Dayan Chanoch Ehrentreu, head of the London Beth Din who issued rulings on every facet of Orthodox Jewish life – obituary

Dayan Chanoch Ehrentreu, who has died aged 89, was head of the London Beth Din – the best known Orthodox Jewish religious court in the UK – and one of the leading Talmudic authorities of the post-war era.

As such, Ehrentreu became the rock upon whom two very powerful Chief Rabbis, Lord Jakobovits and Lord Sacks, depended for on a breathtakingly wide-ranging set of practical day-to-day rulings – including conversion, Kosher food and family matters – as well as presiding over the London Beth Din’s function as an arbitration panel for disputes between Jews in civil matters.

The title “Dayan” means judge and young Chanoch – one of the Kohens, or priestly class, who trace their line back to Biblical times – was marked from his earliest days for great scholarly achievement in Halakhah (or Jewish Law).

Chanoch Ehrentreu was born on December 27 1932 in Frankfurt-am-Main into a distinguished Rabbinical family. His grandfather, also named Chanoch, meaning “Enoch” in Hebrew, was Rabbi of the Orthodox community of Munich; one of his last memories of Germany was as a five-year-old, watching Torah scrolls being burned by the Nazis on Kristallnacht in 1938.

Chanoch was duly dispatched on one of the Kindertransport for Jewish refugee children and was soon followed by his parents; he was educated at Amersham Grammar School and then at Gateshead Jewish Boarding School, prior to entering the Gateshead Talmudical College, the greatest of English Orthodox Jewish religious seminaries, or yeshivas.

Gateshead is a bastion of the “black letter” Lithuanian approach to Torah learning – which, unlike the German Jewish Orthodox tradition from which Ehrentreu’s family came, eschews secular higher education. Ehrentreu combined the best of both worlds in a highly unusual way in the post-Holocaust era: though he never attended university himself, his own German Orthodox background and his period in a non-Jewish school imbued him with a self-confidence in his dealings with the wider world – which proved to be of the greatest significance later on in his career.

After attending Gateshead kollel – postgraduate Talmudic education, often for married men – Ehrentreu became the founding head of the Sunderland Kollel in 1962. He seemed destined for a life of relatively quiet scholarly achievement when in 1979, he was invited to assume a leading role in Manchester, the most important centre of Orthodox life after London.

As head of the Manchester Beth Din, Ehrentreu proved to be a whirlwind of energy, throwing himself into his task of raising standards on everything – such as the Kosher abattoirs (he could often be found conducting his inspections of slaughterhouses at 05:00 prior to morning prayers) and the work of Jewish burial societies (where he insisted that volunteers who actually knew and cared about the deceased should take the initiative in caring for the bodies, prior to interment).

He was only exceeded in such stamina by his wife, Rachel (“Ruchie”, nee Sternbuch) whom he married in 1955; she is a direct descendant of the greatest of 18th century Lithuanian Rabbinical authorities, the Vilna Gaon – and the most respected rebbetzin (the technical term for a Rabbi’s spouse) of her generation. They had three daughters and two sons, one of whom predeceased him.

The nature of Ehrentreu’s new communal responsibilities brought his and his wife’s gifts to the attention of a much broader Jewish audience than that of the core of Talmudists. Many scholars find it hard to develop a personal touch for their wider congregation: Ehrentreu struck the perfect balance, remembering with a smile the names of everyone he met and knowing intimately their circumstances.

Although not of a great height, he was invested with a unique form of star quality and was immaculately turned out, making him the most memorable of interlocutors; and as a teacher, was able to impart learning to the seasoned Talmudist and ignoramus alike, often simultaneously. Latterly, he taught his congregation at Beis Yisroel (the “House of Israel”), the synagogue he founded in Hendon, and was also the inspiration behind two new kollels for continuing adult Torah education in Edgware and Borehamwood.

No one was too forsaken to merit Ehrentreu and his wife’s help: upon hearing that a heavily pregnant secular Israeli woman was being held in Strangeways prison, he promptly went to the jail and shortly thereafter fulfilled her request that the infant boy be ritually circumcised.

Two decades later, an unknown woman turned up on Ehrentreu’s doorstep with a 21 year old man in religious garb. She announced herself to be the one time prisoner from Strangeways, with her now grown-up son, stating that she was there to thank Ehrentreu for putting her back on the straight and narrow. Later, Ehrentreu heard of an anorexic young woman near death, on whom the doctors had almost given up; the Dayan fed her every day for five months till she recovered.

He was also one of the first Orthodox figures to urge communal training in safeguarding for victims of domestic violence: there could be no cover-ups for the sake of communal amour propre. Throughout his career, he believed in the most important of the Talmudic concepts, Dina d’Malchuta Dina, that Jews must obey the laws of the land in which they reside.

In 1984, Jakobovits invited Ehrentreu to become head of the London Beth Din. Some of his most high-profile responsibilities here centred round the Halakhic implications of the newest medical developments such as IVF treatments for infertility: for example, since Judaism is a matrilineal religion, what is the status of eggs from a Jewish woman incubated in the womb of a non-Jewish surrogate – or, indeed, vice versa?

