A top Jewish school accused of race discrimination told the Supreme Court yesterday that a boy was refused admission because he was not a Jew under the rules set by the Chief Rabbi.

In a test case with implications for how faith schools select their pupils, Lord Pannick QC, representing the school, told a panel of nine Justices of the Supreme Court that this was a dispute about religious law.

JFS (formerly the Jews’ Free School) in Brent, north-west London are appealing to the highest court in the land after three Court of Appeal judges ruled in June this year that its entry criteria, imposed to deal with an excess of applicants. racially discriminated against the boy, referred to as M.

The boy’s father is Jewish by birth, but his mother is Jewish by conversion conducted at a Progressive rather than an Orthodox synagogue and therefore not recognised by the Office of the Chief Rabbi (OCR), Dr Jonathan Sacks.

“The difference in the result is not on the ground of M’s ethnic origins. It is on the ground of a religious dispute between Rabbis about who is a Jew,” Lord Pannick told the justices, headed by Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers.

Being Jewish under the criteria set by the Chief Rabbi was a matter of religious status under Jewish law, he added. “It is not dependent on religious practice or attendance at a synagogue.”

“We say that M failed to secure a place at the school because and only because of the religious criteria applied by the Chief Rabbi as to who is a Jew and those religious criteria do not depend on a person’s ethnicity,” he said.

JFS is now a “very successful” comprehensive secondary school, maintained by the London Borough of Brent, which every year is oversubscribed with applications for admission by two for every place.

He said the appeal concerned whether or not the adoption of an oversubscription criteria giving priority to children recognised by the Chief Rabbi to be Jewish is racial discrimination contrary to the Race Relations Act.

He added that the school’s case was that the criteria it applied were “legitimate and proportionate.”

“We say that a faith school is entitled to adopt an oversubcription policy that gives priority to those children who are members of the religious faith as defined by the religious authority of the faith.”

The mother of the boy converted to Judaism in a non-Orthodox procedure not recognised by the Chief Rabbi, Lord Pannick said.

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