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LADY AMELIE

This past week just before the Sabbath a great woman passed from our midst. Lady Amelie Jakobovits died in London. Lady Jakobovits was not only a Lady because her late husband Rabbi Immanuel Jakobovits, Chief Rabbi of Britain, was a Lord who sat in the British House of Lords, she was a Lady in her own right, a forceful, knowledgeable and intelligent person of grace, aristocracy and optimism.

Even after the death of her husband she still occupied the spotlight for London Jewry and her common sense, goodness and cheerfulness approached legendary proportions. She was descended from a most prominent rabbinic family, the Munks of Germany and France and her behavior and world outlook were part of this all encompassing Jewish worldview.

She lived through the most fearsome time in modern Jewish history and emerged from it strong in spirit and hopeful in vision. I was privileged to hear her deliver a long lecture on her remembrances of the Holocaust and thereafter. I have attended many Holocaust lectures and many times the audience including me left feeling numbed and depressed. This is undoubtedly a natural reaction. But after her lecture the large crowd that attended and listened to her words left uplifted and inspired.

She was an inspiring person and role model and everyone was her friend. She was a friend to everyone while at the same time being able to comment clearly and sharply on public and private issues.

I ate breakfast at her home a number of times both before and after she was widowed and the elegance of her table and food was dimmed by her conversation, wisdom and grasp of things, major and minor, national and personal. 

Her acts of charity and personal help to others were the talk of the Anglo-Jewish community. Rabbi Jakobovits told me a number of times that he felt humbled in comparison to the goodness and spirit of his wife. And she was her own person wherever she was, at the table of the Queen of England, as a table companion at weddings and banquets, in her own home and in the eyes of the general public.

Even those whose views were not in concert with hers – and she let you know about that when the occasion arose – they respected her and cherished her presence within the community. In a conversation I once had with Rabbi Jakobovits he pointed out to me that in the Book of Ruth, which we will read this next week on Shavuot, it is not necessarily Ruth that is the heroine of the story as much as it is Naomi.

Naomi is the unseen hand that guides Ruth and the entire course of later Jewish history to a successful conclusion. I sensed that he was talking about his difficult, sensitive and crucial role as Chief Rabbi, he being the Ruth in the story and Lady Amalie fulfilling the role of Naomi. Throughout Jewish history, such women have had major impact on the communities that they lived in and on their families and society.

Rabbi Akiva said it best to his students about his own beloved wife Rachel: “All that is mine and all that is yours truly belongs only to her!” Not only Anglo-Jewry but the Jewish world generally owes a great debt of gratitude to Lady Amelie.

She lived to see generations of scholarly, loyal and public minded Jewish generations that descended from her. A mother’s pride, like her love, always knows no bounds. She had a fierce loyalty to the Jewish people, its scholars and students. As in the book of Ruth, the writer of history will record that generations were born unto this Naomi as well.

She and her husband often swam against the tide of then political correctness and majority opinions but no one could doubt the sincerity of positions taken and criticism voiced. She once told me: “I am not always right but I am rarely completely wrong!”

She said that with conviction, yet with a sense of modesty and subtle humor.

The truth is that, in my opinion, she was rarely completely wrong. She had an inspired instinct for truth and a deep sense of displeasure at hypocrisy and feigned piety. She loved Jews collectively and individually, always being able to rejoice at someone else’s good fortune and happy occasion.

In her passing all of us that were privileged to know her have lost an irreplaceable friend, counselor and inspirational role model. I feel grateful that I had an opportunity to know her well and to be counted by her as one of her friends. Her memory will be a blessing to all of us.