Julia Schwab was born on 27 February 1950 to Walter and Liesel Schwab. She attended South Hampstead High School and Newnham College, Cambridge, where she studied Assyriology at first. After she was refused entry to Turkey because she was British and to Iraq, because she was Jewish, she had to change her subject and started studying Hebrew, her subsidiary language, full-time. Her lecturer at Cambridge, Nicholas de Lange, suggested she should become a rabbi. She obtained her rabbinic diploma at Leo Baeck College, London, where she taught from 1977–97. She was chancellor of the University of Ulster from 1994–2000. Her father was born in Britain to German Jewish immigrants who arrived before the First World War. Her mother was a refugee from Nazi Germany, arriving at age 22 in 1937. The Schwab Trust was set up in their name, to help support and educate young refugees and asylum seekers. In 2016, Neuberger stated she was applying for a German passport.
Religious roles
Neuberger was Britain's second female rabbi, the first being Jackie Tabick, and the first to have her own synagogue. She was rabbi of the South London Liberal Synagogue from 1977 to 1989 and is president of West Central Liberal Synagogue. On 1 February 2011, the West London Synagogue announced that she had been appointed as senior rabbi of the synagogue. She retired from her West London Synagogue role in March 2020. She also regularly appears on the Pause for Thought section on BBC Radio 2.
Public sector activity
Neuberger was Chair of Camden and Islington Community Health ServicesNHS Trust from 1992 to 1997, and Chief Executive of the King's Fund from 1997 to 2004. Who's Who lists a large number of voluntary and philanthropic roles she has undertaken. Her book, The Moral State We're In, a study of morality and public policy in modern Britain, was published in 2005. The title is an allusion to Will Hutton's 1997 book, The State We're In.
Political and parliamentary roles
Neuberger was the Social Democratic Party candidate for Tooting in the 1983 general election, coming third with 8,317 votes. She was appointed a DBE in the New Year Honours of 2003. In June 2004 she was created a life peer as Baroness Neuberger, of Primrose Hill in the London Borough of Camden. She served as a Liberal Democrat Health spokesperson from 2004 to 2007. On 29 June 2007, Neuberger was appointed by the incoming Prime Minister Gordon Brown as the government's champion of volunteering. She resigned from the Liberal Democrats upon becoming senior rabbi of the West London Synagogue.
In 1997 she criticised education in Northern Ireland as sectarian at the opening of Loughview Integrated Primary School. The Irish News claimed she had criticised Catholic schools as sectarian, leading to criticism from the Director of the Catholic Council for Maintained Schools. However, she said that the report from the Irish News had given a misleading impression and that she had been quoted out of context:
Charity involvement
In January 2013, Neuberger was appointed chair of an Independent Review of the Liverpool Care Pathway for the Dying Patient. The impartiality of the appointment was questioned by some of the bereaved families, due to her previous endorsement of the pathway, which was written by Dr John Ellershaw, medical director of the Marie Curie Palliative Care Institute in Liverpool, in a 2003 BMJ article, and her widely publicised support of the Marie Curie Institute. The results of the review were published in July 2013; accepting the review's recommendations, the government advised that NHS hospitals should phase out the use of the LCP. Neuberger was elected vice-president of Attend, a charity that supports and expands the roles volunteers play in creating healthy communities, in 2006 and held the position until she retired in 2011. Neuberger was appointed to the board of Irish health insurers Vhi Healthcare for a five-year period from 2005 by Mary Harney, the Tánaiste and Minister for Health and Children. Neuberger is a Vice President of the Jewish Leadership Council.
