VII - Setting People Thinking … As a Start
No one could have guessed it at the time, but there were actually two Chief Rabbis who participated in the inauguration of the new Lubavitch House in 1968. A special reception for students was addressed by Rabbi Zalman Posner (1927-2014), of Tennessee. A photo from that occasion shows a young man listening to the speaker in an attitude of intense thoughtfulness; head cocked, brows drawn, and chin in hand. He was the leader of the Cambridge University Jewish Society and his name was Jonathan Sacks.
Two years earlier, in 1966, the Chronicle had reported on some unusual events at the University of Cambridge: One Saturday evening a student answered a knock on the door “to find a short figure in a black hat, black coat and black beard, and with shining eyes behind gleaming spectacles … ‘Would you like to come to a party?’ said the figure.”
This figure was none other than Faivish Vogel. “That’s the only way to do it,” he told the reporter, “you’ve got to knock on their doors and make yourself known.” On that Friday, the reporter wrote, “half-a-dozen chassidim” had “set off with half a case of whisky and an unlimited supply of enthusiasm.” They had been invited by Sacks to celebrate Shabbat with members of the Cambridge Jewish Society, and were now in search of more students to participate in some spirited singing and debate.
“The student was too dumbfounded to ask questions. He put on his coat and followed, and found himself at a melava malka,” a meal marking the departure of Shabbat. According to the Chronicle, he “did not regret the encounter,” finding himself “greatly stimulated by the Lubavitch attitude.”
“Once we set people thinking,” Vogel is quoted as saying, “we’re happy. We can’t hope to do more than that—as a start.” That Shabbat in Cambridge was indeed the start of a relationship that would be highly consequential, for Sacks personally, and for Anglo-Jewry in its totality. New vistas of thought and study were opened for him, setting his life on a new course.
In the summer of 1968 Sacks traveled to the United States, where he was given an audience with the Rebbe. After answering some philosophical questions Sacks posed, the Rebbe started to question him about what he was doing to increase the involvement of his fellow students in Jewish life. “Nobody finds themselves in a situation,” the Rebbe told him. “You put yourself in a situation.” Sacks regarded this as the moment that “changed my life.” He was suddenly able to see himself as a leader. Rather than a mere subject of circumstance, the Rebbe taught Sacks to be an agent of history.
After completing his degree at Cambridge, Sacks studied at a Chabad yeshivah in the Holy Land. He then returned to England, married, wrote a doctoral thesis on the rabbinic concept of responsibility for others, and earned rabbinic ordination.
Throughout, Sacks maintained a very close relationship with both Vogel and Lew, often studying with them and celebrating Shabbat in their homes. At their suggestion, he visited the Rebbe again in 1978, seeking advice as to whether he should begin a career as an academic, an economist, or a barrister. The Rebbe’s response was that he should train rabbis and become a congregational rabbi himself. In 2019, Sacks explained just how decisive the Rebbe’s intervention was:
When I came back, I have to say it was quite an ordeal, because what the Rebbe actually wanted was against the United Synagogue by-laws. You couldn’t be a Rabbi of the United Synagogue and have some employment elsewhere (in my case, in Jews’ College, training rabbis.) And yet my own rav, Rabbi Nachum Rabinovitch, who would not, by anyone, I think, be thought of as a chassid or a chabadnik, as soon as he heard what the Rebbe had said, he said, “Okay since the Rebbe said it, it has to happen.” And he phoned-up Chief Rabbi Jakobovits and told him that if it was against the United Synagogue by-laws, the United Synagogue would have to change the by-laws … And that is how I came to be, eventually, head of Jews’ College and training the rabbinate for Anglo Jewry.1
Between 1984 and 1990, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks served as Principal of Jews’ College, while leading Golders Green Synagogue and then Western Marble Arch Synagogue. In 1991, he was inducted as Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, succeeding Rabbi Jakobovits. “When I was faced with a question of whether or not to accept the invitation to become Chief Rabbi,” Sacks recalled, “I set out the pros and cons and I asked the Rebbe, “Should I accept the offer, if it is made?” And the Rebbe, without writing a single word, put in the typographical symbol for invert word order: ‘Should I’ became, ‘I should.’”
