Prince Charles, a student of Jonathan Sacks, eulogized him as ‘a light unto this nation’
Image by Chris Jackson/Getty Images
By David Ian Klein November 12, 2020
The British royal described former Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks as “a trusted guide, an inspired teacher and a friend” in a eulogy he wrote for the United Kingdom’s Jewish News.
“Over many years, I had come to value Rabbi Sacks’s counsel immensely,” wrote Prince Charles. “With his seemingly inexhaustible store of learning, his never-failing wisdom and his instinct for the power of the story in our lives, he could be relied upon to identify clearly the moral issues in question, and to define fearlessly the choices being faced.”
Prince Charles called Sacks “a light unto this nation,” in a deliberate misquote of the Book of Isaiah.
The Prince of Wales has had a complex relationship with British Jewry. In a 1986 letter, he pinned the root Middle East unrest on “Foreign, European Jews” and concluded that “some U.S. president has to have the courage to stand up and take on the Jewish lobby in the US?”
However, this week, Prince Charles also gave the first ever donation from a member of the British royal family to an Israeli non-profit, giving an undisclosed amount of money to the Peres Center for Peace.
The prince was present at the funeral of Peres in 2016, He also visited the country earlier this year in January, where he visited the tomb of his grandmother, Princess Alice of Greece, who became a nun.
Prince Charles also spoke on the occasion of Sacks’ retirement as chief rabbi in 2013.
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