Rabbi Jacob Danglow by John S. Levi

Publisher: Melbourne, MUP 1995.

Binding: Hardcover

Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included

Edition: 1st Edition

Jacob Danglow was Australia’s best known rabbi. He served Melbourne’s St Kilda Hebrew Congregation for more than fifty years. Debonair and articulate, he was ‘the Rolls Royce rabbi’ to his friends and ‘Anglo Danglow’ to his enemies. As Mannix was for the Catholics, so Danglow was for the Jews. His personality transformed a small suburban synagogue into the pre-eminent Jewish pulpit for the first half of this century. Intimate friend of Sir Isaac Isaacs and chaplain to Sir John Monash, Danglow fearlessly denounced anti-Semitism and battled against pro-Nazi professors and bigoted preachers. Danglow walked a fine line. As a staunch Australian patriot, he believed the British crown to be a bulwark against totalitarianism and inequity. He served in both world wars, attaining the rank of chaplain colonel. This courageous ambassador of a beleaguered community was torn by the emerging conflict in Palestine between Zionism and Britain. It was not easy to be a Jew in an Australia that perceived every minority group as bizarre and disloyal. He was no stranger to controversy. His outwardly serene life was filled with argument, and he rarely minced his words. Danglow would live to see his Jewish community grow sixfold with the arrival of many newcomers – who could not believe that the tall, athletic, handsome man in a clerical collar was a rabbi. John Levi’s biography is the first of an Australian rabbi. This candid, intimate portrait of a man and a community is all the more engrossing because shaped by the sharp but kindly insight of Melbourne’s redoubtable Progressive rabbi.