Chief Rabbi Jacobs

Diary Sept. 25, outgoing Rosh Hashanah, A normal rabbi is busy preparing his speeches for the synagogue services on Erev (the eve of) Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. In addition, he will assist his wife with the preparation of the elaborate and festive Yom Tov meals, which will of course be attended by guests.

The Alter Rebbe, the founder of Chabad Hasidism, the movement within Judaism to which I belong, was the regular weekly Baal Kore, the person who reads from the Torah. When he was not in Lyozna on the Shabbat when parsha Tawo (Deuteronomy 27) was read, as it will be this coming Shabbat, his son, who

The Sidra for the coming Shabbat begins with the commandment to “appoint judges and law enforcement officers at all your gates.” When I follow the news, look around me, and see how our society is threatened by anarchy, I can only say that this ancient Jewish Torah commandment may be old, but it is far

The last few days I have been a full-time sjnorrer. A sjnorrer sounds exciting, but it’s just a beggar. In modern times, we no longer have sjnorrer, because begging is not proper, but in the Jewish world we are referred to as fundraisers. And because more than two hundred children have registered for the Chabad

Binyomin, a non-Jewish politician, told me the day after the infamous PvdA-GL meeting that the PvdA-GL’s hatred of Israel affects not only the Jewish community, but also me, your non-Jewish Dutch fellow citizen. In 1948, the State of Israel was established as a refuge for Jews, survivors of the gas chambers. We, the Dutch, had

I have just returned home from a lecture given by the former director of the National Monument Camp Amersfoort about the history of the camp, before and after the war. I went there with the expectation and hope of finally hearing the secret of Camp Amersfoort. Why was there such enormous opposition from the government

There really are people who don’t like me, and one of these non-fans was going around saying that I swim in my spare time and that’s why I write my diaries, as a kind of occupational therapy, just to keep myself busy. I don’t know exactly what is true and what isn’t, but I’ve been

After my recent visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau with more than two hundred and fifty European rabbis, I was asked the (usual) question of how it had affected me. My (usual) answer was: not much! My visit to the Hamas Tunnel replica in Eindhoven also left me cold. Am I insensitive, I wondered, is there something wrong

From Sunday evening until last night, Tuesday evening, 11:00 p.m., I did not read De Telegraaf or RD, did not listen to the radio, and did not touch my laptop because of Shavuot. And what happened? A cabinet crisis! Could my presence, I almost asked myself, have prevented the fall of the cabinet? And if

It is not inconceivable that you could be given the wrong medication. At three o’clock on Tuesday afternoon, I arrived in Budapest to finish a job that I had flown in for several times. Once again, it became clear to me that (almost) every problem can be solved if both parties essentially respect each other