous of the 1000 people a week who log on to his website, Golombok also provides links to a web camera at the Western Wall in Jerusalem and to Israeli Radio. Some questions are not confined to the social, economic, or political life of the Jewish state. One woman from suburban Glasgow wanted to know if she would be arrested if she took some bacon to her (non-Jewish) sister in Israel. A distraught lady in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, wanted to know what he was doing about a strike of El Al employees because she was due to fly to Israel a week later. She got there OK. A Swedish broadcaster complained that his local Internet server in Cairo wasn't updating their link to Golombok's site quickly enough.
One message which brightened his day was a blessing from a convent in Colombia. Occasionally his work attracts an abusive e-mail. A word to the sender's server deals with that.
Providing an international news service is nothing new to Golombok. The weekly Jewish Echo of which he was editor was the only local newspaper in Britain to contain a full world-wide news service. Apart from its readers throughout the UK, the paper's subscribers included individuals in America, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, India, Israel, Italy, New Zealand, Singapore, and South Africa, and institutions like New York Public Library, the Jewish National Library in Jerusalem, and the Library of Parliament in Cairo.
Golombok was a 26-year-old research chemist at Zurich Polytechnic in Switzerland in 1948 when, at the request of his 70-year-old father, the paper's founder, he abandoned the halls of academe and what many think would have been an outstanding career to come back to Glasgow to help him run the Echo.
Two years later the Bachelor of Science and Doctor of Philosophy took over the editorship and guided its fortunes for 42 years. In the last few years of the Echo's life Golombok was probably the only editor in the world who received his foreign news by electronic mail on the computer in his bedroom at home. 'I took it from news agencies in New York and Jerusalem at midnight because that was when the cheap telephone rate operated, he says. I edited the material on-screen, downloaded it to a disk, and at 7 am I was in the office transferring the material to another computer and then to the typesetter.'
And all through its life the paper was published from tiny rooms in Gorbals, first in Govan Street, then Crown Street, and finally Eglinton Street - not much different from the wee room in Giffnock where Golombok still roams the world on behalf of his readers.[1]

People

Contact

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 Harry Diamond, "Echoes of Israel around the world", The Herald, 23 July 1999 (archived), accessed 28 October 2026.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 "News from Israel / Israel Information Office in Scotland", isrinfo.demon.co.uk, archived 15 August 2000, accessed 28 October 2026.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 isrinfo.demon.co.uk, "Updated daily by Israel Information Office in Scotland", archived 6 April 2011 (also 4 January 2005), accessed 28 October 2026.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 Glasgow Jewish Representative Council, "General organisations", glasgowjewishrepcouncil.org, archived 19 November 2008, accessed 28 October 2026.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 Ken Smith, "Obituary: Ezra Golombok, 'Idealist, maverick and loner' who edited the Jewish Echo", The Herald, 2022, accessed 28 October 2026.
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 "Centre for Israel and Scotland Relations", jewishglasgow.org, archived 26 January 2025, accessed 28 October 2026.
  7. ↑ "Information role for ex-editor", The Jewish Chronicle, 7 October 1994, p. 14, via Jewish Chronicle archive.
  8. ↑ The Jewish Year Book, 1997, p. 132.
  9. ↑ isrinfo.demon.co.uk, "Israel Information Office in Scotland, Glasgow / Ezra Golombok", archived 20 January 1998, accessed 29 October 2026.
  10. ↑ The Jewish Chronicle, 4 September 1998, p. 15, via Jewish Chronicle archive.
  11. ↑ The Jewish Chronicle, 5 May 2000, p. 27, via Jewish Chronicle archive.
  12. ↑ The Jewish Chronicle, 17 December 2010, p. X05, via Jewish Chronicle archive.
  13. ↑ 13.0 13.1 isrinfo.org, archived 7 February 2012, accessed 29 October 2026.
  14. ↑ Jeremy Rosen, "Ezra Golombok", jeremyrosen.com, August 2012, accessed 29 October 2026.
  15. ↑ isrinfo.org, "Updated daily by Israel Information Office in Scotland", archived 7 December 2019, accessed 29 October 2026.
  16. ↑ isrinfo.org, "Updated daily by Israel Information Office in Scotland ... Updated SATURDAY 11 APRIL", archived 12 April 2020, accessed 29 October 2026.
  17. ↑ isrinfo.org, "The Webmaster is unwell ( not COVID 19 ). It is hoped to resume regular updating of this website soon", archived 30 April 2020, accessed 29 October 2026.
  18. ↑ isrinfo.org, "Researched by Israel Information Office in Scotland", archived 11 June 2020, accessed 29 October 2026. Also archived 12 April 2022.
  19. ↑ isrinfo.org, "This domain has expired", archived 2 August 2022, accessed 29 October 2026.
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