This is Rabbi Larry Tabick’s second stint with our Community. He served it in its early days, from 1976 until 1980, and then returned, at Simchat Torah, 1990.

Rabbi Larry Tabick was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1947, to a Syrian Christian father and a Jewish mother, both born in the United States, and heard Arabic and Yiddish spoken around him from birth. He is a graduate of the Bronx High School of Science in New York and has a degree in history from the George Washington University in Washington, DC. Having been involved in the movement to stop the war in Vietnam, he left the US for Canada in 1968, rather than serve in the armed forces in that conflict. He pursued an MA in Biblical texts and the history of the ancient Near East at the University of Toronto, before coming to London to the Leo Baeck College, where he received rabbinic ordination in 1976.

In between his stints at Shir Hayim, Rabbi Larry Tabick served as assistant rabbi at the Middlesex New Synagogue in Harrow and as associate rabbi at the Edgware & District Reform Synagogue.

His wife, Jacqueline, was Britain’s first woman rabbi, currently serving the North West Surrey Synagogue in Weybridge. They have three children.

By his own admission, Rabbi Larry Tabick is fascinated, not to say obsessed, with Jewish mysticism in all its forms, especially Hasidism and Kabbalah. To have a look at his translations of key texts from these traditions, as well as Hasidic and Kabbalistic comments on the Torah, visit Rabbi Larry’s website.