The intrepid communal activist Dr Lionel Kopelowitz, who has died in his 93rd year, not only held the office of President of the Board of Deputies for six tumultuous years, but accepted other leading communal positions both nationally and internationally.
At the same time he pursued a very successful career both as a general practitioner and as a leading member of the British Medical Association. As a proud and outspoken practising Orthodox Jew he was an unashamed and erudite champion of his religious beliefs.
But there was about him an effortless haughtiness that sometimes got the better of his sense of political judgment, and led inexorably to unnecessary communal tension. His deference to the office of Chief Rabbi as held by Immanuel Jakobovits turned out to be a major error of judgment.
Jacob Lionel Kopelowitz was born in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, the elder of the two sons of Moses Kopelowitz, a physician, and Mabel née Garstein. He was educated at Clifton College, Bristol, and the University of Cambridge (Trinity College), where he read medicine, completing his practical training at University College Hospital London.
Following national service in the Royal Air Force (1952-53) he set himself up as a general practitioner, taking over his father’s practice. He also developed an early interest in issues surrounding the national regulation and status of GPs, joining the British Medical Association and becoming in time chairman of its General Practitioner Committee and serving on the BMA’s Council, as well as on the General Medical Council.
Kopelowitz was an enthusiastic believer in communal service. From 1973 to 1976 he served as first president of the United Hebrew Congregation of Newcastle-upon-Tyne (where he spent much of his life), becoming, in 1951, one of its representatives on the Board of Deputies of British Jews. At the Board he was able to position himself as the voice of ‘the provinces’ frequently at odds with the London-based ‘establishment.’ During the early 1980s this juxtaposition brought him into increasingly acerbic conflict with the Board’s then president, Labour MP Greville Janner, and with Janner’s supporters, who could always be counted upon to excuse Janner’s disdain for the democratic process.
On Janner’s retirement from the presidency (1985) it was assumed by the Janner camp that he would be succeeded by his chief apologist, Martin Savitt. This was not to be. Kopelowitz and his allies mounted a brilliant whispering campaign against Savitt, whom they defeated by just 14 votes.
“Kop” (as he was affectionately known) was at once thrown into a communal crisis of major proportions, triggered by the determination of the Farm Animal Welfare Council to either outlaw shechita – the Jewish humane method of farm animal food slaughter – or hedge it about with so many restrictions that it would be priced out of existence. The lead in the defence of shechita should have been assumed by the Board of Deputies’ Shechita Committee, advised by the Board’s two ecclesiastical authorities, the United Synagogue’s Chief Rabbi (Immanuel Jakobovits) and the Spiritual Head of the Spanish & Portuguese Jews’ Congregation (Dr Abraham Levy). But Kop was overawed by Jakobovits, and by his assurance that the Chief Rabbi’s close personal friendship with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher would somehow save the day.
So Dr Levy was sidelined, as was the Shechita Committee. The government, sensing that Kop could not be trusted to ‘deliver’ the assent of British Jewry to what was being proposed, simply turned its back on him and negotiated directly with other interested parties – notably the charedim, who were not represented at the Board.
The shechita controversy did nothing to enhance the reputation of the Board. Kop’s insistence on the need for ‘communal discipline,’ epitomised in his misguided maxim that–“there’s got to be a Jewish view at the end of the day; there can’t be two Jewish views or three Jewish views,” was simply no longer grounded in reality - if indeed it ever had been.
Scarcely less serious, the Board’s affairs had become clouded by acute financial problems, largely attributable to the unwillingness and refusal of member congregations to pay for its upkeep – in itself a virtual vote of no confidence. Meanwhile, Kopelowitz’s chairmanship of the Board’s plenary sessions began to fall apart. “Most men and women of any distinction,” Stephen Brook wrote frankly in The Club (1989), “have better things to do with their time than spend a dozen Sundays watching Dr. Kopelowitz mismanage a meeting.”
These failures and failings should not however blind us to Kop’s boundless energy, which he continued to place at the service of Jewry worldwide. Amongst the many communal positions that he held were Council membership of the United Synagogue, vice-president of the Council of Christians & Jews, and the presidency of the National Council for Soviet Jewry.
Dr Kopelowitz was buried in Newcastle-upon-Tyne on July 28, on what would have been his 39th wedding anniversary. He is survived by his wife Sylvia (née Waksman), whom he married in 1980 and his stepson, Judge David Waksman, Sylvia’s son by her first marriage. There were no children of his marriage to Sylvia. His younger brother Michael predeceased him in 2017.
GEOFFREY ALDERMAN
Dr Lionel Kopelowitz: born December 9, 1926. Died July 27, 2019
