Hugo Gabriel Gryn (pronounced green) (25 June 1930 – 18 August 1996) was a British Reformrabbi, a national broadcaster and a leading voice in interfaith dialogue.
Hugo Gryn was born into a prosperous Jewish family in the market town of Berehovo in Carpathian Ruthenia, which was then in Czechoslovakia and is now in Ukraine. His parents, who married in 1929, were Geza Gryn (1900–1945), a timber merchant, and Bella Neufeld.[1]
Gryn's family were deported to Auschwitz in 1944. Hugo and his mother survived but his ten-year-old brother, Gabriel, was gassed on arrival at Auschwitz, while his father died a few days after he and Hugo were liberated from Gunskirchen, a sub-camp of Mauthausen, in May 1945.
Gryn came to the United Kingdom in 1946, and was sent to board at the Polton House Farm School in Lasswade, near Edinburgh. He won a scholarship to study Mathematics at King's College, Cambridge, and after graduation volunteered to serve in the Israeli Army during the 1947–1949 Palestine war. In 1950 he went to Cincinnati in the United States, where he studied for the rabbinate at the Hebrew Union College, a seminary for Reform rabbis.[2]
In 1989, Gryn returned to Berehovo together with his daughter Naomi to make a film about his childhood.[3] After his death, Naomi Gryn edited his autobiography, also called Chasing Shadows,[4] which deals movingly with his experiences as a Holocaust survivor.
He married Jacqueline Selby on 1 January 1957[1] and they had four children together.
He died of cancer on 18 August 1996 and is buried at Hoop Lane Cemetery in Golders Green, London. The grave lies in a relatively prominent location, just north-east of the main entrance. The Chief Rabbi at the time Jonathan Sacks refused to attend his funeral on principle. Sacks wrote in later leaked private correspondence that as part of the Jewish Reform movement, Rabbi Gryn was a part of a "false grouping" and one of "those who destroy the faith".[5]
