About Rabbi Louis Jacobs

Four Rabbinic Positions in Anglo-Jewry - Louis Jacobs

Written around 1990's. Publisher unknown. Any suggestions?

Like most Rabbis serving in this country, I have experienced at first-hand in my career what used to be called minhag anglia, a characteristic English way of approaching things Jewish, subtly different from that of, say, an Israeli or a Russian Jew or even an American Jew, common language notwithstanding. You do not have to be born in England to follow minhag anglia. My Rebbe, who hailed from Russia, was observed, during the semi-jubilee celebrations of the reign of King George V and Queen Mary, precariously balanced on the roof of the Yeshivah in order proudly to place there a Union Jack. When his pupils expressed their surprise at this seemingly unbecoming display of patriotism, he said: `Kinderlech! If you had experienced, as I have, life under the Tsar or the Communist Regime you would understand my love for this free and tolerant country.' The minhag anglia element was present in varying degrees of emphasis in the four congregations I have had the privilege of serving and of which I here try briefly to give my impressions in turn.

The 'English' experience, so far as my own ancestry is concerned, began more than 130 years ago, when my Zaide emigrated from Telz in Lithuania to settle for a short while in Canterbury (of all places), where there was a small Jewish community and a synagogue at that time. My father used to regale me with stories he had heard of dignitaries from the cathedral paying visits to my Zaide's sukkah to learn from an observant Jew something about Jewish rites and ceremonies. Some months ago, when I was invited, as the Lord Mayor of Westminster's Chaplain, to preach at the civic service in Westminster Abbey, I could not help thinking it was not too far a cry from the rudimentary Jewish-Christian dialogue of my Zaide and his cathedral friends.

'MUNK'S'

My first position was that of assistant Rabbi of the Golders Green Beth Hamidrash, a semi-independent, strictly Orthodox congregation, loosely affiliated to Adas Israel, consisting largely of Jews of German origin, headed by Rabbi Eli Munk and still called 'Munk's' after him. Before I came to this remarkable congregation I knew a little of the religious philosophy of Samson Raphael Hirsch, the great exponent of Torah and Derekh Eretz, representing an attempt to merge the ideals of Orthodox Judaism and Western thought and civilisation. At 'Munk's' I learned how the theory was coherently put into practice. Among the congregants were renowned lawyers, university teachers, scientists, writers and other well-educated Jews who yielded to none in their scrupulous adherence to Jewish law. Rabbi Munk had obtained a PhD in Germany on Wordsworth, thus providing a link with Englishness, which, for obvious reasons, he was glad to foster after the Holocaust. In many ways Dr Munk would have qualified as a Modern Orthodox Rabbi, in the sense of one who accepts that European literature, art and music are good in themselves, although in function and to some extent in outlook he belonged to Haredism, otherwise known as ultra-Orthodoxy.

The services at 'Munk's' were conducted with Western decorum. Heaven help anyone who dared to engage in conversation during the services. Only one mourner at a time was allowed to recite kaddish (in front of the Ark) in obedience to the Talmudic dictum: 'two different voices cannot be heard at the same time.' A favourite word for the congregation was discipline. Everything had to be carried out in the precise manner required by the sources. On the festivals not a single piyut was omitted. The men wore hats, never a yarmulke in sight. Only the Rav was allowed to wear his tallit over his head. For a congregant to do so would have been considered an ostentatious show of piety. This meticulousness, however, was redeemed from Teutonic thoroughness by the ability of the members to laugh at themselves. They loved to tell of a visit to Frankfurt by Rabbi Meir Shapiro of Lublin in Poland who was shown round the various institutions of that very frum city, eventually coming to an ice-cream factory which had the legend: 'All our products are frozen under the supervision of the Rabbinate.' `That is true', wryly remarked Rabbi Shapiro, 'of the whole of their Yiddishkeit.' If at 'Munk's' there was a winning blend of European culture and Anglo-Jewish attitudes, in my next congregation there existed a different but happy combination of Lithuanian and English Jewish temperament.

