These are dark and difficult times, but this week there was a warm glow about Anglo-Jewry.
There could have been few more delightful ways to kick off the new year than the news that Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis was being awarded a knighthood and the JC, along with the community, congratulates him.
But amid the rejoicing over his award for “services to the Jewish community, to interfaith relations and to education”, the rabbi himself has been modest about publicly celebrating the honour.
According to those who know him well and work closely with him, the new Chief Rabbi Sir Ephraim Mirvis is more at home singing and telling jokes than standing on ceremony.
His friends and colleagues speak of someone who has a wicked sense of humour, is “a devastating mimic” and a big sports fan.
These qualities came together on one occasion when he entertained the BBC presenter Edward Stourton with a rendition of Grace After Meals to the tune of the Match of the Day theme. His love of football — and in particular, Tottenham Hotspur — comes, say his friends, from his time growing up in Cape Town in the late 1960s.
One day his father, Rabbi Lionel Mirvis, took his three sons — Howard, Jonathan and the teen then known as Errol — to a friendly between a South African side and the visiting team, which happened to be Tottenham. That was the day his love for Spurs was born.
Straddling different worlds has always been his defining feature, past and present. Today, he is well known as a bridge between Orthodox Judaism and the wider Jewish community, an approach that reflects values cultivated much earlier in his life.
According to one of his oldest friends from South Africa, businessman Sheon Karol: “Cape Town, in those days, was not the most observant of communities. But I can’t remember a time when my friend wasn’t going to be a rabbi. His whole goal was not to achieve a title or fame, but to bring people closer to Judaism.
Rabbi Mirvis at a protest against the plight of Soviet Jewry during the 1980s
“Even as a youngster, he was outstanding and delightful,” Mr Karol added. “He was tremendous fun, and never sanctimonious. There was no pomposity, it was just a pleasure to be with him.”
Mr Karol and Rabbi Mirvis grew up together, attending the Herzlia School in Cape Town and also the Zionist youth movement, B’nei Akiva.
As a teenage pupil, Ephraim Mirvis was already exploring ways to encourage people to get closer to Judaism. He led a daily minyan at school — something not made easy by the school authorities. And — despite the fact that Herzlia School was indeed a Jewish school — it took a campaign by the young Mirvis to persuade the school to sell only kosher food in the tuck shop.
After high school, he left South Africa for Israel to attend first Yeshivat Kerem b’Yavne, and then two other yeshivot before qualifying as a rabbi.
Initially Mr Karol did not accompany him. He said: “I went to the University of Cape Town for a year.
When I realised I wanted to learn more, I thought I could go to yeshiva for a few weeks in between my first and second years.”
The problem was that new yeshivah students were finding it difficult to settle in and secure study partners for the few weeks of their stay.
But his old friend helped out. It turned out that the future Rabbi Mirvis was running a hospitality scheme for new yeshiva students from South Africa.
The Chief Rabbi with Prime Minister Rishi Sunak at a Downing Street Chanukah reception
Boys would be met at the airport and brought back by taxi to yeshiva, where “not only a study partner had been arranged, but also you would have company for meals, so you wouldn’t be by yourself”.
Once at yeshiva, where in the end he stayed for a year, Mr Karol soon found that his old friend had persuaded the yeshiva authorities to allow a Thursday night get-together for the South African students.
This “very convivial, warm society” featured copious amounts of toasted cheese and a shiur from Mr Mirvis, as he then was.
Rabbi Mirvis is the son and grandson of a rabbi and a reverend — though Sir Ephraim has said that his father, originally an engineer, began working in the rabbinate only after the company he worked for closed, as a result of opposition to South African apartheid.
His late mother, Frieda, was principal of the Athlone Teachers’ Training College during apartheid — at the time the only college for “coloured” teachers of pre-school children in South Africa.
Rabbi Mirvis received his rabbinic ordination from Machon Ariel, Jerusalem (1978 – 80) and gained a BA in education and classical Hebrew from the University of South Africa. He also received a teaching qualification from the Yaacov Herzog Teachers College in Israel.
This year, 2023, marks the chief rabbi’s decade in the role. It was a mark of the esteem in which he is held that the then-Prince Charles attended his inauguration at St John’s Wood Synagogue in north-west London.
