Natan Sharansky has been appointed the chair of The Rabbi Sacks Legacy’s Global Advisory Board.
The news was announced at a packed event on Wednesday at the Moise Safra Center in Manhattan’s Upper East Side to celebrate the publication of the 20th anniversary edition of Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks’s book, A Letter in the Scroll.
Sharansky, speaking at the event, said, “Rabbi Sacks was a moral lighthouse, and his light is needed more than ever in these dark times. That’s why I have chosen to accept the chairmanship of the Rabbi Sacks Legacy’s Global Advisory Board to ensure his timeless teachings on Jewish identity, personal responsibility, and the fight against antisemitism reach every corner of the world.”
Sharansky, 76, a former Israeli Cabinet minister and Jewish Agency chairman, is an internationally renowned human rights activist and author who played a pivotal role in the Soviet Jewry movement.
He wrote the foreword for the new edition of Sacks’s book.
“We feel Rabbi Sacks’s loss keenly, but are also grateful that he left us his precious words, words that even when we reread them more than 20 years after they were written, carry his gift of opening the fullness of our own existence to us, of inviting us to be everything that we can be,” Sharansky said.
Michal Cotler-Wunsh, Israel’s special envoy for combating antisemitism, participated in a panel discussion at the event.
“A Letter in the Scroll has guided, instructed and inspired me for 20 years. When I try to comprehend how it can be that in response to the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust, there isn’t just a rise in antisemitism, there’s a tsunami, I look to Rabbi Sacks,” she said, in a reference to Oct. 7’s Hamas-led massacre in the northwestern Negev.
“He calls it ‘the mutation of antisemitism.’ This enables us to see what is happening today. This new strain of antisemitism is anti-Zionism,” Cotler-Wunsch added.
The book was first published during Sacks’s tenure as chief rabbi of the United Kingdom, and remains a cornerstone in understanding Jewish identity.
The Rabbi Sacks Legacy was established to perpetuate the rabbi’s wisdom as a “teacher of Torah, a moral voice, and a leader of leaders.”
