Sir Sigmund Sternberg obituary

Sir Sigmund Sternberg, who has died aged 95, was one of Anglo-Jewry’s most active members, present at seemingly any important communal occasion – a banquet addressed by the chief rabbi, a meeting called in honour of an Israeli prime minister, or, most likely of all, representing Britain’s Jews at an interfaith occasion.

At almost every appearance, the decorations he wore seemed to multiply: because of his work for inter-faith relations, he was constantly being presented with medals, from countries ranging from Argentina to Ukraine.

He was born in Budapest, son of Abraham and Elizabeth Sternberg, antiques dealers, and escaped to Britain in 1939 to avoid being transported to a death camp. As a young man, starting from a scrap-metal dealership, he set up a business empire, and from 1971 until his death was chairman of the property company Martin Slowe Estates.

Later, he headed a firm marketing computer software. However, by the mid-1960s he had begun to devote much of his time to charitable interests, the first being the Sternberg Foundation, established in 1968.

His interests were diverse. He was a member of the Board of Deputies of British Jews and was deputy chairman of the Labour finance and industry group from 1972 until 1993 – at the same time as being vice-president of the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists and chairman of the Institute for Archaeo-Metallurgical Studies.

In 1976, Sternberg was one of those who appeared on Harold Wilson’s famous “lavender list” – the collection of names put together by the prime minister’s secretary, Marcia Falkender, for honours on his resignation. Sternberg was knighted for his services to his adopted country and was said to have been considered for a peerage.

In 1985 he was made KCSG – a papal knight commander of the Order of St Gregory the Great – by Pope John Paul II, and often attended functions thereafter in the bottle-green ceremonial uniform of a Catholic knight. He recalled: “My first active encounter with Christianity was as a youngster in my native Hungary when I was beaten up because, as my assailant explained, as he piled in the punches, ‘the Jews killed Christ’. That experience put me on a lifelong journey both to understand the passion that lay behind the attack and to explain my own faith to Christians who would listen.”

He did more than just talk about such things. He was partly responsible for the Vatican’s recognition of the state of Israel in 1993. He had also helped to organise the first visit by a pope to a synagogue, in 1986 by John Paul II. But he was not beyond criticising the Catholic church and pressed for the files to be opened on John Paul’s wartime predecessor Pius XII – an alleged Nazi sympathiser.

Honours came flooding in every time he took on some new office or other. Rotary International made him their Paul Harris fellow in 1989. In gratitude for his work as president of the reform synagogues from 1998 onwards, the movement named their headquarters at Finchley, north London, the Sternberg Centre.

Many of Sternberg’s awards came for his work as patron of the International Council of Christians and Jews and as founder in 1997 of the Three Faiths Forum, a dialogue group of Christians, Muslims and Jews. In 2003, he went to Romania to help set up a similar group. He said: “One wonders if, had there been such dialogue groups in the past, would the Holocaust have happened?” For his interfaith campaigning, he won the 1998 Templeton prize for progress in religion.

Sternberg’s second wife, Hazel (nee Everett-Jones), whom he married in 1970, died in 2014. He is survived by their son, David, and daughter, Ruth; and by a son, Michael, and daughter, Frances, from his first marriage, to Ruth (nee Schiff), which ended in divorce.