Obituary: Ruth Jacobson - The Jewish Chronicle

Regarded as the grande dame of Newcastle Jewry, Ruth Jacobson moved to Newcastle as a bride of 18 and became a leading light in the city and the region, writes Faga Speker.

The youngest of four children of Rev Dr Abraham Cohen, chief minister of the Birmingham Hebrew Congregation from 1913-49, she received early training in charity work from her mother, Bessie. Armed with a receipt book and her natural charm, she was sent to collect annual subscriptions for the Poor Children’s Boot and Shoe Fund.

Marrying in Newcastle in 1937, she was a mother at 19. Another two babies soon followed. Her husband, Lionel Jacobson, had gained a degree at Oxford and trained for the bar.

But he went into his father’s business, Jackson the Tailor, founded in the early 1900s, and ran it with his brother before its 1953 merger with Burtons, of which he became chairman.

Despite her young family, Ruth volunteered for war work and helped with the Women’s Voluntary Service until after the war. She also started her lifelong involvement in the local Daughters of Zion and joined Wizo, soon becoming branch chairman.

Keen on local and especially smaller charities, she and her husband set up a trust fund. But their main endowment was the Ruth and Lionel Jacobson chair of clinical pharmacology at Newcastle University Medical School, twinned with the school of medicine at

the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. For over 40 years, each medical department of the university has invited a speaker from abroad to deliver the annual Jacobson Lecture. After Lionel’s death in 1978, their youngest child, Malcolm, joined Ruth as trustee.

In the 1973 community amalgamation, the Jacobsons bought the site for today’s United Hebrew Congregation of Newcastle upon Tyne. The Lionel Jacobson House, the original house on the site, provides constantly used function and drop-in rooms, synagogue offices and a small shul for the daily minyan, as well as the kosher food facility.

Keen collectors of contemporary art, the couple made generous loans to Newcastle and Durham Universities. Ruth was a life-member and fundraiser of the Friends of the Laing Art Gallery.

A co-founder in 1948 of the highly successful amateur dramatic society, The Jewish Players, she appeared in many of its productions and led the company to its triumphant securing of two cups at the local drama festival.

Involved with youth, she was chairman of the fundraising committee of the Northumberland Association of Youth Clubs, a governor of Rutherford Comprehensive School, and a member of the development trust committee of Newcastle Church High School.

As founder-chairman of the League of Jewish Women in Newcastle, which she was asked to start in the mid-1970s, she became involved with the North East School for the Blind, where she used her thespian skills by acting out each character in the stories she read to the schoolchildren.

Maintaining her interest in Wizo, she sat on its national executive committee and was a vice-president of Wizo UK until retiring in 2005 after receiving a Woman of Valour award.

She was also active in the Newcastle Ladies’ Cancer Committee and was the first female board director of the Metro radio station, retiring in 1989 aged 70.

In 1980 she was invited to join a group visit to schools and hospitals in China, organised by a London communal figure, the late Ruth Winston-Fox, with the aim of gaining emancipation for Chinese women.

Asked by the deputy lord mayor of Newcastle, Labour councillor Bennie Abrahams, to serve as his deputy lady mayoress, she continued as his lady mayoress in 1981, as Mrs Marion Abrahams was too ill for public duties. Politically unaffiliated, she became a huge asset, especially with the lord mayor’s failing eyesight.

She was appointed MBE in 1989 for her contribution to charitable services in north east England. But she retired from her positions as her oldest daughter, Valerie’s, health deteriorated with multiple sclerosis. Both Valerie and Valerie’s son, Nigel, predeceased her.

She is survived by her second daughter, Pamela; son, Malcom; six grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.