The first book ever published by Sacks appeared in 1986, under the title Torah Studies. It was released by Lubavitch Foundation and was a groundbreaking collection of essays based on the Rebbe’s talks on the weekly Parshah. Vogel and Sacks would first study the original Yiddish essays together. Sacks would then reconstruct the teaching in English. In his own words, his goal was to “sketch the mood and thrust of the original ideas, full as they are of detail, nuance and subtlety that verge on the untranslatable.” In the introduction, Sacks credited Vogel and Lew for their encouragement and help, and dedicated the volume to their friendship and inspiration.
Years later, this work would provide the blueprint for Sacks’ popular Covenant and Conversation series. As he commented in the introduction to Torah Studies: “The very forms of these talks — their intellectual rhythms of question and answer, their reasoning and rigour — mirrors a central feature of Chabad, that through a mental journey we affect both emotion and action … in perceiving reality we become our real selves.”
VIII - At the Cultural Avant-Garde
Alongside his visits to student societies up and down the country, Vogel was also attracting attention among writers, actors, and other cultural figures. A case in point was Wolf Mankowitz, a prominent and prolific playwright, novelist, and screenwriter. In 1966, he provided scripted commentary for a video production about the work of Lubavitch, and later told journalists he would make “an hour-long television film” about Chassidism if only he had sufficient funding.
While writing a play based on the Biblical story of Samson and Delilah, Mankowitz visited the Rebbe in New York. It was soon after the Six Day War, and he was struggling with the question of Jewishness in an age of cultural and political emancipation. An introductory essay to the play includes a somewhat exoticizing reconstruction of his conversation with the Rebbe, before formulating the essence of his question: “What, indeed, is the point of Jews remaining Jews either by their own efforts or by those of their enemies? Why must Samson pursue his painful individuation?”
Echoing the Rebbe’s exhortation that “man’s best course is to follow, unquestioningly, the Torah,” Mankowitz concludes that “the sole reason why the Jews may have been Chosen” must lie in “the ethic and aesthetics of the Mosaic Code,” which are “the primary Jewish contribution to the development of Man.” He continues: “If the centers of civilization are destroyed in one holocaust, if Jerusalem itself with the last vestiges of the Temple and the national identity of the Jewish Israelis are all wiped out, somewhere, somehow, nomadic Jewish wanderers far from the centers of destruction will preserve the Code, and when ten of them meet in the desert of glass the civilizing process will begin again.”
For Mankowitz, Vogel and his fellow chassidim were such nomadic bearers of the seed of civilization. For him, they were not throwbacks from the Jewish past, but avatars of Judaism’s immortal ethic and aesthetic, which transcends the vagaries of time. When Lubavitch House was opened in 1968, Mankowitz co-hosted a cultural salon as part of the celebration. “This Lubavitch center,” he declared, “is a place created by Jewish energy for the promulgation of everything that is essential and permanently Jewish.” On another occasion he quipped, “If I were a good Jew, I should like to be a good Lubavitch Jew.”
In April 1970, The Jewish Chronicle reported on a party held at a private address in London’s exclusive Mayfair district, marking the launch of the newly published Challenge: An Encounter with Lubavitch-Chabad. “Rabbi Vogel was there with several colleagues from Lubavitch House, yet the atmosphere was more that of a grand literary party than a Chassidic kumzits.”
A photograph shows Vogel in conversation with the property developer Arnold Lee, who was the evening’s host, and Jeannette Kupfermann, an actor and writer who was married to the Viennese-born Holocaust survivor and expressionist painter Jacques Herbert Kupfermann. She would go on to earn a graduate degree in anthropology for her study of the Lubavitch Chassidim of Stamford Hill, the London neighborhood where Lubavitch House was built.
In her subsequent book, The MisTaken Body, Kupfermann noted “a phenomenal increase” in the use of the mikvah among Jewish women in London, despite a wider “context of religious decline.” She went on to explain this in terms of a renewed recognition of the insufficiency of “ad-hoc ritual,” which “can never provide for the same integration of the individual into the world as does a total systematic religion.”
