Highlights
- The British Indian Jewish Association hosted an enterprise and community event at City law firm Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner.
- Lord Stuart Polak and Lord Krish Raval were presented with BIJA Community Awards at the event.
- Speakers highlighted shared values between the Indian and Jewish communities including family, education and entrepreneurship.
Keith Black said: "We are both minority communities with similar values: commitment to family, hard work, entrepreneurship, and much more.
As a Jewish community, we can sometimes feel a little isolated, so having friends in other communities is really important."
Lord Jitesh Gadhia said the Indian community had "enormous admiration" for the Jewish community, adding: "The British Indian community will always stand shoulder-to-shoulder with our Jewish friends.
I hold a strong belief that identity is destiny. As communities in Britain, we have refused to let prejudice define us."
Awards and recognition
Lord Krish Raval said it was "a great honour" to receive the award, adding: "Both of our communities have a remarkable ability to bring people together — and I love the fact that we can disagree without falling out."
Zaki Cooper, co-chair of BIJA, said in his opening remarks that in "these difficult times — with geopolitical conflict raging around the world" there was a need for "more interfaith engagement, not less."
He noted that while the communities differed in size — around 1.5 million British Indians and 300,000 British Jews — they shared common values including family, community, education and aspiration.
"BIJA exists as the organisational home for the relationship between our two communities," he said.
