Amélie Jakobovits

Origins and early life

Amélie Jakobovits was born at Ansbach in Germany on 31 May 1928, daughter of the rabbi Élie Munk, who got his family out of Nazi Germany in 1937, and of Fanny Goldberger, daughter of Nathan Goldberger, president of the Orthodox Jewish community of Nuremberg.

Work and career

She was nine when the family reached Paris; during the war they fled again, to Switzerland, and returned to Paris afterwards. In 1949 she married Rabbi Immanuel Jakobovits, and for half a century she was rebbetzin in three countries in turn: chief rabbi's wife in Ireland from 1949 to 1958, then at the Fifth Avenue Synagogue in New York from 1958 to 1967, then in England, where her husband was Chief Rabbi from 1967 to 1999.

The office has no salary and no definition, and she made of it something formidable: the New York Times described the couple as a pastoral team who opened their house to crowds. British Jews called her Lady J and, by the end, the grandmother of British Jewry; after her husband's death in 1999 she went on with charitable work in her own name. She died in London on 7 May 2010.