The Herzog family

In 2023, President of Israel Isaac Herzog addressed the International Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony at the European Parliament.

His father Chaim Herzog was President of Israel (1983-1993), and his grandfather was the Chief Rabbi Yitzhak Isaac Halevi Herzog, who was Chief Rabbi of the British Mandate of Palestine (1936-1948) and the first Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of the State of Israel. Their political and religious leadership of Israel, along with their personal involvement in the aftermath of the Second World War – both having witnessed war-torn Europe first-hand – linked them to the Holocaust.

Their only crime was being Jewish and the humanity inside them. They were beloved and cherished. They dared to hope and dream even in the midst of devastation.

Speech of President Isaac Herzog at the European Parliament, 26 January 2023

Recovering Jewish life after the war

Rabbi Yitzhak Herzog was born in 1888 in Łomża, Poland. A renowned scholar, religious expert and author, he became Chief Rabbi of Belfast in 1916, where his sons Chaim and Yaakov were born. He became Chief Rabbi of Dublin in 1919 and of Ireland in 1922. In 1936, he became Chief Rabbi of Palestine.

During the Holocaust, Rabbi Herzog tried to rescue Jews from Europe. He met with senior members of the UK Government, and worked to get immigration permits for Mandatory Palestine and donations for Jewish refugees in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe.

After the war, Rabbi Herzog travelled throughout Europe to recover Jewish children who had been hidden with Christian families and in monasteries. He met with Pope Pius XII to ask for his help in finding children and organising their return to the Jewish community. In the end, he managed to help 500 orphaned children who survived the Holocaust go back to Mandatory Palestine.

He also travelled to displaced persons (DP) camps to give Torah lessons.

As he looked around him, he saw not only smouldering heaps of stone and sand, but also the silent cry of a down-trodden nation. The lives of millions of men, women and children had come to an end, and in their stead he saw only crumbling stone.

Rabbi Herzog also played an important role in saving Jewish religious texts and artefacts that had been found in the Bürgerbräukeller Beer Hall. The Babylonian Talmud recovered from here was transferred to Yad Vashem in 2024.

The family’s first President

Chaim Herzog moved from Dublin to Mandatory Palestine in 1935 and served in the Haganah paramilitary group. During the Second World War, Herzog enlisted in the British Army. He was among the Allied troops that landed in Normandy in June 1944 and participated in combat operations as a tank commander.

As we advanced we encountered the still hardly known horror of the concentration camps. Nobody who saw those terrifying scenes will ever forget them... When we reached Bergen Belsen, we were shattered by the horrifying evidence of starvation, torture and disease, and by the final epidemic of typhus raging there. To one who has seen anything of the Holocaust even marginally, it ceases to be an abstract concept and becomes a searing actuality never to be forgotten.

Later, as an intelligence officer, he helped identify a captured German soldier as Heinrich Himmler, the Nazi Gestapo chief.

After the war, he returned to Palestine. He served in the Israeli army, and was Head of Israel’s military intelligence from 1948-1950 and from 1959-1962. He rose to prominence in Israeli society as a political and military commentator during the Six-Day War in 1967 and became the first military governor of the West Bank. He was the Israeli ambassador to the UN from 1975-1978. He was first elected to the Knesset in 1981 and became President two years later, serving two terms.

Isaac Herzog’s message to Europe

As President of Israel, Isaac Herzog spoke in memory of his father and grandfather, in view of the disturbing rise in antisemitism in Europe, the threats to Jewish communities in Israel and around the world, and the position of the European Parliament as an international body founded in spite of – and because of – the history that preceded its establishment.

Honourable Members of the European Parliament, the Holocaust was not born in a vacuum. We should never forget that the Nazi death machine would not have managed to carry out its nightmarish vision had it not met soil fertilised with Jew-hatred, which is as old as time itself.