Israel Information Office in Scotland

The Israel Information Office was an outpost of the UK embassy of the State of Israel. It appears to have been created in the mid 1990s by Ezra Golombok the former editor of the defunct Jewish Echo, and was based in a 'wee office' in the Jewish Community Centre at 222 Fenwick Road, Glasgow, G46 6UE along with a whole host of other Zionist groups. Golombok appears to have continued producing his Hasbara newsletter for many years after the closure of the office right up until his death in 2022 at the age of 99. The office was, however, replaced at the same address by the Centre for Scotland and Israel Relations in 2015.

• 1997 - Listed as the Israel Scottish Information Service.

The webiste 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.

People

• Ezra Golombok

Contact

• Address: 222 Fenwick Road, Glasgow G46 6UE
• Website: http://www.isrinfo.demon.co.uk
• Archive.org holdings of the website: https://web.archive.org/web/20250000000000*/http://www.isrinfo.demon.co.uk