(JTA) — The queen of the Netherlands is naming one of the country’s chief rabbis an officer of the Order of Orange-Nassau, among Holland’s highest honors.
The honor will be awarded to Rabbi Binyomin Jacobs, chief rabbi of the Inter-Provincial Chief Rabbinate in Holland, next week. The announcement of the honor was made Friday by the Dutch royal commissioner.
Jacobs, 63, lives in Amersfoort and acts as chief rabbi everywhere in the Netherlands except for Amsterdam, Rotterdam and The Hague, which have their own chief rabbis.
The Netherlands-born Jacobs received the honor for his interfaith and intercommunal work.
In recent years, Jacobs has been involved in reaching out to people were born Jewish during the Holocaust and given up for adoption to non-Jewish parents. Jacobs says that many such individuals seek to reconnect with Judaism as they get older.
Jacobs, who in 1975 was named Dutch emissary for the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, is one of the co-founders of the Rabbinical Centre of Europe. He is a prominent advocate for kosher slaughter (shechita) in the Netherlands and in Europe.
In 2003, Rabbi Ies Vorst of Amstelveen, a municipality south of Amsterdam, was made a member of the Order of Orange-Nassau.
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