Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Life

London Synagogue Auctions Off Celebrity Underwear

With Passover just around the corner, goodwill is aplenty: Some charities are delivering seder meals, and others are arranging for holiday invites. The New North London Synagogue however, is taking a different approach. They are auctioning off autographed celebrity underwear on Ebay.

Simon Hattenstone, a writer for the Guardian, decided to request celebrity underwear as a way to raise awareness for needy individuals who seek refuge in the Masorti synagogue. “Look, I’m not a seedy old hack,” Hattenstone wrote in his column. “I help run a drop-in centre for destitute asylum seekers. These people have no money for the basics in life. One of the things they most lack is underwear, so we’re drawing attention to it with an auction of celebrity underwear.”

While he relates that procuring the unmentionables from the stars was somewhat difficult, matching the pair to the name isn’t. Actress Emma Thompson’s black stomach-flattening Spanx came with the note that reads, “These are the knicker equivalent of Fort Knox”. Songwriter and poet John Hegley’s briefs feature a poem about ants and pants. The singer Fergie of the Black Eyed Peas sent in gold, metallic boy shorts. And writer Nick Hornby and his young son adorned a pair of boxers with stickers and a feather.

Undergarments apparently from actress Helen Mirren, actor Daniel Day-Lewis, and illustrator Aline Crumb are also on the block.

With the description of each lot comes a note about the New North London Synagogue’s Destitute Asylum Seeker Drop In: “Destitute asylum seekers live here in fear, terrified of being forcibly returned home. They are not allowed to work and don’t even have the money to buy underwear which is basic to human dignity. Our celebrities will both raise funds for them and draw attention to their plight.”

Bidders can procure their very own gently used memento until March 31.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.