“I spent my entire professional life dealing with quite challenging clients who all felt I was at their beck and call. I have had to learn to deal with them, to negotiate with them, and I think that’s been an extremely good training ground to deal with difficult issues and trying to get consensus,” he says. “I think that’s why we were able to make progress.
“I’ve always taken the view if we can get two thirds of what we want, I’ll take it and we’ll get the other third as and when we can.”
At present, the presidency remains a male preserve, but that could change too. It is not out of the question, he believes, that his successor could be a woman.
A chartered accountant, he specialised in management consultancy at PricewaterhouseCoopers until his retirement in 2010 at 60, the year before he became president. “It is very hard to be president and have a full-time job.” When you have a young family and are “climbing up the slippery pole at work, you have so little time for anything else”.
He and Cheryl have a married daughter with three children and a son at yeshivah in Israel. It was in the early 1990s that he entered shul politics, joining the board of his local US community, Cockfosters and North Southgate. “I complained about something — I can’t remember what. So the answer was ‘if you can do better, you better come and do it.’”
But he did not rush to become a trustee of the US. “I was asked three times to stand. The first time I politely declined, three years later I declined again not so politely. And the third time I said I give up, ok.”
After six years as a US treasurer, and three as vice-president, he clinched the top job in 2011 in a contested election. He inherited a financially stable organisation with an income of around £35 million a year — a far cry from the threat of insolvency that faced it a couple of decades ago. That has given him the “luxury” of looking forward rather than firefighting crises.
He has been its “quasi-chief executive” since the beginning of the year, running the ship until the new chief executive, Steven Wilson, arrives in October. But if the US is better run with a more confident public face, it is not without its challenges.
Although women may now enjoy lay leadership positions, some want more of a role in the synagogue ritual. Mr Pack cannot see the US giving its blessing to Orthodox partnership minyans, where women can read from the Torah and lead some prayers, in the next decade. But if some rabbis can find a way to include women more in the service within the bounds of halachah, then they should be free to go ahead, he believes.
The issue is “not going to go away,” he says, adding that it is critical for the US to educate men and women. “If you don’t know why we do things in a particular way, it’s very hard to form an intelligent judgment.”
But it is “a real misconception to think that in religious circles, women are inferior,” he contends.
“In some of the very Orthodox sects, far to the right of the United Synagogue, the women run everything. The men are learning all day... but the women run the family, make the key decisions.”
As the Institute for Jewish Policy Research survey earlier this year showed, the traditional middle-ground represented by the US has shrunk and faces a continuing squeeze from both left and right. But Mr Pack believes it can still maintain its inclusivist approach.
On the one hand, it must cater for the many members who are frummer than their parents: on the other hand, it must reach out to those young people who no longer regard synagogue membership as a priority. As a result, it will invest more in social activities for young adults and a mission to make communities more than “a place where you go to daven on occasions. That change in emphasis is going to underpin the whole of what comes out of our strategic view. I am very excited about that”.
The recent affiliation of Sheffield as the US’s first northern member encourages plans to “expand the organisation, but not in a predatory way. We already have conversations going on with other communities. We are an organisation others want to be part of. That is a hugely rewarding thing.”
