From Haifa to Jerusalem one day last week, pious Jews of all degrees turned out in a heavy rain to welcome to the Holy Land a sharp-eyed, black-bearded man just arrived from Europe. He was Dr. Isaac Herzog, 48, elected by a modern Sanhedrin or council of 70 Jewish elders to be Chief Rabbi of the Ashkenazic community of Palestine succeeding the late Dr. Abraham Kook.
Unlike U. S. Jews, some European congregations elect a man of learning, not necessarily a native, to head their national community. Because Judaism is congregational rather than hierarchical, he lays down no law, chiefly presides over religious courts and ceremonials. Son of a rabbi who used to head the Russian-Polish Jewish community in Paris, Isaac Herzog went to London University, became a rabbi in 1910. First the Jews of Belfast, then those of Dublin, chose him their leader. In 1925 he became Chief Rabbi of the 3,686 Jews of the Irish Free State, liked the post well enough to decline the Chief Rabbinate of Greece (72,800 Jews) in 1932.
Erudite not only in Hebrew, but in modern tongues and mathematics, Rabbi Herzog is at work on a five-volume work, The Main Institutions of Jewish Law. To Palestine his arrival signalized perhaps smoother relations with the Mandatory Power. He is an old friend of the British High Commissioner, General Sir Arthur Grenfell Wauchope. In a statement which made good reading for Jews and could not possibly irritate goyim he declared:
“The wonderful preservation of the ‘people of the Book’ is a great, living proof of Divine Providence in this world, and, prophetically interpreted, the rebuilding of the Jewish national home after many centuries of desolation means that a people that has already given so much to civilization is now called on to rekindle the light of God in the Holy Land, link the East and West and send forth new waves of light—religious, ethical and cultural— to all mankind.”
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