Yitzhak HaLevi Herzog

Yitzhak HaLevi Herzog was chief rabbi of two countries, and spent the years after the war trying to get Jewish children back out of the monasteries that had hidden them. He was born in Lomza in Russian Poland in 1888, raised in Leeds and Paris, and ordained young. His doctorate was on tekhelet, the blue dye of the ritual fringe, whose source had been lost for centuries; he argued it came from a Mediterranean sea snail, and the identification is broadly the one accepted today. In 1922 he became the first Chief Rabbi of the Irish Free State, a post he held for fourteen years. He learned Irish, was known in Dublin as the Sinn Fein rabbi for his open sympathy with independence, and became a friend of Eamon de Valera - a friendship that mattered later, when he used it to press the Irish government on refugee visas. He moved to Palestine in 1936 as Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi and held that office through the mandate, the war and the founding of the state. What he is remembered for outside religious law is the search. Jewish parents across occupied Europe had placed children in convents, monasteries and Catholic families; many of the parents did not come back, and many of the institutions did not volunteer the children. In 1946 he travelled through Europe and to the Vatican pressing for their return, with partial and contested success, and the question of how many were recovered is still argued over. His rulings shaped the relationship between religious law and a secular Israeli state that had not existed when he trained. His son Chaim became Israel's sixth president and his grandson Isaac its eleventh.

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