Author(s): Zuriaga, Ana; Flannigan, Liam; Wilson, Joanne; Weiss, Sarah; Rottenberg, Gitit; Klynman, Nicole; Schwartz, Ellen Corine; Billett, Julie; Katz, Jacqueline; Weil, Leonora G.
Abstract: Background
There is a need for a specific programme of engagement around COVID-19 vaccination with the Charedi Orthodox Jewish community in Stamford Hill, London, UK. We co-produced a live event for women on COVID-19 safety and vaccination and wider health topics to support vaccine uptake and improve awareness of health and wellbeing issues.
Methods
For this qualitative analysis, we organised an event that was designed and delivered by a local community organisation in partnership with regional and local health partners and community groups. The event was for Charedi women aged 16 years and older, and provided information on COVID-19, childhood immunisations, oral health and dental hygiene, childhood respiratory infections, and mental health. The event included health stalls, a panel session, co-designed culturally competent physical information, and the opportunity to speak with health professionals. We evaluated the event using attendees' feedback forms, collected in person at the end of the event, and a thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews with organisers from community and statutory organisations. The evaluation was informed by a co-produced logic model and outcomes framework.
Findings
More than 100 women attended the event on March 28, 2022. Feedback suggested the focus on wider health issues was valued, and a greater number of more targeted events (eg on health for women older than 40) would be beneficial. Dental health, COVID-19 vaccination, and childhood immunisations were identified as the most important topics by participants. 16 (55%) of 29 respondents stated they would attend a similar event again, 12 (41%) stated they were unsure, and one (3%) said they would not attend again. Informal feedback from the community highlighted that the event was useful and acted as a basis for further engagement and collaboration with the community.
Interpretation
Our findings emphasised the need to work in partnership with a lead community organisation to identify and address principal health challenges within communities, to share community-specific insights, and to promote community events through community communication channels. Statutory institutions should engage with local community organisations to support and facilitate public health interventions to increase relevant vaccine uptake and to improve awareness around wider health and wellbeing issues and services.
Author(s): Gaskell, Katherine M.; Johnson, Marina; Gould, Victoria; Hunt, Adam; Stone, Neil RH; Waites, William; Kasstan, Ben; Chantler, Tracey; Lal, Sham; Roberts, Chrissy H.; Goldblatt, David; Eggo, Rosalind M.; Marks, Michael
Abstract: Background Ethnic and religious minorities have been disproportionately affected by SARS-CoV-2 worldwide. The UK strictly-Orthodox Jewish community has been severely affected by the pandemic. This group shares characteristics with other ethnic minorities including larger family sizes, higher rates of household crowding and relative socioeconomic deprivation. We studied a UK strictly-Orthodox Jewish population to understand how COVID-19 had spread within this community.
Methods We performed a household-focused cross-sectional SARS-CoV-2 serosurvey specific to three antigen targets. Randomly-selected households completed a standardised questionnaire and underwent serological testing with a multiplex assay for SARS-CoV-2 IgG antibodies. We report clinical illness and testing before the serosurvey, seroprevalence stratified by age and gender. We used random-effects models to identify factors associated with infection and antibody titres.
Findings A total of 343 households, consisting of 1,759 individuals, were recruited. Serum was available for 1,242 participants. The overall seroprevalence for SARS-CoV-2 was 64.3% (95% CI 61.6-67.0%). The lowest seroprevalence was 27.6% in children under 5 years and rose to 73.8% in secondary school children and 74% in adults. Antibody titres were higher in symptomatic individuals and declined over time since reported COVID-19 symptoms, with the decline more marked for nucleocapsid titres.
Interpretation In this tight-knit religious minority population in the UK, we report one of the highest SARS-CoV-2 seroprevalence levels in the world to date. In the context of this high force of infection, all age groups experienced a high burden of infection. Actions to reduce the burden of disease in this and other minority populations are urgently required.
Funding This work was jointly funded by UKRI and NIHR [COV0335; MR/V027956/1], a donation from the LSHTM Alumni COVID-19 response fund, HDR UK, the MRC and the Wellcome Trust. The funders had no role in the design, conduct or analysis of the study or the decision to publish. The authors have no financial relationships with any organizations that might have an interest in the submitted work in the previous three years; no other relationships or activities that could appear to have influenced the submitted work.