Because Ehrentreu was a devotee of PubMed, the “Google” for scientific and medical literature, leading physicians found him to be supremely well informed on the latest emerging developments. So, too, did the House of Lords Select Committee on Stem Cell issues, which reported in 2002: of all the major faith groups, Ehrentreu’s masterly testimony on the Orthodox Jewish stance on Stem Cell was much the most favourable to such cutting-edge researches.

Likewise, In the High Court property case of Kastner v Jason [2004], he appeared as an expert witness; Mr Justice Lightman noted that “Dayan Ehrentreu clearly knew the detailed law in the field in question like the back of his hand, even before he was instructed as an expert in this case”.

One of his best known legacies as head of the London Beth Din was the creation of an eruv: Orthodox Jews are not allowed to carry any item in public areas on the Sabbath and an eruv is a Halakhic concept effectively to create a large nominal private domain, thus allowing the Orthodox to carry as if on their own properties.

These had historically existed in major Jewish centres such as New York, or in Belgium, but never before in the UK; and the laws round them are amongst the most complex in the Talmud. Ehrentreu faced opposition from both the “left” (non-Orthodox Jews who thought that an Eruv would “ghettoise” Jews) and the “right” (the ultra-Orthodox who thought that the correct Halakhic conditions for an Eruv did not obtain).

Ehrentreu’s knowledge was so formidable that he obtained letters of approbation for the Eruv from the leading Torah authorities of the Lithuanian and Hasidic strands of Orthodoxy in Israel; in post Holocaust Europe, Ehrentreu was probably the only figure with the requisite authority to see this project through to completion – and, as a result, Eruvs are now uncontroversial in the UK.

He had the self-confidence to issue potentially controversial rulings precisely because his knowledge could not be gainsaid; he became the only British Rabbi to appear in the multi-volume Posen Library of Jewish Culture Civilization.Ehrentreu’s red lines lay in who had the right to speak for authentic Torah Judaism.

He was entirely content to meet Pope John Paul II when the Pontiff visited Manchester in 1982; he only pulled out when he learned that he would be meeting the Pope alongside clergy from Reform movement, which he considered to be “pseudo-Judaism”; such reasoning also lay at the root of his objection to the Limmud festival of Jewish learning, which he urged Orthodox Rabbis not to attend.

Along with the then Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Ehrentreu ruled in 2003 that Louis Jacobs – a onetime rising star of Orthodoxy who lost his Rabbinical post for declaring that he did not believe the Torah to be dictated by God to Moses – could not be called up to the Torah during a service in Bournemouth Synagogue.

Ehrentreu’s reasoning was simple: had Jacobs uttered the words of the requisite blessing, “Our God…who gave us the Torah of truth…”, he would have committed the additional grave sin of giving false witness for something he did not believe. Ehrentreu always believed that words had consequences.

Ehrentreu further had to contend with the fall-out caused by Sacks’s work The Dignity of Difference: How To Avoid The Clash of Civilisations. Sacks had been poorly advised to rush this out for the first anniversary of 9/11 – stating in the first edition that all the major world religions were moving towards the same goal. He thus appeared in the eyes of the ultra-Orthodox to relativise Judaism.

In the ensuiing controversy, Sacks offered to Ehrentreu to resign; Ehrentreu told him to do no such thing, and that a few words in a new edition stating that this was simply the view of other religions (and not the Chief Rabbi’s own view) would suffice. The corrections were duly made and Sacks survived.

Ehrentreu retired from the London Beth Din in 2008. His stamina undiminished, he devoted much of his time to the role of Chief Justice of the Conference of European Rabbis, ruling on Jewish law for all the smaller Jewish communities in Europe that lack a standing Beth Din of their own, such as Basel and Sephardic Gibraltar. In 2009, at the request of the Ronald S Lauder Foundation, he agreed to head the newly re-established Rabbinerseminar zu Berlin, successor to the famed pre-Holocaust institution of the same name.

In 2018, Ehrentreu went to Berlin to receive the Bundesverdienstkreuz, the Federal Republic of Germany’s highest award, for his service to the Jewish community of Germany: there, he recalled the fate of the Talmudic Rabbi Chananya ben Teradyon, who was wrapped in a Torah scroll and then burned alive by the Romans.

The dying sage told his pupils that even as the parchment burns, the divine letters ascend heavenward. The letters do not burn, Ehrentreu said, and now, 70 years after Kristallnacht, they are returning to earth. For Ehrentreu, as he pointed out that day, it constituted “a closing of the circle”.

Ehrentreu died on his 67th wedding anniversary. He is succeeded as Rabbi of Beis Yisroel in Hendon by his son-in-law, Dayan Dovid Dunner, himself a distinguished Halakhist.

Dayan Chanoch Ehrentreu, born December 27 1932, died November 24 2022