At a time when the Jewish world seemed increasingly polarised between a more insular piety and rising secularism, Rabbi Abraham Levy, who has died aged 83, held fast to his belief in the middle way.

Widely admired for his tolerance and educational vision, Levy was the exemplar of the Western Sephardi tradition, inspired by the great Spanish rabbis of the past whom he saw as “masters of synthesis”, combining commitment to the Torah with involvement in wider society.

While some Orthodox groups veered towards increasingly stringent interpretations of Jewish law, the Sephardim, he argued, saw a virtue in leniency.

His teaching of Torah came with a warm personal style. The definition of a good Jew, he was fond of saying, was “someone who wants to be a better Jew”. He would try to coax a person a little further on their Jewish path.

His approach, said one of his students, Rabbi Gideon Sylvester, now the United Synagogue’s Israel rabbi, was “lively, non-coercive and encouraging”.

His faith in the classic Sephardi legacy was underpinned by a sense of his own lineage as a descendant of exiles from Castile after the expulsion of 1492.

A relative of his mother in Morocco was knighted by the King of Spain in the 16th century. The earliest known rabbi on his father’s side could be traced to 17th-century Morocco.

He was born in Gibraltar to Rachel and Isaac Levy, the third of five children. The family flat was the first Jewish-owned property in the territory when acquired by a relative in the 1730s.

Young Abraham went to the Jewish primary school his father helped to re-establish after the Second World War but was sent to England to complete his education; firstly to the recently opened Carmel College in Oxfordshire under the headship of the formidable Rabbi Kopul Rosen, where he set his heart on becoming a rabbi; then to take A-levels and a University of London semitics degree as part of his ministerial training at Jews’ College.

The one thing he could remember about his college interview was being asked whether he played cricket.

Rabbi Abraham Levy

Rabbi Abraham Levy

At the age of 17 he was awarded a scholarship as student chazan (cantor) at the London synagogue to which he devoted most of his life, Lauderdale Road in Maida Vale, the flagship community of the Spanish and Portuguese Jews’ Congregation (as it was then called).

Although top hats and canonicals were being mothballed in most central Orthodox synagogues, he remained loyal to the S & P’s traditions of clerical dress, believing it bestowed elegance and dignity fitting to public worship.

He met his wife Estelle Nahum while on secondment at Holland Park Synagogue and married her in 1963, the year after obtaining his ministerial diploma. Continuing his rabbinic studies part-time at Jews’ College, he became the first student to receive semichah from Chief Rabbi Immanuel Jakobovits in 1967.

Appointed rabbi of Lauderdale Road in 1975, he began to make his mark in the wider Jewish community. In 1978, he launched the Young Jewish Leadership Institute, an innovative programme that aimed to equip British Jewry’s future lay leaders with a solid foundation of Jewish knowledge, whose tutors included the young Rabbi Jonathan Sacks.

The same year he completed his doctorate on court rabbis of medieval Castile.
His congregation’s politics would have tested the mettle of any rabbi. He learned to ride out the tensions that arose from a joint leadership arrangement whereby he served as communal rabbi — ( later “spiritual head” ) — while Dayan Pinchas Toledano headed the Sephardi Beth Din.

It took all his determination to bring to fruition the project closest to his heart: the opening of the Naima Jewish Preparatory School in Maida Vale in 1983, the first Sephardi school in the UK in a century.

While the past three decades have witnessed a huge expansion in Jewish day schooling in Britain, Rabbi Levy was ahead of the curve. Yet far from encouraging him, some of the old guard were deeply sceptical and tried to dissuade him.

It was the support of some of the families who had arrived in the exodus from the Middle East that proved decisive.

Apart from the traditional rabbinic skills, he was a peerless fundraiser, who continued to attract the backing that enabled the school, which celebrates its 40th anniversary in September, to flourish.

In his memoir A Rocky Road, he recalled visiting a casino to collect a cheque from two of the biggest donors to its new premises, the Shamoon brothers. He did not make wearing tzitzit a compulsory part of the school uniform for boys: he wanted them to wear it out of love.

His interfaith work assumed a higher profile in 1992 for the Sepharad, the international commemoration of the 500th anniversary of the expulsion of Jews from Spain.

He saw it as an opportunity to increase awareness of Sephardi history and heritage, while he helped to foster reconciliation with the country that had driven out his ancestors. King Carlos of Spain was impressed with his fluent Spanish. Spain made him a Knight Commander of the Order of Civil Merit and he was appointed OBE in 2004.

He reached beyond the Christian world to cultivate good relations with Morocco. And his diplomacy extended beyond the religious sphere: his uncle Sir Joshua Hassan, chief minister of Gibraltar, called on him at one point to act informally as an emissary to the Spanish Embassy in London.

Back home, when religious tensions within British Jewry were at their peak, he was the one rabbi able to maintain contacts across the denominational spectrum. At a service to mark the 350th anniversary of the readmission of Jews to England at Bevis Marks Synagogue in 2006, the ark was opened by Reform president Sir Sigmund Sternberg and veteran Hackney Charedi leader Joe Lobenstein.

Only the Sephardim, he believed, could have pulled off such a display of unity. When most British Orthodox rabbis shied away from Limmud, he stood by the cross-communal event and not only taught there himself but encouraged his rabbinic students to do so too. His wealth of experience made his counsel valued among colleagues, including his friend Jonathan Sacks.

But he was prepared to go against the then Chief Rabbi when his alma mater, Jews’ College — rebranded as the London School of Jewish Studies — fell into financial difficulties, successfully resisting its takeover by the United Synagogue.

Although he could not save the college’s ordination course, in 2006 he revived home-grown semichah with his long-term ally Lucien Gubbay, with whom he had collaborated on the publication of a practical guide to Judaism, Ages of Man, and an illustrated history, The Sephardim. Sponsored by the Montefiore Endowment, the programme uniquely enabled part-time study and introduced a fresh stream of rabbinic talent into communal service.

Ten years later, they went one better with the first home-grown dayanut training scheme, whose first graduate, Dayan Daniel Kada, has taken his seat on the Sephardi Beth Din.

“Where else, I ask, but under Rabbi Levy’s Montefiore umbrella do we see rabbis from the extreme right and left wings of our Orthodox community studying Torah together at the same table?” Mr Gubbay said during Rabbi Levy’s shivah.

By the time he retired from the pulpit aged 73, his achievements also included establishing the first local mikveh.

He remained actively engaged through his Montefiore projects and helped secure the patronage of the then Prince Charles for the appeal for Bevis Marks, whose new visitors’ centre is due to open later this year.

For him, the historic synagogue stood as testament to the deep roots of the Jewish community in this country and its traditions of integration. “England has been good to the Jews and the Jews have been good to England,” he would remind audiences on civic occasions.

Nothing gave him more satisfaction than his weekly visits to Naima JPS to speak to the children, which he maintained until last summer.

As one grateful former student recalled, its hallmark was a Jewish studies programme that “didn’t tell us there was only one way to be a Jew or that how we lived was wrong, but focused purely on giving us skills to live as an Orthodox Jew”.

He lost Estelle, his wife of 56 years, three years ago. He is survived by his son Julian, four grandchildren and a brother and a sister.

Rabbi Abraham Levy OBE: born 16 July 1939, died 24 December 2022