Winner of by-election in UK’s Kingswood a Jew by choice, married to Israeli

Damien Egan, who on Friday won the erstwhile Tory constituency of Kingswood for the UK Labour Party, is the latest addition to the House of Commons’ Jewish community, having converted to his Israeli husband’s faith in 2018.

“A massive Mazal Tov to our member Damien Egan,” the Jewish Labour Movement posted on X after the results came in. At his victory party, Egan thanked his husband, Yossi Felberbaum, for his support throughout the election campaign, the UK-based Jewish News reported.

Egan, who resigned as mayor of Lewisham in southeast London to stand for the election, took over the seat vacated by Chris Skidmore, a Conservative lawmaker who resigned in January after the Conservative government of UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak eschewed commitments to green energy. Skidmore’s resignation triggered a by-election in the constituency, which the Tories had won by over 10 percent in the 2019 general election.

Egan’s Friday victory in the constituency was one of two blows dealt to the Conservative Party. In addition to Kingswood, the Tories lost Wellingborough to newly elected Gen Kitchen of Labour, in a special election called after the constituency’s longtime Conservative MP Peter Bone was ousted over allegations of bullying and sexual misconduct.

Egan was elected mayor of Lewisham in 2018, running as a Labour candidate when the party, then led by left-wing firebrand Jeremy Corbyn, was embroiled in an antisemitism scandal.

“I think of myself as an open person and don’t like to hide anything, and yet, at some points over the last year, you feel like you’re hiding something,” Egan told the London-based Jewish Chronicle in 2019, speaking about his conversion.

“People do know I’ve converted, it’s not hidden, but it’s not exactly open either,” he said, expressing his concern over the reaction of some Labourites to his conversion, which he had completed the previous year at the Bromley Reform Synagogue, not far from his new constituency.

In the interview, Egan recounted the spiritual journey that culminated in his conversion. Born in Cork, Ireland, to a family he described as “cultural Catholics,” Egan had served as an altar boy in his youth, before drifting away from the religion in his teens.

Nevertheless, he told the Jewish publication, “I was always, growing up, interested in faith and thinking about all faiths.” He said visits to Israel and conversations with Jewish friends piqued his curiosity about the religion, which he decided to explore in greater depth upon meeting his Israeli-born husband in 2016.

“It wasn’t directly connected to meeting Yossi, but part of it was going into a relationship with someone and thinking now is the right time to explore that further, it felt natural.”

Reporting on Egan’s Friday victory, Jewish News said that the new MP’s husband was raised in Kiryat Yam, near Haifa, and earned degrees in computer science and software engineering from Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba.

The centrist Keir Starmer, who took over the Labour Party from Corbyn after the party’s dismal showing in the 2019 election, has pledged to eradicate antisemitism from the party. On Monday, the party withdrew support from its representative in the upcoming Rochdale by-election, after he falsely claimed that Israel had engineered Hamas’s brutal October 7 onslaught as an excuse to invade the Gaza Strip.

On October 7, thousands of gunmen led by the Palestinian terror group stormed southern Israel, killing nearly 1,200 people, mainly civilians, and taking 253 hostages of all ages, while committing numerous atrocities and weaponizing sexual violence on a mass scale.

The shock assault triggered Israeli ground and airstrike campaigns in Gaza that have destroyed about half of the Strip’s residences while displacing over a million people from the coastal enclave’s north and center, many of whom face severe risk of starvation. The Gaza Strip’s Hamas-controlled ministry of health says that over 28,000 Palestinians have been killed in the war, though the figure, which cannot be independently verified, does not distinguish between civilians and combatants, of whom Israel’s military claims to have killed upward of 10,000.

The devastation in Gaza has placed the Israel-backing Starmer at loggerheads with some members of his party, and precipitated a revolt in its traditionally solid bloc of Muslim voters. Nonetheless, polls show Labour easily winning a theoretical general election against the beleaguered Conservative Party, which is currently headed by its third leader in as many years.