The Charity Commission has launched inquiries into two UK Jewish charities that support advanced Torah study in Israel due to concerns over financial management including the use of “signed blank cheques”.

The Telz Talmudical Academy and Talmud Torah Trust, and the Gevurath Ari Torah Academy Trust, share identical trustees and each raised more than £600,000 in the year ending March 2022, according to the charity watchdog’s website.

Both trusts say they help scholars to devote time to study of the Talmud and rabbinic commentaries.

In a statement, the regulator said it was concerned about their management after “discovering that one trustee, who lives in Israel, is in possession of the charities’ cheque books containing a number of blank cheques pre-signed by the trustees who live in the UK”.

The charities, it added, “also operate heavily in cash, which the Commission advises against, overseas and do not maintain adequate records to supplement this.”

Trustees “could not provide sufficient evidence that they were monitoring or verifying the end use of the charities’ funds overseas”.

The inquiry will cover governance, financial control and the conduct of the trustees but its scope could be extended if additional regulatory issues emerge, the Commission said.

It has made an order to restrict the trustees from carrying out several transactions, including cash withdrawal of charitable funds and pre-signing cheques. 

Speaking from Israel, one of the trustees said that he had been responding to questions from the commission for two and a half years. "I don't know why they aren't happy," he said. "There's been no wrongdoing whatsoever." 

He added that he was "sure they are going to find nothing in the end” and added: "We have been doing a good job for 40 years supporting poor students to continue to study the complete Talmud in depth".