Linda Bayfield, teacher, was born on November 24, l947. She died of cancer on July 21, 2003, aged 55.
Linda Bayfield was the outstanding pioneer of multicultural education in Jewish faith schools. With her innovative courses and activities, she reshaped the pattern for progressive Jewish education in Britain.
She carried out her educational mission for l7 years at Akiva School, in Finchley, North London, Britain’s first progressive Jewish day school. For five years she was its head teacher. Her trailblazing programmes have recently attracted the attention of senior policy advisers in Downing Street and at the Department for Education and Skills. She sought to forge links with Muslim schools and visits became a regular feature of the Akiva school year. She also rescued religious studies from their capsule within the weekly curriculum and brought them into daily mainstream teaching. Her innovative programmes found a ready response within the Jewish community, and Akiva’s waiting list became one of the longest among Britain’s Jewish primary schools.
Advertisement
She was also determined to bridge sectarian divides between Jews. And she allowed no divide to open between her professional and her private life. She was married to Rabbi Tony Bayfield, the head of the Reform movement in Britain, and their friendship with Jonathan and Elaine Sacks stretched back to the time that Sacks and Bayfield were at Cambridge together.
During the decade that her husband was the “parish” rabbi in Weybridge, Surrey, Linda Bayfield took a break from teaching to be a full-time mother and rabbi’s wife, known as “rebbetzin” within the Jewish community. She relished the role, and in spite of three small children, had an open house and listening ear for all who needed her at any time. When her husband took on a wider communal role and Linda Bayfield returned to teaching, with a degree in English from King’s College London, her continuing vocation as rabbi’s wife widened her vision and deepened her dedication.
Rabbi Yitzchak Kolitz, Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem, was born in Lithuania on June 13, 1922. He died in Jerusalem on July 24, 2003, aged 81.
Advertisement
Chief Rabbi Kolitz was the scourge of all archaeologists who came from the four corners of the world to dig up the Holy Land. For in most digs, especially in Israel and Palestine, there is the possibility that ancient bones will be found and disturbed. And this is a breach of Jewish “canon” law, which decrees that human bones, once interred, are to remain undisturbed for all eternity. As Kolitz put it: “Human bones are not earthen vessels to be displayed in a museum.” So he put himself at the head of the Ultra-Orthodox campaign severely to restrict digs by archaeologists. And he put pressure on the Israeli Government to bring in restrictive rules governing all archaeological work.
Kolitz was a world authority on the Jewish laws of burial, and at one point was flown to Hamburg to advise on the use of the grounds in an old and disused Jewish cemetery — a major problem in modern Germany, where there are hundreds of disused cemeteries and not a Jewish community within their vicinity. In his early teenage years he attended one of the most famous of prewar talmudical academies in Slobodka in his native Lithuania. And when he went to Palestine in the mid-1930s, he continued his studies at Hebron. By the time he was 33 he was a judge of the religious court in Jerusalem, appointed by Isaac Herzog, who was then Chief Rabbi of Israel.
When Kolitz was appointed chief rabbi he immediately set out to win the confidence of the Ultra-Orthodox “charedi” community, in their crowded quarters in the Mea She’Arim (A Hundred Gates) district of Jerusalem. And by imposing an increasing number of restrictions on the public activities of the entire Jewish population in Jerusalem on the weekly Sabbath day, he won the acclaim of the Orthodox, and censure of the secular. That secular resistance did not worry him. Throughout his 22 years as chief rabbi he was a relentless opponent of all secular and non-Orthodox religious movements in Jerusalem, and sought with unceasing persistence to block their participation in all decision-making bodies, such as the local religious councils. He sought to enforce their exclusion by ordering a boycott by Orthodox members.