Young and old celebrate Queen’s life at uplifting St John’s Wood shul service

A packed St John’s Wood Synagogue was the venue for a remarkable memorial and thanksgiving service on Wednesday night, in which the Jewish community paid tribute to the late Queen Elizabeth II— referred to, in Hebrew, as “HaMalka Elizabet Hashniya”.

It was a pull-out-all-the-stops full choral service under the auspices of the United Synagogue, beginning with a children’s choir from Sacks Morasha Primary School, and featuring not just rabbis, but rebbetzins, too, from communities in London and the provinces.

Three chazanim – Johnny Turgel, Avrohom Freilich and Avraham Kirshenbaum – gave their beautiful voices in prayer and praise, while seven head boys and girls from different Jewish schools described how they had been inspired by the Queen’s example of service and duty.

But the congregation — who included peers, MPs, and the Bishop of London — also heard two star speakers — Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis and the former prime minister, MP Theresa May.

The chief rabbi, who recalled that the then Prince Charles had broken into his holiday nine years ago in order to be present at Rabbi Mirvis’s installation, spoke warmly of the royal family and the example set by the late queen. Before he spoke there was a recitation of the special prayer he had written in honour of her late Majesty.

He told his audience that while there were generally held to be three crowns — “the crown of royalty, the crown of priesthood, and the crown of Torah” — there was a fourth which superseded all of these.

That, said the chief rabbi, was “the crown of a good name. It is non-transferable, and has to be earned.” Queen Elizabeth, he said, had abundantly demonstrated that she also wore the fourth crown. He added that she had combined “an exceptionally brilliant mind with a heart of gold”.

Lady May, who met the Queen often when she was prime minister, made a sparkling speech in which she sometimes appeared to take reading-between-the-lines featherlight swipes at her successors.

She said, to the evident interest of the audience, that the Queen’s year “had been marked out by required duty. Her late Majesty’s commitment to duty and service should be an example to us all. I hope that at a time when service to others and doing one’s duty has sadly slipped out of focus in many areas of our public life, that her late Majesty’s example can be an inspiration to us all.”

Later, Lady May recalled that the Queen had been “assiduous” in reading the contents of her government’s Red Boxes, adding, after a pause: “not everyone is”. A ripple of amusement echoed through the congregation as most listeners reckoned they knew who she meant in both cases.

Most of all, Lady May said, the Queen had been “a woman of faith, happy to be known and identified as such”.

And though hers had been a strong Christian faith, she “believed in the importance of faith, the guidance from above that provides a strong framework of values for life, and crucially, the difference between right and wrong. And in that she recognised the value of other faiths. What was important was to have faith. We can all be grateful to her for her increasing references to the importance of faith, in recent years.”