Baruch Dayan Emet – Remembering Rabbi Nachum Rabinovitch,
Principal of Jews’ College 1973-1982
By Rabbi Dr Raphael Zarum, Dean of LSJS
On 6 May 2020, the Jewish world lost a great religious leader. Rabbi Nachum Rabinovitch, the head of the yeshiva in Ma’ale Adumim, who had previously been the Principal of Jews College, died age of 92.
Born in Montreal, Canada, he moved to the United States in order to study at the prestigious Ner Yisrael yeshiva in Baltimore. Incredibly, he was gained semicha, rabbinic ordination, when he was only twenty years old. While studying at Ner Yisrael he also attained a master’s degree in mathematics from John Hopkins University.
In 1952, Rabbi Rabinovitch began his career as a congregational rabbi serving the Jewish community in Charleston, South Carolina. In1963 he was called back to Canada to become the rabbi of a large community in Toronto. He completed a doctorate in the philosophy of science at the University of Toronto and was subsequently appointed as a lecturer in mathematics at the university. Additionally, he took the role of editor of Hadarom, the journal of the Rabbinical Council of America.
In 1971, Chief Rabbi Immanuel Jakobovits invited Rabbi Rabinovitch to come to London to become the new Principal of Jews’ College. It was a great coup for the college to a attract such a brilliant scholar and academic. Under his leadership the range of study programmes increased, and the student body thrived. His appointment significantly increased the reputation of the college.
Rabbi Rabinovich set a very high bar for Judaic scholarship. As a result, he granted semicha to very few students in the decade in which he led Jews’ College. One young man who rose to the challenge was a recent first-class graduate of Cambridge University, Jonathan Sacks. Sacks, who went on to become Principal of the college himself, and later the Chief Rabbi, said of his teacher, “Rabbi Rabinovich was an intellectual giant and he was extremely demanding of his students. He expected us to have read everything and not just to have absorbed the knowledge but to be critical about it as well… He represented the American standards of Jewish Orthodox learning, which were really not to be found in Britain.”
In 1982, Rabbi Rabinovich fulfilled his dream of moving to Israel to live and teach. He accepted the offer to become the head of Yeshivat Birkat Moshe in Ma'ale Adumim, He continued to lead this Hesder yeshiva – in which boys both studied Torah and served in the Israeli army – for the rest of his life.
In 2015, he became one of the founders of the Giyur K’Halacha rabbinical court, which provides conversions to Judaism outside the state-run Chief Rabbinate. His leadership of this court was credited as significantly helping to professionalise the conversion process.
Rabbi Rabinovich authored of over a dozen Jewish legal books in Hebrew and English. Yed Peshuta, his monumental commentary on Maimonides’s entire Mishneh Torah has become a standard sefer that is to be found on the shelves of almost every yeshiva and academic Jewish institution. He also became a globally-recognised posek (legal decisor), whose opinion was sort by leading rabbis in dozens of large Jewish communities.
Rabinovitch’s death was mourned by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who said in a specially prepared statement that, “Rabbi Rabinovitch was a polymath — a tremendous scholar, a prominent legal decisor and an educated scientist.”
The Orthodox Union, the largest religious Jewish organisation in the Unites States, called him, “one of the greatest poskim in the religious Zionist world in Israel.”
In his eulogy, available on Youtube, Rabbi Sacks said, “He was my Rav, I was his disciple, and I count that one of the greatest blessings of my life… Rabbi Rabinovich was one of the intellectual, moral, and spiritual giants of our time... He was, above all, a teacher, raising up many generations of Torah scholars and fighters for the State of Israel.”
The trustees of LSJS, together with all the faculty and staff, pay tribute to the memory and incredible achievements of Rabbi Rabinovich. May his approach and writings continue to inspire all of us at LSJS, where he planted a deep love of Jewish scholarship and a lifetime commitment to Jewish learning.
Baruch Dayan Emet.
