Welby joins Chief Rabbi at Western Wall

Interfaith activity is one of the best ways to honour the memory of Holocaust victims, Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis declared during a joint visit to Jerusalem with Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, writes Nathan Jeffay in Jerusalem.

It was the first time that such a high-ranking pair of Christian and Jewish leaders from the UK have gone to Jerusalem together. They spent much of their day-long trip exploring the Old City by foot, with Rabbi Mirvis, who lived there in the 1970s, acting as Archbishop Welby’s tour guide.

The two men stood side-by-side at the Western Wall, praying in their two different languages for peace. When they prayed for a second time it was at the Hebrew University, with the Christian and Jewish friends of Hannah Bladon, the British Christian student killed in a terror attack in Jerusalem last month. Rabbi Mirvis told The Tablet: “Her death was something absolutely horrific, and it’s very appropriate that we marked it together.”

During a visit to Israel’s Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem, the archbishop said that anti-Semitism represents the “the root of all racism” in European culture.