Mazel tov! King Charles III has honored 93-year-old Jewish communal and heritage activist Leslie Lipert, naming him a Member of the Order of Empire (MBE)!
Lipert was among hundreds of people included in the King’s 2025 New Year’s Honors List. He was awarded for “services to the Jewish Community in Cornwall.” (The Honors List includes many other Jews, including several honored for Holocaust education.)
Lipert has long been active both in Kehillat Kernow — the small Jewish community in Cornwall — and in preserving Jewish built heritage in Cornwall, including the the long-disused 18th-century Jewish cemetery in Penzance, for which he was appointed by the Board of Deputies to oversee fund-raising efforts.
The Penzance cemetery was rededicated in 2016 following restoration funded in part by a grant from the National Heritage Lottery Fund. Lipert’s wife Pat was buried there after her death in 2021, the first burial in the cemetery since 1911 of a resident member of the Jewish community of Cornwall.
Believed to have been founded in the 1740s, the cemetery has been described as “by far the finest” of the 25 Georgian Jewish cemeteries in Britain outside of London and is listed by English Heritage as a Grade 2 heritage site. It includes about 50 well preserved gravestones and is surrounded by a high stone wall dating from 1845. It also has a ceremonial hall/tahara house.
Lipert also has been involved in fundraising for the ongoing restorations at the Ponsharden Cemeteries between Penryn and Falmouth, helping to raise more than £500,000.
“I am absolutely delighted in being made an MBE,” Lipert told the local news site The Packet. I could not have done the things I did over the last 25 years in Cornwall without the support of many people associated with ‘Kehillat Kernow’ – in particular my wife Pat, of blessed memory, who died in December 2021.”
See our previous posts about the Penzance and Ponsharden Jewish cemeteries HERE and HERE and HERE and HERE and HERE
Friends of Penzance Jewish cemetery web site
Kehillat Kernow Jewish Community of Cornwall web site