Immanuel Jakobovits, chief rabbi of Great Britain and the Commonwealth, has been awarded the 1991 Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, marking the first time that the prize has been given to a Jew in the award’s 19-year history.
Great Britain’s Prince Philip will present the prize to the outgoing chief rabbi at a private ceremony at Buckingham Palace on May 7. Public ceremonies honoring Jakobovits will take place in Toronto on May 27 and in Vancouver, Canada, on May 29.
The award, announced here Wednesday at the United Nations Church Center, is being granted as Lord Jakobovits retires from his post after a career that spanned five decades. It carries with it a stipend of 410,000 pounds sterling, the equivalent of about $800,000.
Jakobovits was knighted Sir Immune by Queen Elizabeth II in 1981 and made Baron Jakobovits of Regent’s Park by the queen in 1988, becoming the first rabbi ever to sit in Britain’s House of Lords.
Jakobovits is the author of several books about Jewish medical ethics and about Zionism, as well as numerous scientific and legal articles.
He is also an outspoken on the subject of Arab-Israeli peace. During a news conference here after he was announced as the winner, Jakobovits said that Jews and Palestinians must make “an effort of conciliation to reach a solution and an understanding.”
He said that he would not propose dealing with the Palestine Liberation Organization until the group removes from its charter a commitment to the destruction of the State of Israel.
THREE YEARS AFTER FUROR
Born in Konisberg, Germany, in 1921, Jakobovits fled Nazi terror in 1936 at the age of 15 and went to London, where five years later he occupied his first pulpit. By 1947, he was minister of the Great Synagogue of London.
He served as chief rabbi of Ireland from 1949 to 1958, and went on to become the founding rabbi of New York’s Fifth Avenue Synagogue in 1958. In 1967, he returned to Britain, where he was appointed chief rabbi.
Jakobovits’ selection as this year’s winner of the prize comes three years after international furor was aroused by awarding the prize to Dr. Inamullah Khan, secretary-general of the World Muslim Congress.
After several American and international Jewish organizations documented that Khan and the Muslim Congress were anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic, Templeton Prize sponsors delayed presentation of the award by several months.
Khan eventually received the award in September 1988 in Melbourne, Australia.
His organization’s newsletter has published anti-Jewish and anti-Israel diatribes, including an article decrying the “Zionist stranglehold” on the news media and American politics.
The Templeton Prize was created in 1972 by John Marks Templeton as a counterpart to the prizes in other disciplines awarded by the Nobel Prize Committee.
Past winners include Mother Teresa of Calcutta, the Rev. Billy Graham and Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
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