THE CENTRAL SHUL, MANCHESTER

The Manchester Great Synagogue, where my parents were married by Rabbi Dr Salamon, a graduate of the Orthodox but westernised Seminary in Berlin, was known as the English Shul and was the epitome of AngloJewish Orthodoxy, albeit in a blunt, northern manner. Quite different was the Central Shul in Heywood Street. The congregation at the Central were, in the main, immigrants from Lithuania and their offspring. After serving at 'Munk's' for nearly three years, I was appointed Rabbi of the Central in 1947. Rabbi J. Yoffe, my predecessor, a Rabbi of the old school and a great preacher in Yiddish (though he tried to address the Bar Mitzvah boys in English), sought to preserve Judaism in the best Litvitcher traditions. He died before the Second World War so that I was obliged, after a long gap, to step into his shoes with a determined effort on the part of the congregation to follow his Rabbinic outlook while, at the same time, catering to the needs of the younger members. My task was to preach in English, except for the Yiddish Derashah delivered on the Sabbaths before Pesach and Yom Kippur, and to conduct a nightly Talmud Shiur in Yiddish to oldsters who had been attending Rabbi Yoffe's class many years before. This class was conducted in the Bet Hamidrash equipped with long tables and surrounded by weighty tomes, exactly as in pre-war Lithuania. A London Jew on a visit, seeing a Rabbi with a beard teaching Talmud in Yiddish, remarked that he could only believe that he was not in Manchester at all but in a heimisher shtetl. Unlike my predecessor, however, I was expected to wear canonicals as did the Chazan and the Chazan Sheni. Even the choirboys wore short gowns and black, felt caps. Chazanut was highly prized at the Central. On the second night of Pesach hundreds of Manchester Jews descended on the synagogue to listen to Chazan Moshe Price's melodious rendering of the Ribbono shel Olam for the counting of the Omer. Although in my pastoral functions I was an English Minister, no one in the congregation ever dreamed of describing me, young though I was, as anything but the 'Roy'. From time to time I would even pasken shaalos, pious women bringing me chickens wrapped in newspaper which, after examining the innards, I had to pronounce either kosher or trief.

The members of the Central, with few exceptions, belonged to the lower-middle or working class. Like my father, uncles and cousins, they earned their living through various occupations in the waterproof and raincoat factories owned by Jews who released their Jewish employees from having to work on the Sabbath. It is not generally realised that there existed in Manchester a religious working class, the members of which, while admiring the wealthier Jews who managed to get on, were proud to be working men and women and who usually, like their counterparts in Lancashire nonconformism, saw no contradiction to religion in their stance. They may have blessed the squire and his relations, if they had known of such, but would only have accepted reluctantly their 'proper' station and would never have requested God to keep them in it. In my time, a splendid building was erected by the members of the Central and this was adequately maintained. How could a largely working-class congregation afford such luxury? The answer is that, in addition to the standard membership, there were hundreds of families in the city who, for sixpence a week, belonged to the Synagogue's Burial Society which entitled them to burial in the Shul's cemetery but not to actual membership. The revenues from the burial scheme made the Central rich as a congregation, though poor as individuals.

To what extent was the Central an Anglo-Jewish synagogue? The wearing of canonicals and sermons in English have already been mentioned. In addition, the affairs of the congregation were not conducted, as they were in Lithuania, solely by a few autocrats but by a democratically elected council operating not very differently from the Manchester City Council, with motions proposed and seconded, and regular cries of 'On a point of order'. At one of the meetings someone used the term ipso facto, and this became a catchword of the 'Boys', as the younger members were called. The members of the Central, like Manchester Jewry in general, kept kosher homes and were regular in their attendance at services, certainly on the Sabbath and, for many, at the twice-daily minyan during the week as well. They were all proud to speak English with a Manchester accent, and with a regular admixture of Yiddish words such as chutzpah, mazaldik and kenenhora.

