Top Dutch Rabbi Gets Award From Queen
The queen of the Netherlands is naming one of the country’s chief rabbis an officer of the Order of Orange-Nassau, among Holland’s highest honors.
The honor will be awarded to Rabbi Binyomin Jacobs, chief rabbi of the Inter-Provincial Chief Rabbinate in Holland, next week. The announcement of the honor was made Friday by the Dutch royal commissioner.
Jacobs, 63, lives in Amersfoort and acts as chief rabbi everywhere in the Netherlands except for Amsterdam, Rotterdam and The Hague, which have their own chief rabbis.
The Netherlands-born Jacobs received the honor for his interfaith and intercommunal work.
In recent years, Jacobs has been involved in reaching out to people were born Jewish during the Holocaust and given up for adoption to non-Jewish parents. Jacobs says that many such individuals seek to reconnect with Judaism as they get older.
Jacobs, who in 1975 was named Dutch emissary for the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, is one of the co-founders of the Rabbinical Centre of Europe. He is a prominent advocate for kosher slaughter (shechita) in the Netherlands and in Europe.
In 2003, Rabbi Ies Vorst of Amstelveen, a municipality south of Amsterdam, was made a member of the Order of Orange-Nassau.
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning journalism this Passover.
In this age of misinformation, our work is needed like never before. We report on the news that matters most to American Jews, driven by truth, not ideology.
At a time when newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall. That means for the first time in our 126-year history, Forward journalism is free to everyone, everywhere. With an ongoing war, rising antisemitism, and a flood of disinformation that may affect the upcoming election, we believe that free and open access to Jewish journalism is imperative.
Readers like you make it all possible. Right now, we’re in the middle of our Passover Pledge Drive and we still need 300 people to step up and make a gift to sustain our trustworthy, independent journalism.
Make a gift of any size and become a Forward member today. You’ll support our mission to tell the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
Only 300 more gifts needed by April 30
