A strictly Orthodox school in Manchester has cancelled a talk that was due to have taken place next week by a controversial outreach rabbi who believes that autism and Down’s Syndrome are the result of sins in a past life and that Ashkenazi Jews helped to bring the Holocaust on themselves because of assimilation.

Rabbi Yosef Mizrachi from New York was due to speak next Thursday evening at Beis Yaakov High School during a short visit to the UK.

But the school said it had cancelled the booking, made by an outside party, because “we wouldn’t want to be associated with the event”.

Rabbi Mizrachi, who has also opined that mixed parties increase the incidence of cancer, has previously been condemned by the Office of the Chief Rabbi and the senior rabbi of the S & P Sephardi Community, Rabbi Joseph Dweck.

David Toube, of the anti-extremism think-tank, the Quilliam Foundation, said: “Rabbi Mizrachi has a long and depressing record of making obnoxious statements, and has rightly been condemned by the leading voices of Anglo-Jewry. It is about time venues desist from offering him a platform.”

Rabbi Mizrachi is due to speak in two independent Sephardi synagogues in London next week: in Beth Hamedrash Knesset Yehezkel in Golders Green, run by Rabbi Aharon Bassous, and Heichal Leah in Hendon.

In another talk, a few years ago, he’s also warned that the French will be taken over by Muslims and “either be butchered or they will have to run out of France because the Arabs have many, many children and they grow very fast, plus immigration coming in non-stop”.