In the synagogue they talk of nothing else

Jo Carlowe and Anne Finch on the row that's splitting British Jewry

Synagogue sermons and synagogue conversations yesterday revealed the full extent of the anguish caused to Britain's Jewish community by the publication of an attack by the Chief Rabbi, Dr Jonathan Sacks, on the revered Reform Jewish rabbi Hugo Gryn, who died last year.

Dr Sacks's denunciation of Rabbi Gryn, the Holocaust survivor who became a national figure with his wry comments on Radio 4's The Moral Maze, as "one of those who destroy the faith", was made in a private letter to an ultra-Orthodox rabbi but leaked by the Jewish Chronicle on Friday.

The public chasm it opened between the Orthodox and Reform-Liberal sides of British Judaism yesterday made for a distressing Sabbath: in synagogues there was talk of little else, and in the Liberal Jewish Synagogue in St John's Wood, London, the leading Liberal rabbi, David Goldberg, was outspokenly bitter. "This weekend marks ... the incontrovertible end of any illusion that the Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations, to give Dr Jonathan Sacks his full title, can still pretend to be the spokesman for anything more than his own section of Anglo-Jewry," he said in a bar-mitzvah sermon.

The office of Chief Rabbi was "to all intents and purposes, dead, an empty fiction," he said, adding: "Jonathan Sacks has helped to bury it. The best he can do now in order to allow communal wounds to heal and the damage to mend somewhat, is to observe that lengthy period of silence which Clement Attlee recommended to a garrulous member of his Cabinet."

Dr Sacks seemed to be taking him at his word. At his own place of worship, the Orthodox St John's Wood United Synagogue just down the road, he was not to be seen: he had clearly decided not to attend the service and delegated his response to the news to the synagogue's regular rabbi, Dayan Ivan Binstock.

Dayan Binstock made an impassioned plea for unity. "There comes a time when enough is enough. For Anglo-Jewry, that time is now," he told a 200- strong congregation, roundly condemning the person who leaked Dr Sacks's letter. "Whoever did this, it was painfully destructive and wrong. We have no need of enemies from the outside when we have enemies on the inside." He added that next week's Purim festival was meant to bring Jews together but this was not the case at the moment.

The news in the morning's papers overshadowed, for this congregation at least, the sadness at the slaughter of seven Israeli schoolgirls by a Jordanian soldier last week. Outwardly, everything seemed normal at this synagogue in upper-middle-class north London.

The tradition at the synagogue, one of the most influential Orthodox communities in London, remains despite the more modern influences of life outside. Men wearing their prayer shawls, and head coverings from skullcaps to top hats, swayed and muttered prayers in the main synagogue hall as the cantors chanted Hebrew verses.

Women, as is expected in Orthodox tradition, were seated separately in an upper gallery where conversation about social lives and cookery is the norm.

But the buzz of shocked conversation underpinned all but the most serious moments of the service. For two women in their sixties, it was the first topic they turned to. "I don't normally look at the front pages before I go out but today I had to," one said. "You should be able to worship however you want to. As long as you're in the fold, what does it matter?"

But it was an even more painful day for Reform Jews, who felt they were the object of Dr Sacks's attack. The West London Synagogue near Marble Arch, where Rabbi Gryn had been senior minister for over 30 years, was still reeling from the Chief Rabbi's remark about "a destroyer of the faith".

The congregation of the synagogue, which included Rabbi Gryn's wife, Jacqueline, sought reassurance from Rabbi Jackie Tabick, who led yesterday's Sabbath morning service. "The remarks in the Jewish Chronicle were painful for us," she said, "but we must respond with dignity."