Among other literary luminaries who were present that evening in 1970 was Bernice Rubens. Later that year she would become the first woman, the first Jew, and the first person born in Wales, to win the Booker Prize, for her novel The Elected Member. The anti-hero at the novel’s center is the troubled son of a rabbi, echoing Rubens’ own path as the product of a very traditional Jewish family trying to find her way in a society that was at once familiar and foreign.
For figures such as these, caught between the particularities of their Judaism and the ostensibly universal discourse of modern culture, Vogel was somehow able to bridge a vital gap. With his charm, eloquence, and intelligence, he manifested not only Judaism’s timelessness, but its of-the-moment relevance too.
Vogel sometimes caused controversy with his forays into the Anglo-Jewish cultural scene. But he wasn’t deterred. Back in 1968, when Chaim Topol was starring in the London production of Fiddler on the Roof, Vogel visited him backstage and presented him with a pair of tefillin. A picture of the rabbi and the actor was published in the Chronicle, eliciting condemnation from Orthodox ideologues who thought this amounted to some sort of sacrilege.
“I sent a report to the Rebbe,” Vogel later recalled, “and attached the critique of Lubavitch that had been published, asking if I had acted properly.” The next letter he received from the Rebbe included a handwritten blessing: “You should have much success in the holy work, and not be intimidated at all in the face of etc., for G‑d is with us.”
“The Rebbe did not write G‑d is with you,” Vogel emphasized, “but included himself with me in the situation … This feeling of comforting embrace raised our spirits and gave us renewed energy.”
In 1971, the novelist and playwright Herman Wouk flew from Washington to address Lubavitch Foundation’s annual dinner. Wouk’s grandfather was a Lubavitcher from Minsk, and the grandson remained a steadfastly observant Jew even after attaining vast literary success. Before shipping out to war with the United States Navy, back in 1943, his mother had brought him to receive a blessing from Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, the sixth rebbe of Chabad-Lubavitch. Later he would enjoy close relationships with several Chabad emissaries. But he had not met with the Rebbe himself, face to face, until Vogel suggested it.
Wouk arrived in London fresh from his very first encounter with the Rebbe. He took the opportunity to reflect on the “extraordinary intensity” of the Rebbe’s personality: “Here is a man who carries the weight of a world—if not of the world—on his soul. This is a feeling that never quite leaves you all the time you speak to him, though he speaks simply, clearly, and even humorously.”
“The Jewish people and the Jewish destiny,” Wouk continued, “are my life. In my considered judgment, Lubavitch has made, is making, and will continue to make a substantial contribution to the coming renaissance and redemption of the Jewish people, and on that basis are entitled to your support.” According to a Jewish Chronicle report, Wouk’s appeal helped raise £110,000 “towards the cost of the second phase of the new Lubavitch building in Stamford Hill.”
IX - Into the 1980s: Fervor, Expansion, Openness, and Optimism
In 1977, a multi-page feature on “The Chasidim of Stamford Hill,” ran in a Chronicle supplement. The Chabad-Lubavitch community is described as “a new plant” in Anglo-Jewry’s “unyielding soil,” which nonetheless, “has struck strong roots.” From its center in London, where its community “consists of some 200 families” it “has spread to Leeds, Birmingham, Manchester and Glasgow.” The reporter was most struck by the sight of crowds, several hundred strong, listening for “six hours or more … far into the night” to the Rebbe’s public farbrengens broadcast live from Lubavitch International Headquarters, in Brooklyn, N.Y. (Weekday farbrengens typically began at 9:30 p.m., which would be 2:30 a.m. in London.)
During the preceding decade, Stamford Hill had undergone a major transition. Take for example, the case of “the New Synagogue.” Constructed on Egerton Road in 1915 by one of the five founding congregations of the United Synagogue, it was a bastion of the decorous and distinctly English mode of Orthodox liturgical practice known as minhag anglia (literally: English custom). Now, however, many of its congregants were moving to “newer and more salubrious ‘Jewish’ districts.” Their exodus made way for the “noticeable move of Chasidim from other parts into the mainly superannuated property of the district.” By 1977, “London’s Bobov Chasidim” had already acquired many properties on Egerton Road, with plans to build a yeshivah, complete with dormitories, as well as a study hall and a mikvah. They would purchase the New Synagogue itself, a Grade II listed building, in 1987.
