Fabrications and Resignations: A Crisis at Britain’s Jewish Chronicle

When several prominent journalists resigned this month from the British newspaper over false news articles, they also raised a broader question: Who owns it now?

For decades, members of Britain’s Jewish population have marked life’s milestones by taking out notices in The Jewish Chronicle, a weekly publication founded in 1841 that bills itself as the world’s oldest Jewish newspaper.

Births, weddings and deaths — or, as some like to call them, “hatches, matches and dispatches” — all are recorded faithfully each Friday in a community publication that Jonathan Freedland, who until recently wrote a column for The Chronicle, once described as the “beating heart of British Jewry.”

So when Mr. Freedland and several other well-known journalists announced this month that they would stop contributing to The Chronicle, it seemed less a business breakup than a family rupture. The trigger was a series of sensational articles about the war in Gaza that ran in the paper but were later debunked as fabricated.

The Chronicle’s editor, Jake Wallis Simons, apologized for the articles, removed them from the paper’s website and severed ties with the freelance journalist who wrote them, Elon Perry. “Obviously it’s every newspaper editor’s worst nightmare to be deceived by a journalist,” he said in a social media post.

“I take full responsibility for the mistakes that have been made,” Mr. Wallis Simons wrote, “and I will take equal responsibility for the task of making sure nothing like this can happen again.” He did not reply to requests for additional comment.

To Mr. Freedland and his fellow contributors, the episode was not an aberration but the troubling culmination of a period in which, they say, The Chronicle has evolved from a beloved community paper — albeit one that did not hesitate to weigh in with a conservative slant on the thorny geopolitical issues of the day — into a mouthpiece for right-wing Israeli politicians.

Mr. Freedland, who is also a columnist for The Guardian, said in an interview that he had made the decision to end his relationship with The Chronicle “with a heavy heart,” noting that he himself had been “hatched and matched” in the paper. He had written for it since 1998; his late father, the author Michael Freedland, since 1951.

“In more recent years, the paper has become more stridently right of center,” he said. “The thrust of the paper, in its current incarnation, does not reflect the breadth of the Jewish community in Britain.”

But it was not simply extreme politics that drove out Mr. Freedland, as well as the columnists Hadley Freeman and David Aaronovitch, the academic Colin Shindler and the humorist David Baddiel, all of whom joined Mr. Freedland in declaring that they would no longer contribute to the paper.

Since The Jewish Chronicle survived a brush with insolvency in 2020 and was rescued by a group of investors, the paper’s ownership has been shrouded in mystery, deepening the anxiety over its editorial direction.

“I just can’t think of a precedent for a newspaper being in anonymous ownership,” said Alan Rusbridger, a former editor of The Guardian, who has written about the upheaval at The Chronicle for his current publication, Prospect magazine.

The lack of transparency had long troubled Mr. Freedland and others, who said their questions were deflected when they asked Mr. Wallis Simons for answers. But it was after the Gaza articles were published that a full-blown crisis erupted.

Mr. Perry, a freelancer with a thin portfolio of published work, made an extraordinary claim: that he had obtained Israeli intelligence showing that the Hamas leader, Yahya Sinwar, was preparing to flee Gaza, via the Philadelphi corridor, to Iran, and would take with him Israeli hostages captured in the Oct. 7 attack on Israel.

The report echoed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, who had cited fears about Mr. Sinwar and the hostages as a reason that Israel would not agree in cease-fire talks for its soldiers to leave the corridor. One of Mr. Netanyahu’s sons, Yair, reposted the story on his social media account, and the prime minister’s wife, Sara, referred to the reports in a meeting with family members of the hostages.

But questions about The Chronicle’s article, parts of which were also reported by the German tabloid Bild, quickly surfaced. The chief spokesman for the Israeli military, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, told reporters he was unaware of any intelligence indicating that Mr. Sinwar planned to flee Gaza with hostages. Other officials called the reports “wild fabrications.”

There were also questions about Mr. Perry: On his website, he claimed to have covered the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a journalist for 28 years. But he has published very few articles, apart from those in The Chronicle. He claimed to have served as a commando in the Israeli army; while The Chronicle said it believed he had served in the military, “we were not satisfied with some of his claims.”

Mr. Perry’s website also included a blurb for one of his books from a Harvard humanities professor, Stephen Greenblatt. “I have not read and did not endorse Elon Perry’s book, nor, to the best of my knowledge, have I ever met or corresponded with him,” Professor Greenblatt said in an email, adding, “I am appalled.”

