Immanuel Jakobovits
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Immanuel Jakobovits, also Baron Jakobovits (8 February 1921 - 31 October 1999) was the Orthodox Judaism Chief Rabbi of Great Britain and the Commonwealth from 1967 to 1991. His successor is the present Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks.
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Biography
Jakobovits was born in Königsberg, East Prussia (now Kaliningrad), where his father Julius was a community rabbi. The family moved to Berlin in the 1920s, where his father became rabbinical judge on a local beth din, but fled the country in time to escape Nazi persecutions. In the United Kingdom he completed his higher education, including a period at the Yeshiva Etz Chaim in London, Jews College and London University.
He married Amélie Munk of Paris, the daughter of a prominent rabbi, who would support his community work throughout his life. They had six children.
His first position was as rabbi of the Brondesbury synagogue. In 1949, at the relatively young age of 27, he was appointed Chief Rabbi of the declining Jewish community of Ireland. This was to be a stepping stone towards a greater rabbinical career, and in 1958 he assumed the rabbinate of the Fifth Avenue Synagogue in New York, a position he held until 1966, when he was called to the Chief Rabbinate of the United Hebrew Congregations of the British Commonwealth. He held this position until his retirement in 1991.
He was knighted in 1981 and awarded a life peerage by Margaret Thatcher in 1988 becoming the first rabbi to receive this honor. In 1991 he received the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion. In the House of Lords he became known as a campaigner for traditional morality. Jakobovits aroused considerable controversy when, after the discovery of a possible genetic explanation for homosexuality, he called for the eradication of this genetic variation.
Jakobovits died of a cerebral hemorrhage, and was buried on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem.
Other functions
Rabbi Jakobovits was also the president of the Conference of European Rabbis, in this capacity he worked on standardising and regulating religious conversion to Judaism.
Ideas and philosophy
Jakobovits was a firm adherent of the "German-Jewish" Torah im Derech Eretz philosophy, having a broad knowledge of religious subjects as well as secular culture and philosophy. This made him a unique spokesperson for Orthodox Judaism, as he was able to transmit ideas to a wide audience which would otherwise not have achieved dissemination. His specialty was the interaction between medical ethics and halakha. Thanks to his training in Ireland, Rabbi Jakobovits approached his comprehensive Jewish Medical Ethics in light of Catholic medical ethics, with which he often compares Jewish ethics.
His political stance was conservative, and he was particularly close to Margaret Thatcher. Within Judaism, he held mildly Zionistic views. He maintained that sooner or later Israel would need to negotiate the territory it conquered during the Six Day War, which made him a controversial figure when he would mention these views publicly.
Books
- Bermant, Chaim. Lord Jakobovits; the Authorized Biography of the Chief Rabbi. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, Limit 1990. ISBN 0297811428.
- Jakobovits, Immanuel. Jewish medical ethics : a comparative and historical study of the Jewish religious attitude to medicine and its practice. New York : Bloch Pub. Co., 1959 and 1962.
- __________. Dear Chief Rabbi: from the correspondence of Chief Rabbi Immanuel Jakobovits on matters of Jewish law, ethics, and contemporary issues, 1980-1990. Hoboken, N.J. : KTAV Pub. House, 1995. This volume of rabbinic responsa was edited by Jeffrey M. Cohen.