Sir Sigmund Sternberg

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Hungarian-born British philanthropist and entrepreneur Sir Sigmund Sternberg, oil on canvas by Valerie Wiffen, 1998.

© Quantum Pictures/Alamy

Sir Sigmund Sternberg was a Hungarian-born British philanthropist and entrepreneur who was known for his efforts to foster connectedness between various religious faiths. He was the founder and president of the Sternberg Foundation, as well as the founder of the Sternberg Centre for Judaism.

The seeds of Sternberg’s interest in improving interfaith relations were sown during his childhood through his early awareness of the absence of dialogue between Roman Catholics and Jews. Owing to quota restrictions for Jews at the University of Budapest and to the rise of Nazism, he left Hungary for the United Kingdom in 1939. At the outbreak of World War II in September of that year, he was classified by the British government as a “friendly enemy alien”; Hungary was not at war with Britain but was not an ally. Because of this classification, he could not attend school and so began to work in metal recycling. He established his own business in that industry, became a member of the London Metal Exchange (1945), and was naturalized as a British citizen (1947).

Sternberg’s involvement in business, civic life, and charitable causes paved the way for his interfaith work. He formed a charitable organization, the Sternberg Foundation, in 1968, and in 1979 he joined the International Council of Christians and Jews, an umbrella organization created to fight antisemitism, racism, and xenophobia. In 1981 he founded the Sternberg Centre for Judaism, then Europe’s largest Jewish cultural center. His many accomplishments included helping to arrange the first-ever papal visit to a synagogue (Rome, 1986), helping to establish diplomatic relations between the Vatican and Israel (1993), and assisting in the creation of the Three Faiths Forum to promote mutual understanding between Islam, Christianity, and Judaism (1997).

Sternberg was perhaps best known for his facilitation of the Geneva Declaration (1987), an agreement calling for the removal of a Carmelite convent that had been established in the mid-1980s at the site of the World War II Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz in Poland. Although the nuns’ intent was to pray for the camp’s victims, many considered their presence an intrusion in a setting where nearly two million Jews were killed during the Holocaust. Prior to Sternberg’s intercession in 1989, relations between the Roman Catholic Church and the Jewish people had deteriorated. Sternberg negotiated with Poland’s Józef Cardinal Glemp, who agreed to the move, which was completed in 1993.

Sternberg was the recipient of numerous honors. Following the bestowal of his knighthood in 1976 by Queen Elizabeth II, in 1985 he was named a Knight Commander of the Pontifical and Equestrian Order of St. Gregory the Great at the request of Pope John Paul II; he was only the second Jew so named in the United Kingdom. In 1998 Sternberg won the Templeton Prize for having “advanced public understanding of God and spirituality.” Sternberg was the second Jew—and the first Reform Jew—to receive the prize, which was established by Sir John Templeton in 1972 to recognize achievements related to humanity’s spiritual dimension. In 2008 Sternberg received the St. Mellitus Medal from the bishop of London, in recognition of his continued promotion of interfaith relations. That same year he accepted the Responsible Capitalism Lifetime Achievement Award, presented by British Foreign Secretary David Miliband.