In 1989, June Jacobs, one of British Jewry’s most intrepid leaders, was in the eye of a storm. As chair of the Board of Deputies’ foreign affairs committee she held peace talks with Abu Sharif of the Palestine Liberation Organisation. The “treachery” led several deputies to demand her resignation
She survived, but as a trenchant critic of Israel’s role as an occupying power, she was not likely to be muzzled for long. “Talking in itself can’t hurt anyone,” she told me in an interview. “If you go with the love of the Jewish people in your heart, that’s a positive act.”
But the Israeli government had banned contact with the PLO, so her meeting with Sharif fanned the flames within a community keen to toe the line. She considered it “absurd” that Israelis could be prosecuted for talking to the PLO, and believed the dissensions within the Jewish community should reflect Israel’s. Many admired her pioneering spirit, perceiving in her a potential change for women’s activism. Dr Lionel Kopelowitz, Board president from 1985-1991, described her as a “dynamic force who showed great signs of leadership”.
June Jacobs, who has died aged 88, was called a “talented maverick”, by the lawyer Lionel Bloch. At the time of the Board fiasco, she was supported by Jewish Quarterly editor Colin Shindler, Yakar director Rabbi Michael Rosen, and Michael May, director of the Institute of Foreign Affairs, all of whom bemoaned the lack of leadership within British Jewry.
“We are all responsible for Israel,” she declared. “Being silent about the Occupied Territories is very dangerous if you happen to believe that not everything there is all right.”
But Jacobs’s left-of-centre views disturbed the cosy, complacency of Jewish loyalists. Although coming too early in the feminist era to have a career, she admitted to being “a small-f feminist.”
She was born into an affluent, enlightened family. Her parents Lily and Louis Caller did not believe Jews should only study Judaism. One of three children, June was sent to a boarding school in Tetbury, Gloucestershire during the Second World War, where she studied Latin, played lacrosse and flirted with the “hunting, fishing and shooting set.”
She studied at South Hampstead High School but, to her regret, failed to win a place at the London School of Economics. Frustrated in her desire to become a probation officer, she went into supply teaching. Youth work at Brady and the Association of Jewish Youth (AJY) fostered her sense of communal duty. She married Basil Jacobs, managing director of Willowbrooks tailors, whom she described as a “very, very introverted intellectual whose real love was painting.” Soon after her marriage, she joined the Jewish Child’s Day Committee, of which she would become honorary life president.
Basil’s early interest in Soviet Jewry may have inspired her as she began campaigning vigorously for exit visas on their behalf. As chair of the National Council for Soviet Jews, she risked jail to fly to the USSR to visit Jews who were refused permission to emigrate to Israel. In 1971, she delivered a letter to the Soviet Embassy calling for their release.
“I was desperately involved with Soviet Jewry and I wanted them to be free…that ultimately led to my involvement with Israel,” she said.
Superficially, Jacobs seemed the inveterate committee person with her compound Jewish interests: British Friends of the Diaspora Museum,National Council for Soviet Jewry, Jewish Child’s Day, International Council of Jewish Women, the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, the New Israel Fund, Jcore — for which she was one of the first volunteers to sign up after it was founded in 1976 — and a host of others into which she put her heart and soul.
She threw herself into what she called the political hegemony of Orthodox men, and particularly the agunot, chained wives, those refused a Jewish divorce by their husbands. At a distance, she radiated a certain power, imposing but never formidable. But it all dwindled in the face of her sheer vitality, her responsiveness, the clipped emphasis of her phrases. And a certain innocence. Blessed with good looks and energy, she was a captivating speaker whose ideas flowed with breathless rapidity. Her willingness to take risks for her beliefs won respect even from opponents.“And when you’re that good-looking,”confided a friend, “you’re bound to have problems.”
Her Georgian home reflected the art and culture she had once shared with her husband; heirlooms and memorabilia, an impressive, 20th-century art collection garnered from Basil’s Bruton Street gallery —a Mané-Katz, a Picasso ceramic, oriental vases, bound volumes of Gibbons’ British Empire and a marble kitchen table-top standing on two wrought iron sewing machines.
Jacobs confessed to being a pragmatic Zionist. She stressed she was no political animal, just guided by instinct and a sense of fair play.
This middle-of-the-road liberalism attracted her to the Social Democrats at their inception, but she soon became irritated by their disintegration — “leaving us once again with the two-party system!” It was a measure of her refusal to confine herself to parochial issues that she insisted Jews should embrace many points of view on immigration, racial harmony and environmental issues, subjects so topical today.
In the mid 1980s, Jacobs fought, with limited success, to create a Jewish-black alliance through the Council for Community Relations; she was involved with the battle for Syrian-Jewish rights, and earlier still as a delegate from the International Council of Jewish Women to a UN women’s conference in Nairobi, she skilfully overturned an anti-Israel resolution. She did so by nurturing her strong contacts with the Palestinian delegation for which the Deputies would later vilify her. In 2009, she was awarded a CBE for her contribution to human rights and interfaith work.
She deplored the fact that young people needed Auschwitz ---“which must never be forgotten” --- in order to identify as Jews.
“But there is a joy in Judaism and an exciting and wonderful history.”
She is survived by her children Keren Durant, Nick and Robin, grandchildren Simon, Matthew and Emily and great grandchildren Tom and Gili. Basil predeceased her in 1973.
GLORIA TESSLER
June Jacobs: born June 1, 1930. Died July 22, 2018
