With the permission of the honourable Chief Rabbi, I am posting the letter that was sent from the Chief Rabbi’s office directly to Schlesinger in 2019. Of course no weekly calls have taken place since. Not even a personal letter from the Chief Rabbi could shame him or the community.

Dr Michael Schlesinger

By Email:

17th April 2019

Dear Dr Schlesinger,

It is now more than eight months since I travelled to Vienna in the hope of meeting with you and three months since I last wrote to you, urging you to enable contact between Beth and the children on a weekly basis. When you wrote to me in December, you indicated a willingness to do this. I understand however that since 1st January 2019, you have permitted only five calls in total.

I appreciate that your own relationship with Beth has broken down irrevocably but I am at a loss as to why you will not facilitate regular weekly telephone calls with her for the boys.

As I have previously made clear, despite your suggestions to the contrary, I have done everything in my power to prevent this painful dispOte from re-emerging in the media. I had hoped that doing so would demonstrate the good faith with which I entered into this dialogue and might encourage you to do the right thing.

Although it seems my efforts have been unsuccessful in that regard, I thought I might write to you one more time to plead with you, for the sake of your children, to establish regular weekly telephone contact with their mother.

As I indicated in my previous letter to you, I understand that it can be difficult to maintain an arrangement for a fixed time every week but with some flexibility on both sides, it must surely be possible to provide for weekly telephone contact as a minimum? Such an arrangement can only be to the benefit of the boys – which ultimately is the outcome we are all working towards.

Yours sincerely,

Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis