Rabbi Solomon Schonfeld, a leading Jewish educationalist and one of Anglo-Jewry’s most controversial personalities, died here last Sunday at the age of 72. Renowned for his strict Orthodoxy and aversion to Zionism, he single handedly established a chain of Jewish day schools, of which the best known were the Hasmonean grammar schools for boysand girls in London.
He exacted strict observance from his schools’ Jewish teachers, although many of the staff were non-Jewish. But despite his controversial policies, suchas refusing to recognize Israel Independence Day in his schools, he was widely respected, even among those who rejected his views.
A man of outstanding courage and resource, he was responsible, before and during World War II, for bringing thousands of Jewish children from continental Europe to England where he set up a special reception camp on the east coast. He chartered ships and trains and traveled to the continent himself to rescue whole families from the Nazis and bring them back to Britain.
Schonfeld was one of seven children of Dr. Avigdor Schonfeld and Rachel Stemberg. His most famous brother was the late Sir Andrew Schonfeld, the British economist and one-time director of Britain’s Royal Institute of International Affairs.
SACRIFICED EVERYTHING FOR HIS BELIEFS
Schonfeld was the presiding rabbi of the Union of Orthodox Hebrew Congregations, commonly known as Adath Yisroel. The Adath movement had been started by his father, but when the latter died at the age of 49, Solomon decided to enter the ministry and at the age of 18 left his English high school to study in Europe. He was sent to Hungary, from where his family originated, Lithuania and Germany. He returned to England three years later with a doctorate and a rabbinical diploma.
He took control of his late father’s day school movement, but shortly before the war he became the director of an emergency committee for European Jewish relief formed by the Chief Rabbi of the British Commonwealth, Dr. Joseph Hertz, whose daughter, Judith, was Schonfeld’s wife.
Schonfeld retired from the head mastership of the Hasmonean day schools five years ago and spent his remaining years writing Biblical commentaries. A tall commanding figure, he looked more like an autocratic British army colonel than a rabbi. He sacrificed every thing for his beliefs and his beloved day school movement and died, as he had lived, close to poverty.
Some 2,000 people followed his funeral cortege yesterday through the Stamford Hill district of north London, the city’s main center of ultra-Orthodox Jewry
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