As a general rule, according to the Chronicle feature, “the Chasidim” are “inward-looking,” asking only “to be left to go their own way.” In contrast “stands the outgoingness, the ahavas yisroel (love of Jews), of Lubavitch.” Even while participating in Stamford Hill’s turn towards a more overtly fervent tradition, the Chabad-Lubavitch community remained an oasis of openness, where all sorts of Jews felt comfortable. In large part, this was attributable to “the young and personable executive director at their London headquarters, Rabbi S. F. (Faivish) Vogel.”
One young intellectual who became involved in Chabad during the early 1970s was Naftali Loewenthal, then a graduate student studying under Professor Chimen Abramsky at University College London (UCL). Abramsky was a scholar of both Jewish history and Marxism, renowned for his vast personal collection of books, and for his unparalleled bibliographical expertise. His father was one of the leading rabbinical figures of the twentieth century, and had been sent to the Siberian Gulags as punishment for his “counter-revolutionary” (i.e. religious) activities. Chimen had a close relationship with his father, yet lived the life of a socialist intellectual, far removed from any rabbinical aspiration.
Nevertheless, Loewenthal recalls his professor coming to Lubavitch House to hear a live broadcast of the Rebbe speaking. Unsurprisingly, it was Rabbi Faivish Vogel who had invited him. Vogel and Abramsky apparently became acquainted via the legendary diamond dealer and book collector Jack Lunzer (1924-2016), who created the Valmadonna Trust library of rare Hebrew books, incunabula, and manuscripts. Unlike some of the newer Lubavitchers in attendance, Chimen was fluent in Yiddish, and soon “found himself providing … an English summary of the Rebbe’s Yiddish words during the intervals between the talks.”2
Vogel’s relationship with Lunzer proved extremely instrumental in the mid-1980s, when rare books began disappearing from Chabad’s Central Library in New York. One of those books, a manuscript Haggadah crafted in 1760 by Chaim ben Asher Anshel in the town of Kittsee, near Pressburg, was purchased by an acquaintance of Lunzer’s in Switzerland. Beginning with this lead, Vogel ultimately located some thirty additional volumes that had made their way into the European rare book market. At Vogel’s word, the Rebbe’s secretariat wrote checks to fund their retrieval; the Kittsee Haggadah alone carried a price tag of $140,000.
In the spring of 1985, an exhibition was held at the Royal Lancaster Hotel. “Maimonides: A Model for our Times” displayed rare early editions of works by the great medieval rabbi, marking his 850th anniversary, courtesy of Lunzer’s Valmadonna Trust. Organized by the Office of the Chief Rabbi in conjunction with Lubavitch Foundation, it opened with a discussion between Chief Rabbi Jakobovits and Rabbi Dr. Jonathan Sacks, Principal of Jews’ College. Rabbi S. F. Vogel was in the chair.
A photo of Lord Gowrie, Minister of State for the Arts, viewing the exhibition together with Jakobovits and Vogel ran in The Jewish Chronicle. “The large turnout,” Vogel told reporters, “proved that there was a desire for Jewish learning in this country.” In a nod to chassidic custom, the audience was invited to echo his optimism with “a l’chaim in vodka,” offering “a toast to the spirit of Maimonides.”
X - Visibility and Voice on the National Stage
Over the course of decades of intensive work, Vogel’s connections with rabbinic, business, cultural, and political leaders gave Chabad-Lubavitch national visibility and voice.
When thousands of Jews fled Iran’s Islamic Revolution in 1979, many parents entrusted their children to Chabad representatives who airlifted them to Europe. Their ultimate destination was the United States, but until they could obtain the necessary papers, Vogel was tasked with hosting some 200 children in England. Vogel called Greville Janner, a Jewish member of parliament, and asked him to persuade the Home Secretary, William Whitelaw, to grant temporary permission for the residence of these refugees in the UK. When Whitlaw asked who would guarantee their stay would remain temporary, Janner responded: “Rabbi Vogel of the Lubavitch Foundation.”
