For decades, members of Britain’s Jewish population have marked life’s milestones by taking out notices in The Jewish Chronicle, a weekly publication founded in 1841 that bills itself as the world’s oldest Jewish newspaper.

Births, weddings and deaths — or, as some like to call them, “hatches, matches and dispatches” — all are recorded faithfully each Friday in a community publication that Jonathan Freedland, who until recently wrote a column for The Chronicle, once described as the “beating heart of British Jewry.”