THE NEW WEST END SYNAGOGUE

In 1954 I left Manchester for London to take up the position of Minister-Preacher in what was probably the most highly Anglicised Orthodox congregation in this country, counting among its membership peers of the realm, knights and their ladies, members of Parliament and others active in politics and social work. The first Minister of the New West End Synagogue was the Reverend Simeon Singer of Prayer Book fame and my immediate predecessor was the Reverend Ephraim Levine, who had just retired after almost 40 years of distinguished service. Both these men sought to preserve intact the older Victorian mores, but change was in the air, especially in the swing to the right that has now become the norm.

The New West End was 'Orthodox' in a peculiar, non-dogmatic use of that term. There was separate seating for men and women, the latter proudly occupying the ladies gallery, apparently without any need to see this as being politically incorrect. Rightly or wrongly, egalitarianism in Judaism would have been seen as a somewhat bizarre notion. And yet, with typical Anglo-Jewish compromise, not to say inconsistency, the synagogue had a mixed choir and the prayers for the restoration of the sacrificial system were either omitted or recited silently. The cultural shock involved in my transformation from Rov to Minister was not too severe, especially when I witnessed on my first Rosh Hashanah service the whole congregation carrying out with complete devotion the traditional kneeling during the Alenu prayer. In my induction address I declared how honoured I was to have been appointed to a congregation so successful in merging Orthodoxy with modernity, which led Ephraim Levine to observe, at the Kiddush, that it was a good job that this buttering up of the congregation did not take place after a meat meal.

It is hardly appropriate to rehearse here the 'Jacobs' Affair', except to say that the willingness of the New West End to reappoint me as Minister, after I had left for a position at Jews' College, was frustrated by a veto exercised by the Chief Rabbi because of my allegedly untraditional view. The members of the New West End become torn between two characteristic Anglo-Jewish loyalties, to the Chief Rabbi and to religious tolerance and the freedom of the pulpit. My supporters founded the New London Synagogue in 1964, purchasing the building, a fine example of late-Victorian architecture, from the St John's Wood Synagogue, belonging to the United Synagogue. We changed the name to the New London Synagogue, bayit chadash ('New House') in Hebrew.

THE NEW LONDON SYNAGOGUE

At the New London, the aim was to return in some way to the older AngloJewish tradition, albeit with certain reservations. There was no mixed seating but we still have a mixed choir and we do not pray for the restoration of sacrifices. A departure from tradition took place in the election of a woman as chairman of the congregation in the belief that, whatever the great sage Maimonides had said 800 years ago, it was a move in full accordance with the spirit of the times. In its constitution the New London Synagogue is described as an Orthodox congregation but we are all aware that the problem of when to go along with the Zeitgeist and when to reject it is acute, as it is in every Anglo-Jewish congregation which claims to be modern.

ST JOHN'S WOOD

It is just coincidental, of course, but our congregation is situated in St John's Wood, a district long at the geographical centre of Anglo-Jewish affairs. At the time of the election of Judge Finestein, a resident of St John's Wood, to the presidency of the Board of Deputies, the other candidate was Eric Moonman of the nearby Belsize Square Synagogue. Some of the major congregations in Anglo-Jewry are situated in or adjacent to St John's Wood: the United Synagogue in Grove End Road; the Sephardi Synagogue in Maida Vale; the Liberal Synagogue in St John's Wood Road; Hampstead Synagogue in Dennington Park Road; and the Reform Synagogue in Upper Berkeley Street. The Saatchi Synagogue has recently been established in the neighbourhood. All that is missing is a Chasidic stiebel. The Israeli ambassador's official residence is only a few streets away. We know that Abraham Ibn Ezra stayed for a short while in London. He refers in his writings to a 'wood' near London. I am no historian of Anglo-Jewry but don't tell me that it was not in our neck of the Wood in which the mediaeval sage sojourned for a while.

There are signs that minhag Anglia is fast disappearing. Good riddance, some now say. More of us will hope that reports of its passing are grossly exaggerated.