Michael Rose, the co-founder of the New North London Synagogue, a distinguished lawyer, poet, linguist, story-teller, humourist, yachtsman and historian, who was above all a devoted husband, father of four, grandfather of eleven and great-grandfather of (so far) one, died peacefully at the age of 90, on March 6, 2026. To our mother Susan’s occasional frustration, he never learned to drive, or to cook anything more challenging than a boiled egg. But our memories of him in his many roles, and of his gentleness, modesty, kindness and selfless generosity, are a blessing that will light the lives of those he leaves.
As a child he did not have it easy. His father Jacob Rosenberg, a tailor raised in London’s East End, died of cancer when Michael was only seven years old, in the middle of the Second World War, leaving his mother, Kate, to struggle to support him and his beloved elder sister, Rhoda, from a series of jobs that did not do justice to her formidable talents and intellect. But as a pupil at the venerable grammar school Queen Elizabeth’s, Barnet, he won a coveted state scholarship to read law at Exeter College, Oxford, so becoming the first member of his extensive family to go to university.
He told the foundation story of his marriage and our family many times. Michaelmas term, 1955. Dad was 20; mum just 17, a history fresher. Michael an Ashkenazi Jew from north London; Susan the then-Anglican daughter of a rather traditional Berkshire family – her grandfather was Earl Jellicoe, the great Navy commander who fought the Battle of Jutland during the First World War. The coup de foudre came when she descended the stairs of a newly-created nightclub in the cellars of the Oxford Union. He asked her to dance and she agreed, though she said she had to put down her handbag first. In the more than 70 years that followed, they were never apart for more than a few days.
After completing his legal training, Michael joined Bartlett & Gluckstein (later Bartletts De Reya), a central London solicitors’ firm where he was made partner before he turned 30. His professional success was not only welcome but necessary, for by this time he and Susan had four children under the age of six. Bartletts was dissolved in the mid-1980s, a painful process that Michael had to manage and which caused him great anxiety. However, he joined the ambitious and innovative City firm SJ Berwin, where he specialised successively in tax, European law, litigation and, on a pro bono basis, human rights. He retired aged 75 in 2007. Researching this obituary, it has been humbling to discover the extraordinary esteem in which he was held by his colleagues and professional associates, who speak of his kindness, wisdom, superb legal judgement and integrity – and of his unvarying habit, come what may, of lying down for a 15-minute nap every day in his office after lunch.
Many of his clients stayed with him for decades, and became good friends. They found their way into our family too: absorbed into Michael’s surreal imagination, they would re-appear as thinly-disguised characters in the offbeat stories he would tell at bedtime and during long car journeys, or in his many comic songs.
If family and the law were two of the golden threads running through Michael’s life, the third was Judaism. Susan converted to Judaism early in their marriage, and they kept an observant home. But Michael was attracted by the intellectually progressive tradition being forged by Rabbi Dr Louis Jacobs at the New London Synagogue in St Johns Wood: a Judaism of the mind as well as the heart. For the younger Roses, this meant a rather lengthy weekly trek on foot from our home in Highgate, which may have been one reason why Michael decided to join forces with Jacobs’s son Ivor to found a new synagogue with the same philosophy. Originally known as the New Highgate and North London (the Highgate was dropped when it moved to its permanent home in East Finchley), its first service was held in our family home on Shabbat Chanukah 1974, more than 50 years ago, in the same room where we said Kaddish for him last week. Michael and Ivor Jacobs were its first Chairs, and Michael wrote its constitution. NNLS is now one of the largest and most vibrant synagogues in the UK, indeed, in Europe. Some years later, Michael went on to co-found the UK Masorti movement, and was its first joint Chair.
In later life, Michael became an accomplished lyrical poet, and a volume of his work, Devil May Care, was published in 2023. He was also an historian, and conducted extensive research into the Jews of Nevel, the Russian shtetl from which his mother’s family, the Yigdaloffs, originated. That work began in 1999, when he made the first of many trips to his maternal grandparents’ ancestral home on the 100th anniversary of their migration. He had imagined there wouldn’t be any Yigdaloffs left, that they must all have perished in the revolutionary war or the Holocaust. In fact, they were numerous, though now mostly living in St Petersburg, and some came to visit their cousins in Highgate. Michael wrote two accomplished papers on the family’s Nevel history.
He was also an extraordinary linguist. There was a period when he seemed to pick up new languages as easily as others might try on a suit: Czech one year, Russian the next. He also loved the outdoors, as a rambler, and later, with Susan, as an adventurous sailor, who undertook challenging voyages among the Scottish islands, around Arctic Norway and the Aegean.
Until the end, his intellectual and spiritual curiosity remained undimmed. Last pesach, he led a seder in Oxford, the city where both of us live. A few weeks later our clan gathered from locations across the globe in the garden of our family home for his 90th birthday. It was a luminous, sun-drenched afternoon, one more glorious addition to our stock of everlasting memories.
He is survived by Susan and their children, David, Bernard, Philip, Dinah, and grandchildren.
Michael Rose: born June 29, 1935. Died: March 6, 2026
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