Anthony Bryan Tankel

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Anthony Bryan Tankel (known as 'Tony', born 1962, Kelvin) is a Glasgow diamond dealer and Zionist activist. He comes from a family with a long involvement in the Zionist movement in Scotland. His father's first cousin Henry Isidore Tankel was a leading Glasgow Zionist as was his wife Judith Benita Tankel (a daughter of the famous Glasgow Zionist Woolfson family). Both were involved in Zionist activism and in "anti-racist" groups. Tony Tankel, as he is generally known, is also involved in similar activities including interfaith work, with Glasgow Friends of Peace Now, Glasgow Jewish Educational Forum, as a left Zionist and secular critic of the mainstream Zionist movement which in Scotland is predominantly Revisionist.

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  • 2012 (November) - The entire school curriculum is compulsory for all pupils, Jewish or not, and the staff are emphatic about the attraction of Calderwood Lodge to non-Jewish families. "Non-Jews send their kids here from a deliberate decision that they feel the school's values equate with their family values," says Thomson. "The families that have chosen to do that had heard about the school, its values and how we respect one another here." The large minority of non-Jewish pupils does not change the school's identity, says deputy head-teacher Maureen Langman, who has been at the institution for 20 years: "Everyone who comes here has had to agree to the Jewish ethos. People accept that we teach Jewish values, but we are very aware that these are also universal values." "The kids are very accepting of the differences between them, and there are Jewish, half-Jewish, non-Jewish, Muslim children here," says Rachel Tiefenbrun, a mother to three pupils at Calderwood Lodge. For some members of the community, this is not enough Judaism, and in recent months, controversy has been growing around Calderwood Lodge. Fifty years ago, the school was founded by the Zionist Federation, at the time one of the more influential Jewish organizations in Glasgow. For its first three decades, Calderwood Lodge existed as a private school. Twenty years ago, as demographics and rising costs took their toll, the school was transferred to the ownership of the local authority, which took responsibility for the operating costs and the salary of the teachers for general subjects. Jewish education remained under a separate communal organization and all parents continued to pay an additional fee that underwrote the teaching of religious and Hebrew studies.
But for many parents, the additional cost became prohibitive. "It meant that parents were paying 70 pounds a month per child, and some parents, have two or three children so it added up," says Tony Tankel, chairman of the school's parents organization. To alleviate the costs, two years ago, the parents agreed with the local authority that it would take responsibility for the school's entire curriculum, including Jewish studies, and would pay for the additional costs. Effectively, this meant that the religious studies in Scotland's only Jewish school would be supervised by the national Inspectorate of Education, rather than by a communal or rabbinical body. "A majority of parents were happy with the change, and it is a very good fit with the local authority," says Tankel. But while members of the parents organization are very supportive of the new arrangement, not all of the local community is so pleased. Calderwood Lodge "used to be regarded as one of the jewels in the community's crown," says one veteran community official. "Now someone should take a good look at what is going on there." The complaints are focused on what some parents claim is a "diluting" of the Jewish element of the school's curriculum. Most community members have preferred not to speak out openly; many have children at the school and others are involved in its affairs in other ways. One parent explained that, "I am very unhappy with recent changes, but the school is an excellent one and is central to our community." Other parents claimed that over the last two years, Jewish studies had been sidelined and the time devoted to them has been reduced.
The Parents Council angrily refutes these claims. Ziv Dotan, a father of two children at the school and a member of the council says that "the Jewish content is excellent and my kids know lots about the hagim [holidays], minhagim [traditions] and history. As an Israeli, I can say that they learn here more about Jewish life than they would in many schools in Israel. I think there is a good emphasis on Jewish values, Jewish ethos and their integration in daily life."
One of those complaining has been the local Chabad rabbi, Chaim Jacobs, whose wife Sora was a teacher at the school until last year, when, as he puts it, she was "chased out of Calderwood Lodge." The school told me that Jacobs' employment at the school was ended because she insisted on teaching "by her methods." Head-teacher Thomson defends the new organization, saying that "we can plan together, all the staff, since the change, and work on school-year projects together. There are still individual classes for Kodesh and Ivrit, but there is more cross-subject work and it is in the children's best interests. We never forget that the school serves its community. I'm not hearing from parents that they're not happy with the Kodesh classes. One parent asked for a specific change and was very happy with our receptiveness."
