Personal Recollections of Rabbi Shmuel Jakobovits

Rabbi Shmuel Jakobovits remembers…

– Rabbi Jakobovits is the son of the late former Chief Rabbi of the UK, Lord Emanuel Jakobovits. He lives in Jerusalem.

When I gave a talk some years ago at the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem on the “Importance of Unity and Brotherhood,” a lady came up to me and said “I must give you a present – which is a story.”

Thirty years earlier, when the woman was a student, she had participated in an international conference of students in Europe. She felt, as a “modern, liberal academic,” more identification with the European students than with members of her own, Jewish and Israeli people.

Then she came back to Israel and the Six-Day War broke out. She heard a talk given by the new Chief Rabbi in England, and heard how deeply he felt about Israel. “Then I understood,” she said, “that what I had said to those students in Europe, wasn’t really right, and that the sense of inner identification with my own people was the stronger.”