Obituary: Sir Sigmund Sternberg

After attending the Jewish gymnasium school, he went to a commercial college, where he was the butt of antisemitic taunts about “killing Jesus”. Ironically, having finally beaten his principal tormenter in a fight, he then started to take an interest in Christianity.

The young Sigmund was obliged to take on family responsibility in his early teens, after his father died. After police came to the door asking for him in late August, 1939, he acceded to his mother’s demand that he join his cousins in England. After the war, he returned to Hungary to find his mother, who had survived, and brought her to England.

In 1949, he married Ruth Schiff and the couple had two children, Michael and Frances. The marriage was dissolved in the mid 1960s but the couple remained on good terms and Sternberg was particularly attentive when Ruth was diagnosed with terminal cancer 30 years later.

In 1970, he married Hazel, the widow of his cousin, Victor Sternberg. She was an invaluable source of help to him in his endeavours and predeceased him, to his great distress, in 2014.

Despite his Orthodox origins, Sternberg joined the then RSGB after his divorce. He was a congregant at Alyth Gardens Synagogue and later became President of the Movement for Reform Judaism. He was also the principal sponsor of the Sternberg Centre for Judaism, in Finchley, north London, the largest Jewish cultural centre in Europe.

Sternberg had used his experience in the metal business to supply the government with materials for stripping cables, which became a constructive form of work for prison inmates. He also showed interest in matters relating to health and was brought in by Sir Keith Joseph, then Minister of Health in the Conservative government of the early 1960s, to help with the National Health Service.

An institution Sternberg took great interest in was the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists, of which he became a senior life vice-president. During the 1970s, he made efforts to reorganise health services for the Camden Area Health Authority. By the time he resigned in the 1980s — believing that too little time was devoted to patients and too much to management — he was already chairman of the North West Thames Regional Health Authority.

He was an active supporter of the Labour party and during the 1970s worked with prominent Labour politicians on company law reform and other projects. He was awarded a knighthood for services to industry in Harold Wilson’s resignation honours list in 1976.

Sir Sigmund had a close working relationship with Frank, later Lord, Judd, a former Director of Oxfam, who appreciated his help in handling tensions between Oxfam and the Jewish community. Another commitment was to the Rotary movement. He was listed among the 100 Great Rotarians.

In the late 1970s, he was directed towards the field of endeavour that was to play a leading role in his life, after being asked by the then president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews to “save” the Council of Christians and Jews.

Interfaith activities were to become his passion and the main source of his renown.

Appreciating the importance of Christian-Jewish relations, particularly in the wake of the Holocaust, Sir Sigmund had already been greatly moved by the Papal declaration, Nostra Aetate, promulgated in 1965, which absolved the Jewish people from the charge of deicide and accepted the Jewish religion as valid in its own right. He wished to see this commemorated every year as a Nostra Aetate Day.

He established relations with several branches of the Christian church, in particular with Catholics and, in 1985, was invested with the award of Knight Commander of the Equestrian Order of St Gregory, which was virtually unprecedented for a non-Catholic.

In 1986, Sir Sigmund helped arrange the visit of Pope John Paul II to the Tempio Maggiore, Rome’s Great Synagogue, the first visit of a Pope to a synagogue since apostolic times. He was also influential in bringing about the Vatican’s recognition of Israel and in resolving the imbroglio instigated by the presence of the Carmelite convent at Auschwitz.

In 1998, he was awarded the prestigious Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion.

Sternberg had long believed that interfaith dialogue should be extended to include Muslims and in 1997 set up the Three Faiths Forum with Sheikh Dr Zaki Badawi and the Rev Dr Marcus Braybrooke, a cause to which he remained passionately committed.

Sigmud Sternberg: born Budapest, 2 June 1921; died October 18, 2016