It was at this time, in 1921, at the suggestion of Basil Henriques, that Wellesley became involved with disadvantaged youth from the East End of London.

This first encounter with underprivileged Jews was to have a profound influence, as he later wrote, "the two years I spent with these responsive young scouts left a real and lasting satisfaction such as I have never experienced".

[4] Returning to Cambridge he was in total shock over this rejection based simply on the fact that he was a Jew, and spent much time soul searching.

At the same time, he faced another inconsistency – the ambivalence displayed by English Jews to the Zionist aim of reestablishing a sovereign Jewish community in Palestine.

Basil Henriques, who had often charged him with being "un-Jewish" for not including Jewish content into his Scouting activities, now saw it as a "tragedy" that Aron had decided to go to Palestine.

Wellesley recalled that it was this period that forced him to reject the conventional religious approach of Orthodox Judaism and look instead "to the renaissance of the Jewish People as a political entity in its own homeland".

He spent the next years in Haifa and Tel Aviv teaching sports and English – first at Reali and then at the famous Herzliya Gymnasia.

Due to the Balfour Declaration of 1917 in which "His Majesty's Government viewed with favour the establishment of a Jewish National Home in Palestine", the centre of political Zionism had moved to London.)

Wellesley returned a year later with his young family and started to work at the Zionist Federation Offices at 77 Great Russell Street.

Wellesley produced a handbook with instructions on how to run groups of teenagers, using elements of Jewish history and symbolism, tests and ceremonies not dissimilar to those customary in scouting.

His prior attempts to get this written by various authoritative Jewish sources had failed to achieve suitable results, and he was thus constrained to undertake the task on his own.

[7] Aron's efforts to obtain funding to move forward the establishment of Habonim also saw him become one of the founders of the Bar-Kochba Jewish sports organisation in England.

It has since linked up with Dror, a semi-political Jewish Zionist Movement whose roots go back to 1917 Polish and European sources.

Later, in Italy in 1944, risking court-martial, he led his unit in helping rescue many Jewish refugees who had escaped the concentration camps of the Holocaust.

In November 1945, given his military experience, he was asked to join David Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir and Chaim Weizmann in testifying before the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry in Jerusalem.

He prepared a symposium outline for the Harry S. Truman Institute for the Advancement of Peace at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which was rejected on the grounds that it had too much emphasis on youth and not enough on the scholarly approach.

Aged 70, Wellesley joined Father Bruno Hussar, a Catholic priest, in pioneering the establishment of Neve Shalom – Wāħat as-Salām, an Arab-Jewish village near Jerusalem.

Samuel W. Lewis, former USA Ambassador to Israel and close friend described their home as a "...concrete box on a windswept, barren, rocky hill".