Notably, Vogel emphasized, Janner was a member of the Labour party, while Whitelaw was a member of the Conservative party. Visas were granted for a period of one year, and Vogel mobilized other institutions to help host the children. Some of the boys were hosted at Carmel College, others were enrolled at London’s Hasmonean School, while most of the girls attended the Lubavitch Girls School in Stamford Hill.
Back in 1972, that school had been visited by Margaret Thatcher, in her capacity as Minister of Education. In 1976, as leader of the opposition, she sent a congratulatory telegram to the seventh anniversary dinner of Lubavitch Foundation of Glasgow, Scotland. One of Vogel’s aims was to secure state-funded status for the Lubavitch school system. Unfortunately, although other government grants were secured along the way, this did not begin to come to fruition until 2003. But Vogel was equally interested in promoting a public educational agenda, extending outward into British society more broadly.
By the mid-1980s the Rebbe was increasingly speaking of the Torah’s universal ethical message, and of the obligation on Jews to communicate it to their gentile neighbors. To this end, Vogel spearheaded the production of a series of short films designed to be used by schools in social studies curricula. As explained by Naftali Loewenthal, “Each sequence set out a moral question, followed by a variety of responses,” and “there is nothing overtly Jewish in any way about the characters or images.” Topics ranged from practical dilemmas of financial and sexual ethics to more abstract discussions “about the meaning of life and the existence of G‑d.”3
Among the chief supporters of Lubavitch during this period was the politically connected lawyer, developer, and philanthropist Godfrey Bradman. A 1988 profile of Bradman highlighted his friendship with Vogel, along with a Megillah reading he organized at Claridge’s, the luxury hotel in Mayfair. “I thought it would be a way of interesting people who wouldn’t normally read the Megila [sic] and wouldn’t necessarily go to the synagogue,” Bradman explained. “Afterwards there was a kosher breakfast and dancing … I have a lot to thank Feivish Vogel for. He showed me the road.”
Bradman didn’t only invest directly in Lubavitch, but in a host of other organizations devoted to various social, medical, and environmental causes. His social consciousness was explicitly shaped by his ongoing engagement with Jewish practice and learning. “He found a Talmudic justification,” reported the Chronicle, “for his clean atmosphere campaigns, by quoting the prohibition of a permanent threshing floor within 50 cubits of the city limits because the wind-born chaff might damage the health of the city dwellers.”
Vogel and Bradman both made efforts to raise awareness of the Torah’s view on the value of human life in an era when abortion was increasingly coming to be seen as a social question rather than a moral one. At Vogel’s suggestion, Chief Rabbi Jakobovits drew up a memorandum setting out the halachic opposition to terminating pregnancies for “social” reasons. The memorandum was mailed to 2,200 Jewish doctors. According to the Chronicle, Bradman also discussed the issue directly with the prime minister at the time, Margaret Thatcher, when hosting her for lunch.
In 1989, Bradman took part in a meeting between the leaders of Lubavitch Foundation and Prime Minister Thatcher. A photo in The Jewish Chronicle showed Rabbis Vogel and Sudak presenting her with a silver menorah as “a tribute to religious freedom in Britain.” Also pictured is Anthony Steen, a Jewish member of the governing party at the time.
Later, in 1992, Thatcher recorded a personal tribute to the Rebbe, saying that she “wished to honor leadership itself … I honor the rabbi, the work he’s done, and the example he’s set, and the inspiration therefore that he has given to many many people, and will continue to give.”
Epilogue: Worlds Converge in a Life of Ideology and Activism
Throughout his career, Vogel’s activism and fundraising was powered by his ideological drive to share Jewish knowledge and teach Torah. He taught weekly classes on Friday evenings at Lubavitch House, and during some periods taught Chassidic thought in the Lubavitch Senior Girls' School. He also studied one-on-one with many individuals. In the case of Binyamin Cohen, a young man growing up in a typical anglo-Jewish household a couple of doors down from Vogel’s own home, this proved transformative. Vogel made time to study Tanya with him. Today, Rabbi Binyamin Cohen serves as the head of the Chabad yeshivah in Melbourne, Australia, where he has raised several generations of students himself.
