In Hampstead Garden Suburb and its environs, it was only with great fortune that you could actually find a copy of the Jewish Chronicle on that terrible Friday. It was a measure of the affection in which he was held. Chaim was different. He was no gossip columnist, but a Jewish writer permeated by tradition … Read more
Last year the Hale-Bopp comet traversed our skies. It was paying its first visit to the inner solar system for two and a half thousand years. The last time that Jews looked up and gazed in wonderment was during that terrible period of exile and return. Carrying with them the harrowing memory of the destruction … Read more
You were amongst the pre-war founders of Bnei Akiva-Bachad in London, but when did you leave for Israel? After my father discovered that her father had perished in Auschwitz, the family went from London to Palestine in May 1947. I was still engaged in Zionist work in London at that time as Director of … Read more
RABBI YOCHANAN, A Palestinian rabbi of the third century, described the qualifications for members of the Sanhedrin: They should be ‘men of stature, wisdom, good appearance, mature, age and they must be conversant with all the seventy languages of mankind as well as some of the arts of the sorcerer’. [Sanhedrin 17a, Talmud Bavli]. Another … Read more
Some British rabbis believed the peace process to be responsible for the recent massacre of worshippers in Hebron. The tension amongst the settlers, they argued, had pushed Baruch Goldstein over the edge. The situation was to blame. In this way, they shifted any moral consideration from themselves and were able to circumvent condemnation of the … Read more
In the winter of 1954, Jacob Sonntag edited a special issue of THE JEWISH QUARTERLY—number seven—which was devoted to an examination of the youthful State of Israel. Looking back at it, after nearly four decades, from the heights of our 150th issue, that passion for the Zionist experiment and the seemingly timeless freshness of statehood … Read more
Five hundred years ago, the Jews of Catholic Spain were expelled from their homeland by the practitioners of a religious fanaticism who believed that they had God on their side. The talents and contributions of minorities, whether Jewish or Muslim, were unwanted in a religiously pure Iberia. Those Jews who did not prostrate themselves before the priests of Ferdinand and Isabella left to seek new … Read more
A reception at London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies in May launched the Council of Jewish-Palestinian Dialogue. The new group grew out of a plethora of dialogue groups which have emerged during the last few years following the PLO’s movement towards a political solution based on a two-state formula. Yet even before these … Read more
JONATHAN Sacks’s elevation to the Chief Rabbinate marks a watershed between the generations: the pre-Holocaust generation and those born after the war. Unlike those scarred by the years of fascism and anti-Semitism, their sons and daughters do not seem to have that psychological need for survivalist policies and symbols; they are generally more open … Read more
“A GOOD opportunity”, “a new mood since the Gulf war”, “a tragedy to let this opportunity slip” — such was the official phraseology of the Board of Deputies of British Jews on the prospect of an international . peace conference on the Middle East. The comments could be construed as merely a public-relations exercise … Read more