"It takes time to adapt to change," says Tony Tankel, who claims that some of the critics, including those from more religious families, do not send their children to Calderwood Lodge, preferring for their own reasons a non-Jewish school. He also stresses the fact that the demographic changes in the city's Jewish community mean the school cannot afford to accept only children from Jewish families, not to mention only those who are Jewish according to Orthodox rabbinical law. "We have children from a variety of backgrounds, and as we have to ensure the school's survival, it has to compete and we represent people from different streams. Some people have agendas and they don't come to the parents' council. They don't realize that membership in the school's community doesn't necessarily mean synagogue membership. There are other ways, and our identity is much more pluralistic."
The leaders of Glasgow's Jewish community are embarrassed by the way the controversy has burst out in to the open, with articles in the British Jewish press, and about the way it has involved local authorities. Edward Isaacs, president of the Glasgow Jewish Representative Council, tried to sound conciliatory when he told Haaretz that "change always means teething issues. Jewish kids go to Calderwood and get there an excellent secular education, but there are one or two concerns about Jewish education." Isaacs and other members of the JRC recently approached East Renfrewshire Council, without consulting the parents committee, and demanded in the name of the community that Calderwood Lodge be defined as "denominational school" - meaning that a communal body would have a say in the school's management and the selection of teachers and that the religious studies would become subject to the supervision of a rabbi from one of Glasgow's Orthodox synagogues. The Parents Council responded in a letter to parents saying that "Calderwood Lodge draws children from a diverse range of Jewish backgrounds - Orthodox, Reform, homes where one parent is Jewish but not practicing, and so forth. The school has to be inclusive of all Jewish children and exclude no one ... To appoint a representative of a particular branch of Judaism as the sole supervisor of religious instruction would lead inexorably to a serious imbalance, in that it would privilege that branch over all others." Some of the older members of the Glasgow Jewish community remember days when most of the Jewish boys and girls were not enrolled in Jewish day schools, but still succeeded to acquire a solid Jewish education by going four times a week to heder (Hebrew school ). But even the successful heders in Jewish neighborhoods closed down years ago, partly due to competition from the new heder set up by Chabad, and parents today report that they cannot get their kids to show much enthusiasm for extra Jewish instruction.[1]
  • 2010 (June) - A row is raging between two key communal organisations over the level of antisemitism in Scotland. In a letter to the JC, Glasgow Jewish Educational Forum's Michael Samuel, Jeremy Stein and Tony Tankel expressed concern "at the repeated attempts of the Scottish Council of Jewish Communities to exaggerate the threat of antisemitism, which will only cause harm to the interests of Jews living in Scotland". At SCoJec, public affairs officer Leah Granat countered that the council was not trying to exaggerate matters. "The Jewish community is absolutely not under siege in Scotland, but it's ridiculous to deny that incidents do happen. Clearly we need a piece of research to find out what isn't reported." She added that she was waiting for the police to arrive to investigate threatening hate mail received that morning. The council is planning research to deepen understanding of the experience of being Jewish in Scotland, with particular focus on antisemitism. "It might be antisemitism in the playground, it might be in the classroom, it might be some form of institutional antisemitism," said SCoJeC director Ephraim Borowski. We need research to find out what isn’t reported "Everybody has got stories to tell about things that have happened that made them feel uncomfortable or vulnerable."
According to the Community Security Trust, just 10 out of 541 reported incidents in 2008 occurred in Scotland. Despite a relative upsurge around the time of Israel's Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, the figures remain low compared to elsewhere in the UK. But Mr Borowski said SCoJeC was aware of six incidents the CST did not know about. "Three were described as racist and three as religious." "We need to make sure that when things are reported, they are properly categorised and properly handled." The educational forum writers also reject any suggestion that antisemitism is the reason for the decline in numbers of Scottish Jewry.[2]

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  1. ↑ https://archive.ph/FiwsZ
  2. ↑ https://www.thejc.com/news/community/scottish-jewish-groups-row-over-racism-xokcqjlc?reloadTime=1658016000011
  3. ↑ https://tankel.co.uk/our-story.php
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