Rupert Nathan, 63, was arrested by British police and held in a cell for 12 hours after describing a rabbi in a private Facebook post as a “creep,” a “fake rabbi” and a “kapo boy.”
“Kapo” refers to Jews in German concentration camps during World War II who cooperated with the Nazis in overseeing other prisoners in return for preferential treatment. A 2019 article in the London-based Jewish Chronicle called it the “worst insult a Jew can give another Jew.”
Nathan admitted his remarks may have caused offense, but disputes that it was illegal or antisemitic. “I admit that calling someone a ‘kapo’ is not a nice thing to do but it is not a crime,” he told the Daily Mail on Saturday.
The target of his slurs was Rabbi Gabriel Kanter-Webber of the Brighton and Hove Progressive Synagogue, also known as Adat Shalom Verei’ut. Kanter-Webber reported Nathan to the police and to Nathan’s professional body, the Chartered Institute for Securities & Investment (CISI).
On July 18, 2024, the CISI decided not to take action, but in August, police came to Nathan’s front door to arrest him.
Nathan was arrested in front of his daughter. “My [12-year-old] daughter was in tears—completely inconsolable. Still now she has this deep fear that the police are going to take me away and put me in jail,” Nathan told the Daily Mail.
“In the police station I was treated like a proper criminal. I was fingerprinted, DNA tested, photographed and then kept in a cold cell completely alone for ten hours. It was humiliating,” he added.
Nathan was released on bail.
He now fears his career may be “destroyed” if he’s handed a criminal conviction after police submitted his case to the Crown Prosecution Service on Nov. 11 to determine whether he should be charged with “malicious communications,” the Daily Mail said.
Toby Young, director of the Free Speech Union, a public interest group, said, “If it’s not a criminal offense for pro-Palestinian protestors to call for a global intifada, I don’t see how a Jew calling another Jew a ‘kapo’ can possibly be against the law.”
North West Friends of Israel, a Manchester-based group that supports Israel and combats antisemitism, said, “The fact that Gabriel Kanter-Webber (who has the title rabbi before his name) chose to report someone to the police rather than reach out, in the pastoral role you would expect of a rabbi, to the person who called him a kapo to offer the hand of ‘rachmonus,’ compassion, says so much about Kanter- Webber.”
Kanter-Webber at first declined to comment but then, according to Israel National News, posted to X, “I am hereby reaching out with the hand of compassion to ask if you feel you need a pastoral conversation?”
