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16—MARYLEBONE JOURNAL BIG INTERVIEW


JEWRY SERVICE


Jackie Modlinger meets the human dynamo that is Baroness Julia Neuberger, the charismatic senior rabbi who has recently returned to her spiritual home at the West London Synagogue


Dame, baroness, senior rabbi, public servant, teacher, writer, wife, mother and philanthropist – despite the absence of a cape, I think I may have finally met Superwoman. Julia Neuberger is just back from


a weekend in Israel, where she has been celebrating her aunt’s 90th birthday, when I catch up with her for a precious one-hour slot in her hectic schedule. Our interview is sandwiched between a morning at her office at the West London Synagogue in Marylebone and an afternoon at The House of Lords, where she acts as a Liberal Democrat whip, a position she will relinquish in September, when her husband Anthony also steps down as head of department and professor of finance


at the University of Warwick. She will, however, continue to sit on the crossbenches in the Lords. God forbid she have a rest. For Julia, her recent appointment


as the synagogue’s senior rabbi marks something of a homecoming. “My parents, my father’s elder brother and sister-in-law were all members here,” she says. “It is the congregation that I grew up in and it feels like home. My father was a warden here and taught at the religion school. Monty Moss, of Moss Bros, equipped him with his morning dress for 30 quid. I teased Monty with that in my first sermon.” Julia grew up in Belsize Park,


north London, the only child of Walter and Liesel (Alice) Schwab. The couple met through Julia’s


paternal grandmother, Anna, who chaired the welfare committee of the Refugee Council. Her British-born father was a civil servant, her mother a refugee who arrived in Britain from Nazi Germany in 1937, aged 22, and who, as Julia puts it, “felt solidly, ethnically Jewish, but very rarely came to synagogue”. Julia’s father became an ardent


Zionist in the 1930s. “He went to Israel, was involved in Habonim [a Zionist youth movement], became a Reform Jew in Palestine. He went with Abba Eban, Walter Ettinghausen, Teddy Kollek [erstwhile Mayor of New York]. He didn’t get his degree at Cambridge because, as an ardent Zionist, he left before he finished, returning to help


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