10 Facts About Hugo Gryn

Hugo Gabriel Gryn was a British Reform rabbi, 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 in Ukraine.

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.

Hugo Gryn came to the United Kingdom in 1946, and was sent to board at the Polton House Farm School in Lasswade, near Edinburgh.

Hugo Gryn became a regular radio broadcaster and appeared for many years on BBC Radio 4's Thought for the Day and The Moral Maze.

In 1989, Hugo Gryn returned to Berehovo together with his daughter Naomi to make a film about his childhood.

Hugo Gryn married Jacqueline Selby on 1 January 1957 and they had four children together.

Hugo Gryn died of cancer on 18 August 1996 and is buried at Hoop Lane Cemetery in Golders Green, London.

Sacks wrote in later leaked private correspondence that as part of the Jewish Reform movement, Rabbi Hugo Gryn was a part of a "false grouping" and one of "those who destroy the faith".

Hugo Gryn was described as "probably the most beloved rabbi in Great Britain" by Rabbi Albert Friedlander, who was the author of the entry about Gryn in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.