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Lord Baron Rabbi Immanuel Jakobovits of Regent's Park (8 February 1921 - 31 October 1999) was Chief Rabbi of Great Britain and the Commonwealth from 1967 to 1991. His successor is the present Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sacks.
He 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.
His first position was as rabbi of the Brondesbury synagogue. In 1949, at the rather 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 was to hold 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 made a peer (Lord) of the House of Lords by Margaret Thatcher in 1988. He was the first rabbi to receive this honor. In 1991 he received the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion.
He passed away in 1999 from a cerebral hemorrhage. He had six children. He is buried on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem.
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.
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 political stance was conservative, and he was particularily 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.
His specialty was the intercations between medical ethics and halakha.
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