Faith in Practice
Doing Whatever You Can
Hannah Kowszun
A barrister, human rights activist and Jewish Chaplain to
the University of Surrey, Alex Goldberg advised
the Olympics organising committee on faith issues. He is also the
chair of the Football Association's Faith in Football initiative
and will be an Olympic chaplain.
For the last four years
I've been advising the organising committee of the Games on issues
of dress and dietary needs, and things like prayer facilities,
fasting and festivals during the Games. Also on how uniforms might
be modified for different religions. I was representing the Jewish
community.
The Olympics really is the greatest show on earth: it is the
pinnacle of sporting achievement. However, it is different for the
local area in terms of legacy because it is an opportunity to
transform part of East London into a new city centre. When we were
working with what was then the London Development Agency, we were
thinking about 2040: what the Olympic park would look like in the
future.
I don't get a free ticket. Nor was I lucky enough to get any
paid-for tickets! My volunteering role is full time in any
case.
I am also currently working with a UK coalition of faith
organisations and community groups on the 2012 Hours Against Hate
project: encouraging people to volunteer their time to combat
religious, racial and gender-based hate and promoting communities
working together. We're launching the Walk-A-Mile phone app, which
will promote these aims whilst encouraging people to keep fit. You
link to other walkers across the world. For instance you agree to
walk with someone in Bangladesh or the US or Brazil, and the app
tracks you and your partners' progress using a GPS device. We were
recently awarded the International Olympic Truce mark and we are
hoping this global community, which is committed to peace,
tolerance and respect, will be a legacy of the Games.
I spend a lot of time in Guilford walking around and, while it
has a growing ethnic population, it's still quite small compared to
the rest of the country so I'm the only person in town wearing a
yarmulke. I pray three times a day. I also express my faith through
action: I'm also a volunteer chaplain at the University of Surrey,
nominated by my community, I teach young people. Giving back to
society is a very big thing in Judaism. It's rooted very much to
where we are, our street, our neighbourhood and the welfare of our
city, as it says in Jeremiah. So that's an important part of my
life.
We have strict dietary rules, so when I pick up a piece of meat
I need to know it's kosher. When I eat three times a day, I need to
be sure I'm eating according to Jewish law. I also give thanks for
that food, which I know a lot of people do in their faiths, it's
probably akin to grace. Except that we have to pray longer at the
end. We have a five minute end prayer for our food, which is
slightly longer than grace!
I spend half the week in London and the other half in Paris,
where my wife and my family are. In Paris I live in the historic
Jewish quarter called the Marais, which is lovely. The British and
French practice their Judaism differently. I think that in France
there's more of a way of identifying religion in the street, so for
instance in Paris we have double the Jewish population of London
but 321 kosher restaurants compared to London, which has about 40.
The Marais is exciting because there are a lot of strands of
Judaism: there are are people who identify ethnically as Jewish but
not religiously, there are those who identify religiously but may
not be so worried about their ethnic identity. There's quite a mix
of cultures.
I do love football. My relationship with the Football
Association goes back six or seven years. We wanted to find a
medium to bring young people together, which we did through
football and pop music. This was a way in to get young people to
open up and engage with public authorities. If you ask young
people: come talk to us about social deprivation, gang issues,
crime and education, I don't think they'd turn up. So we used
football as a mechanism to open up these discussions.
A few years ago it became more serious. My colleague became
chair of the Muslim police association at the FA and we became
concerned with the rise of antisemitism and islamophobia in
football, mainly chanting. You still get antisemitic chanting
today, most of it aimed around Tottenham Hotspur, but not
exclusively so. Recently, a match official was suspended by the
local FA for grotesque antisemitic comments and this is not the
only case of players in the local community receiving faith-based
racial abuse. There was also evidence of islamophobic chanting and
we wanted to do something about it. So we created a Commission on
Islamophobia and Antisemitism, which was chaired by John Mann MP,
which came up with a number of recommendations.
Out of that we have created a number of projects to encourage
what we call Faith in Football. We have that schools project, we're
still looking at antisemitism and we're looking at hard to reach
parts of the community: there are many people of faith who feel
there are obstacles to them playing the national game, for instance
young women with issues around dress and modesty. I met last month
top players in the game who are religious Christians, who were
concerned that they were not allowed to practise their faith freely
in the changing room. That's just wrong.
Some senior people at Chelsea got wind of my position as chair
of Faith in Football and I told them four rounds ago that I thought
this might be their year for the Champions League, I don't know why
(In fact I support Arsenal) but as they carried on winning matches
they started texting me asking me to keep on praying for them. So I
think there may have been a misunderstanding there! We will have a
go for Euro 2012, though I doubt prayer works like that.
Alex Goldberg was talking to Hannah Kowszun