A Torah scroll. Photo: Wiki Commons.

Chimen Abramsky was one of those geniuses who dwarves most intellects. He was a modest, loving man — who was also self-taught — and he became a lecturer and visiting professor at Oxford, London University, Harvard, and the Hebrew University — to mention only some. He was Sotheby’s’ and the world’s expert on Judaica.

For much of his life, he was a convinced Marxist. Born in Russia, he was allowed to leave in the 1920s with his father (other members of the family were held hostage by Stalin), and came to London as a young man. He soon became one of the brains and prime movers of the U.K. Communist Party, even supporting the Stalinist regime. Until he eventually saw the light.

I met him on several occasions in the house of Jack Lunzer, the indefatigable businessman turned collector of the largest Judaica library in private hands. Chimen was elfin, with a mischievous smile. His rapid-fire delivery of scholarship, still in a thick Russian Yiddish accent, was mesmerizing.

It was Chimen who told me about the Russian ideologue Plekhanov’s bon mot that in history “the inevitable always comes about through the accidental.” He also told me that after the Shah fell, the Tudeh Party, the Iranian Communist party, would seize control. They never did of course. He was an atheist with a deep love and respect for Jewish culture. He was hardly known beyond left-wing and academic circles, and his passing was largely unnoticed by the community at large. His grandson Sasha has written a well received book, The House of Twenty Thousand Books, in which he explores his grandfather’s massive collection of books and documents to his life.

The name Abramsky carried awesome weight in my family because of Chimen’s father, a great and imposing Talmudic giant and commanding authority. He was the religious kingmaker in Anglo-Jewry and possibly the single most influential factor in creating modern Anglo-Jewish religious life. Dayan Abramsky, known as one of the most brilliant rabbinical scholars in Eastern Europe, was sent to Siberia for refusing to stop teaching Torah or to give in to the Communist Party’s demand that he publicly say how well the Jews of the Soviet Union were being treated. After a great deal of pressure, he was freed and came to London. Chief Rabbi Hertz appointed him head of the Beth Din, and he became Hertz’s ally in trying to assert the values of Torah over the semi-assimilated Anglo-Jewish petty aristocracy, who at that stage dominated the United Synagogue, and who were very lukewarm towards Zionism.

Amongst Abramsky’s earliest innovations was his scheme to identify the most talented young men studying in yeshivot in Britain and send them off to one of the great academies of the East. My father was one, and he went to Mir in Lithuania. I remember his telling me that Dayan Abramsky had promised to arrange for a scholarship to support him, but it never materialized. My father could not afford a warm winter coat. His own parents were far too poor to help him, and he suffered through the freezing arctic cold. But my father recounted this without malice. When he returned to begin his career in the rabbinate, Dayan Abramsky had recommended him as one of “his boys” in contrast to the graduates of Jews College, the more anglicized training institution for Anglo-Jewish ministry.

In 1944, Chief Rabbi Hertz and Dayan Abramsky persuaded my father to leave his position as Communal Rabbi of Glasgow and come to London to help them fight the battle for Orthodoxy. He was appointed Principal Rabbi of the Federation of Synagogues. After Hertz died in 1946, the final shortlist to succeed him was Israel Brodie and my father, even though my father was only 32 at the time.

Many years later, meeting Ben Elton in New York (who had written his doctorate on the chief Rabbinate in the UK), I discovered that Abramsky had actively undermined my father’s candidacy and supported Brodie. I found this strange, given that Brodie was a typical Jews College Anglo-Jewish minister whereas my father was a Lithuanian educated yeshiva man. Naturally I wondered whether Abramsky simply thought my father was too young, too ambitious, too overreaching, or whether it was too humiliating to have his protégé in what was after all, on paper at least, the most senior position in Anglo-Jewry. My father must have known, but I never ever heard him say anything critical of him, which was typical of my father who readily forgave a long list of people others would not have. He never bore a grudge.

In 1958, my father sent me to Yeshivat Kol Torah in Jerusalem, and he insisted that I call on Dayan Abramsky, who lived nearby. He received me most cordially. Three years later I was back in Jerusalem studying at another yeshiva, and Dayan Abramsky sent a message asking me to come and see him. I arrived to see him sitting, studying Talmud with a small bald younger man (who was not wearing a kipa). He interrupted his study and told me that my father had asked him to tell me that he was very seriously ill and that I had to return to England. And that was the last I ever saw of him. A few years later (after my father had died), I met Chimen and recognized him as the man who had been sitting at the table studying Talmud with a bare head.

I recount these reminiscences for two reasons. One is out of admiration for my father, who clearly had not been treated all that well by Dayan Abramsky, and yet remained steadfast in his admiration and respect for him. Of all the rabbis he knew in Israel, Dayan was the one he trusted to convey the awful news that he was dying and had the authority to tell me to return home.

But I also want to emphasize the other side of the Dayan’s personality. He had this awesome reputation for fierceness, uncompromising commitment to the strictures of Orthodoxy. He was a fighter for Torah against both the communists and the pseudo-Orthodoxy of the Anglo-Jewish aristocracy. Yet when it came to his son, he was so sensitive to his individuality that even knowing full well how far Chimen had strayed from what mattered to his father, more than anything else, he could tolerate it with love and tenderness. What a salutary lesson and one that too few great men seem capable of following.