The Chief Rabbi completes this month twenty years as Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the British Empire.
He was elected to that position, in succession to the late Dr. Hermann Adler, at a meeting of the Electoral College of British Congregations held on February 16th, 1913, under the chairmanship of the late Lord Rothschild. The induction ceremony was on April 14th of that year at the Great Synagogue.
“There is room for sincere congratulation to Dr. Hertz,” the Jewish Chronicle’ writes in an editorial article, “though fortunately this is not the moment at which to appraise his work for the Community. This much, however, can be said, and, in fairness, should not be omitted. There will always be critics who lament that this or that public man, or this or that institution, does not live up to past examples — to which the immortal answer, given by a famous editor when he was told that his paper was not as good as it once was, is not inappropriate — ‘it never was!’ It would be easy to point to things which might have been done, but were not, or to others which were done but might better have been left undone. But that would only be to say again what has been said many a time before—that the object of the criticism is only human, and the Jewish, like any other Community, is not fruitful in supermen. The Chief Rabbinate is not a bed of roses. We imagine that there has been hardly an incumbent of the office who has not regarded it as the reward of ambition rather than the gift of good fortune. It demands the possession of many signal qualities—scholarship, tact, courage, energy and invincible patience—such as are not often found faultlessly combined in a single individual. And it demands a flock to match! It may truly be said that if we have not secured the ideal Chief Rabbi, neither is British Jewry the ideal Community. And if we still want to know how exacting the position of Chief Rabbi is, we have only to recall how difficult it is to fill it whenever it falls vacant.
“Of more importance, however,” it goes on, “is it to take a glance at the office itself. As an institution, the Chief Rabbinate is an anomaly. Its existence has no justification in Jewish tradition. There is nothing really comparable with it among Jewries abroad. And it does not really measure up to its somewhat grandiloquent title. ‘Chief’ suggests a number of secondaries, all acknowledging the chieftancy. But we all know well
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.