Evidence before the study In January 2020, we searched PubMed for articles on rates of SARS-CoV-2 infection amongst ethnic minority groups and amongst the Jewish population. Search teams included “COVID-19”, “SARS-CoV-2”, seroprevalence, “ethnic minority”, and “Jewish” with no language restrictions. We also searched UK government documents on SARS-CoV-2 infection amongst minority groups. By January 2020, a large number of authors had reported that ethnic minority groups experienced higher numbers of cases and increased hospitalisations due to COVID-19. A small number of articles provided evidence that strictly-Orthodox Jewish populations had experienced a high rate of SARS-CoV-2 infection but extremely limited data was available on overall population level rates of infection amongst specific ethnic minority population groups. There was also extremely limited data on rates of infection amongst young children from ethnic minority groups.
Added value of the study We report findings from a population representative, household survey of SARS-CoV-2 infection amongst a UK strictly Orthodox Jewish population. We demonstrate an extremely high seroprevalence rate of SARS-CoV-2 in this population which is more than five times the estimated seroprevalence nationally and five times the estimated seroprevalence in London. In addition the large number of children in our survey, reflective of the underlying population structure, allows us to demonstrate that in this setting there is a significant burden of disease in all age groups with secondary school aged children having an equivalent seroprevalence to adults.
Implications of the available evidence Our data provide clear evidence of the markedly disproportionate impact of SARS-CoV-2 in minority populations. In this setting infection occurs at high rates across all age groups including pre-school, primary school and secondary school-age children. Contextually appropriate measures to specifically reduce the impact of SARS-CoV-2 amongst minority populations are urgently required.
Abstract: Yiddish was the everyday language spoken by most Central and East European Jews during the last millennium. As a result of the extreme loss of speakers during the Holocaust, subsequent geographic dispersal, and lack of institutional support, Yiddish is now an endangered language. Yet it continues to be a native and daily language for Haredi (strictly Orthodox) Jews, who live in close-knit communities worldwide. We have conducted the first study of the linguistic characteristics of the Yiddish spoken in the community in London’s Stamford Hill. While Krogh (in: Aptroot, Aptroot et al. (eds.) Leket: Yiddish studies today, Düsseldorf University Press, Düsseldorf, pp 483–506, 2012), Assouline (in: Aptroot, Hansen (eds.) Yiddish language structures, De Gruyter Mouton, Berlin, pp 39–62, 2014), and Sadock and Masor (J Jew Lang 6(1):89–110, 2018), investigating other Hasidic Yiddish-speaking communities, observe what they describe as morphological syncretism, in this paper we defend the claim that present-day Stamford Hill Hasidic Yiddish lacks morphological case and gender completely. We demonstrate that loss of morphological case and gender is the result of substantial language change over the course of two generations: while the case and gender system of the spoken medium was already beginning to undergo morphological syncretism and show some variation prior to World War II, case and gender distinctions were clearly present in the mental grammar of both Hasidic and non-Hasidic speakers of the relevant Yiddish dialects at that stage. We conclude the paper by identifying some of the language-internal, sociolinguistic and historical factors that have contributed to such rapid and pervasive language change, and compare the developments in Stamford Hill Hasidic Yiddish to those of minority German dialects in North America.
Abstract: This article is concerned with what happens to precarious community buildings in times of austerity. It responds to a landscape of capitalist realism, in which instrumental, economic forms of value are mobilised to justify the closure of ordinary buildings whose survival is not identified as a political priority. The study focuses on two London cases of a library and an elderly day centre under threat of closure, and traces how grammars of austerity rendered these buildings substitutable. Considering how abstract sociological conceptions of value/s can struggle to break into the embedded common sense of austerity, the authors explore how ethnographic practices of collaboration and attentiveness can help amplify alternative expressions of the meanings of these buildings for their communities. Enacting a form of ethnographic witnessing, which learns from Wittgenstein, the authors highlight the creative, vernacular registers and gestures of library users and day centre members, and show how these were anchored in the buildings themselves. In this way, the article supplements noisier, more hyperbolic accounts of the violence of austerity by amplifying quotidian responses, which express how ordinary buildings and the forms of life they sustain, matter.
Abstract: This book focuses on two main areas – first, the response of British Lubavitchers to misfortune generally and sickness, in particular and the role of their religious leader the Rebbe in this process; and second, their response to the illness and ultimate death of the Rebbe. It addresses a number of issues in contemporary social and medical anthropology: the social construction of the body, the power of words in ritual, the relation between myth and praxis, religious texts as a charter for healing and the relation between the use of biomedicine and symbolic healing. This book will be of interest to students of social anthropology, medical anthropology, medical sociology, millennialism, religious studies and students of contemporary Judaism.