King Charles with the Chief Rabbi (Getty Images)
Their relationship has remained a warm one. The new King has invited Sir Ephraim and his wife, Valerie, to stay overnight at Clarence House on the eve of the Coronation on Saturday 6 May, to avoid them having to break Shabbat; and last year, after the Queen died, Buckingham Palace brought forward a Friday multi-faith commemoration event, again to accommodate Chief Rabbi Mirvis.
Michael Goldstein, president of the United Synagogue, spends more time with Chief Rabbi Mirvis than most in the community. The two speak regularly. He said: “He is very warm and also very principled. I think I have been most impressed by the stand he took against Jeremy Corbyn. It was unprecedented for a chief rabbi to speak out in the way that he did.”
In November 2019, a couple of weeks before the general election, Chief Rabbi Mirvis wrote in The Times about “a new poison” that had engulfed the Labour Party. He added: “It is not my place to tell any person how they should vote. I regret being in this situation at all. I simply pose the question: What will the result of this election say about the moral compass of our country? When 12 December arrives, I ask every person to vote with their conscience.
"Be in no doubt, the very soul of our nation is at stake.”
Jonathan Goldstein, former chair of the Jewish Leadership Council, is a long-time associate.
He said: “I think the main thing about him is his humanity. He has a deep concern for people across all faiths, and he has a desire to be a facilitator and conciliator, while always being very clear about the tradition which he upholds and the values he represents.”
It is, of course, not Rabbi Mirvis’s first role as chief rabbi — he was previously chief rabbi of Ireland from 1985-1992, after serving as rabbi of the Dublin Hebrew Congregation.
Rabbi Mirvis (right) with Irish president Patrick Hillery (centre) and the leader of Irish Jewry, Hubert Wine
In a sort of “rabbi-go-round”, he succeeded both Lord Sacks’s predecessor Lord Jakobovits in Ireland and Lord Sacks himself as rabbi of the Western Marble Arch Synagogue in London (1992–96), before becoming senior rabbi at Finchley United Synagogue (known as Kinloss) in 1996, a position which he held until becoming chief rabbi in 2013. Between Lord Jakobovits and Rabbi Mirvis as Chief Rabbi of Ireland, there was one of Rabbi Mirvis’s closest colleagues, Rabbi David Rosen.
Rabbi Rosen, now the American Jewish Committee’s International Director of Interreligious Affairs, has known the Mirvis family since serving as a colleague of Rabbi Lionel Mirvis in Cape Town.
Rabbi Rosen said that Sir Ephraim strongly resembled his late “remarkable” mother, Freida, both emotionally and physically, and praised her family, the Katz family as “one of the mainstays of South African Jewry”. From her, Rabbi Rosen suggested, Rabbi Mirvis drew his “sincerity, openness towards others, and acceptance of diversity.
“That’s very important because there are very few deeply Orthodox rabbis who are open to diversity and pluralism. Obviously, he’s had to learn to be a politician, to steer a fine line between being authentic and true to one’s principles, but also being in a representational position, which is not so simple.”
He also applauded the chief rabbi’s 2018 guide to Jewish schools as to how to treat LGBT pupils, a document believed to be the first of its kind in the Jewish world.
He said: “I think Rabbi Mirvis has shown remarkable spine in negotiating with, and standing up to, different elements of the community.”
This week, Rabbi Mirvis defended the LGBT community in an interview on Israeli TV, amid a stream of homophobic comments from leading Israeli rabbis and lawmakers after the Knesset elected its first openly gay speaker.
It’s probably impossible for most chief rabbis to have an “off-switch”, but US president Michael Goldstein, in particular, has seen Sir Ephraim in more laid-back mode.
“We were crossing Tottenham High Road to get to the [Spurs] ground and he had his yarmulke on.
He turned to me and said, is this a cap or a yarmulke situation? I said, it’s up to you, it’s a relaxed atmosphere. So he said, fine, and we walked in, and the first person we ran into was a young guy with a big, black kippah.”
The Chief Rabbi looked at Mr Goldstein. “We both just giggled!”