Vogel was famous for his by-invitation-only “Sunday shiur.” This bi-weekly class was primarily attended by philanthropic supporters, and by other influential individuals such as academics, doctors, and lawyers. Channa Pruss, a daughter of Vogel who served as his secretary in the eighties, recalls that the discussion would often turn to recent teachings from the Rebbe or to the Rebbe’s opinion on current events.
In addition to expanding Chabad’s activities in the United Kingdom, she explained, Vogel was deeply committed to furthering the reach of the Rebbe’s message and perspective. This extended especially to questions relating to security and Jewish identity in the Holy Land, and his advocacy on these issues sometimes brought him into direct conflict with the strongly held opinions of Chief Rabbi Jakobovits. Despite such differences, the two men remained respectful colleagues and continued to work together on the various projects already described.
A closer intellectual partner for Vogel was the next chief rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, who would be installed in that office in 1991, and whose entire career was shaped by a deep association with Lubavitch. In 1981, Sacks participated in an International Symposium on Jewish Mysticism, along with Rabbis Immanuel Schochet, Yitzchak Block, and Adin Even-Israel (Steinsaltz). The symposium was organized by the aforementioned Bentzion Rader, but the vision was provided by Vogel. Proceedings were published as To Touch the Divine, with acknowledgment made of “Rabbi N. Sudak and Rabbi S.F. Vogel,” along with the latter’s old study partner, “Rabbi Y. Friedman, [of] New York, U.S.A.,” for “their guidance and assistance in the compilation of this volume.”
Two decades later, in 2000 and 2001, Vogel organized events at Brandeis University and King’s College London. Under the banner “Worlds Converge,” he brought scholars from within Chabad and university-trained scholars into fruitful dialogue. Reflecting on her participation in these events, Dr. Ada Rapoport-Albert of University College London told The Jewish Chronicle: “It confirms just what I like about Chabad, it wants to engage people who are not part of it, even people like myself who are not part of the Orthodox world but are intimately connected with Jewish tradition.”
In 2003, Vogel organized a conference on the ethical role of religion in society. “The problem we confront today,” he explained, “is that in the eyes of many people, the intensification of religion seems the reverse of progress. We’ve got to argue why real monotheism, in the framework of the Noahide laws, is the solution for mankind.” Of course, the concern to communicate Judaism’s moral ethic in ways that would be universally resonant was shared by Sacks, who attended the “Religion for Humanity” event to deliver “a major address on faith.”
Vogel’s relationship with Sacks stands as an important indicator of his successful and enduring influence on Anglo-Jewry as a whole. Three decades after first returning from New York City as “a pupil of the Lubavitcher Rebbe,” Vogel saw the installation of one of his own pupils as Chief Rabbi. In the intervening years, he had influenced many other individuals who would similarly go on to become educators and communal leaders across the Jewish world.
Equally important was his pioneering launch of new kinds of communal institutions, and his catalyzation of new kinds of encounters, or convergences—meetings that thrive on difference, forging unexpected intellectual exchanges and personal relationships. Perhaps more than his erudition, eloquence, organizational prowess, confidence, and charisma, it was Faivish Vogel’s capaciousness that enabled him to set Anglo-Jewish life on a new foundation.
Rabbi Shraga Faivish Vogel passed away on the 10th of Cheshvan, 5785 (November 10, 2024), in London, UK. The above profile was published to mark his first yahrzeit.
In addition to The Jewish Chronicle newspaper, whose archived copies contain hundreds of references to Vogel and his work, this profile draws on interviews conducted by the author with Rabbi Shmuel Lew, Rabbi Faitel Levin, Dr. Naftali Loewenthal, Mrs. Channa Pruss, Rabbi Yitzchak Sufrin and others. Further sources include: 1) A three-part feature published in the Hebrew language Kfar Chabad Magazine, issues 1965, 1966, and 1967. 2) “Soul Interviews with Rabbi Faivish Vogel” by Eli Friedman (available on YouTube). 3) Interviews conducted with Vogel by Dovid Margolin and generously shared with the author. 4) Bentzi Avtzon’s “Homesick for Lubavitch” interview with Sandy Weinbaum.
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