Mr. Perry did not reply to a request for comment. His wife, Gillian, said in an email last week that her husband had suffered a “severe heart attack” in recent days and had been hospitalized. She questioned the continued media interest in “someone who neither holds public office, nor is running for politics.”

To Israeli national security journalists, the reports bore the hallmarks of a disinformation campaign by sources in the Israeli government. Such stories, one said, are often placed in friendly publications outside Israel because their reporters and editors are less likely to subject them to intense vetting.

Even after the Israeli military denied the report, Mr. Rusbridger noted that it stayed on The Chronicle’s website. Only after Mr. Freedland and other columnists cut off their ties did Mr. Wallis Simons retract the stories.

The Jewish Chronicle was owned for decades by the Kessler Foundation, a family trust, before the paper fell into financial distress during the coronavirus pandemic. The owners proposed in 2020 to merge it with London’s other Jewish paper, The Jewish News, but that deal fell apart when a consortium of investors led by Robbie Gibb, a former BBC executive, offered a rival bid.

In its statement announcing the acquisition, the consortium said it had lined up financing for the paper from donors, adding, “These donors that have made philanthropic contributions to secure the future of this treasured institution are entitled to their privacy.”

Until recently, Mr. Gibb, who was once communications director for a Conservative prime minister, Theresa May, and now sits on the BBC’s governing board, was listed in public records as the sole shareholder of Jewish Chronicle Media Limited. Mr. Rusbridger said that posed a conflict with Mr. Gibb’s role at the BBC, which includes sitting on the broadcaster’s Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee, and therefore reviewing its coverage of the Gaza war.

Mr. Gibb declined to comment. A spokeswoman for the BBC said that the board had not yet initiated a review of Gaza coverage, and that if it did, the review would be conducted by an independent committee.

Last month, Mr. Gibb resigned as a director of The Chronicle and divested his shares into what the paper said would be a new charitable ownership structure. A spokeswoman for Britain’s Charities Commission said there was no record yet of The Chronicle’s registering for status as a charity.

Mr. Gibb was replaced by two new directors. One is Ian Austin, a former Labour member of Parliament now in the House of Lords, where he has stoutly defended Israel’s conduct in Gaza. The other is Jonathan Kandel, a tax lawyer who is active in Jewish causes. Mr. Rusbridger said none of the directors appeared to have the financial resources necessary to bankroll the paper, which as recently as 2022 had debts of 3.5 million pounds ($4.6 million) on its books.

That has fueled unsubstantiated rumors of other investors, with the most frequent name floated being that of Paul E. Singer, an American billionaire hedge fund investor who backs pro-Israel groups. He is a board member of the Republican Jewish Coalition, a lobbying group for Jewish G.O.P. candidates. A spokesman for Mr. Singer’s firm, Elliott Management, said he had no involvement with the paper.

Mr. Freedland said he had regularly raised the question of ownership with Mr. Wallis Simons, who came to The Chronicle in 2021 after working for The Daily Mail, a right-leaning tabloid, but never got a satisfactory response. “You can’t have accountability if you don’t know, ultimately, who owns the institution,” he said.

The opacity of The Chronicle’s ownership has reinforced suspicions that it was being used to promote a political agenda. And yet, because of its long history and revered place in the British Jewish community, it remains influential.

“It sells itself as the voice of British Jewry,” Mr. Rusbridger said, “and it has a disproportionate influence because people think it reflects the Jewish community in this country, which I don’t think it does anymore.”

“Effectively,” he said, “it’s become a mouthpiece for Likudnik propaganda,” referring to Mr. Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud party.

For the paper’s longest-serving contributors, the upheaval has been a source of sorrow as much as anger.

“The Jewish Chronicle had this hallowed place, not only within the British Jewish community, but more broadly in the Jewish world,” said Mr. Shindler, an emeritus professor of Israel studies at SOAS University of London, who contributed essays and book reviews for 50 years. “The beauty of The Jewish Chronicle is that it had to be all things to all people.”

The fact that the paper no longer plays that unifying role, he said, was a loss for a community that is already suffering the trauma of the Hamas attacks and the polarizing effect of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.

“There’s no forum — there’s no place to discuss these issues,” Professor Shindler said.

Ronen Bergman contributed reporting.