Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks 1948-2020 Barry and Rosalind Landy I first met Jonathan in shul. In the light of his career this does not seem odd, but in 1966 he was a young man starting his first year as an undergraduate at Cambridge, so meeting in shul was entirely natural. In the mid 60s we were one of the few Kosher homes in Cambridge that invited Jewish students on Shabbat and our custom then was to have a mass tea event on the first non Yomtov Shabbat of the first term. Usually 20 or 30 students would turn up. Of course I cannot now remember if Jonathan was among them but I am sure he would have come. Thereafter we had him in our house regularly for Shabbat lunch. Even then he was very good at holding an audience, and at our fairly large lunch table the other diners were often to be found listening to him very attentively. A much-repeated refrain (common to quite a surprisingly large number of students that I remember) was "I am doing no work and am bound to fail my exams". In common with most other students who made that claim, he did not fail, and in fact did very well. It is natural to draw the conclusion that while in fact he was a diligent worker he preferred to hide that fact from his contemporaries. Indeed one obituary referred to his spending time looking out at students playing croquet; that would certainly not have happened in the two winter Terms. Sometime in his three years as an undergraduate he met his future wife Elaine. The story of how that happened differs depending on who is telling the tale, but our version is that having seen this lovely blonde Jewish girl in shul, we naturally also invited her for lunch, and that is where she met Jonathan. At one time we discussed with Jonathan what he might do postCambridge and were struck by the many possibilities in his mind. At that stage in his life his preferred choice was to become a barrister, at
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