Aba (Avrohom Moshe) Dunner (13 November 1937 – 17 July 2011) was a social and religious activist, who represented and worked for the interests of European Jewry, first as the personal assistant to Rabbi Solomon Schonfeld, then as Secretary to the British office of Agudat Israel, and in his latter years as Executive Director of the Conference of European Rabbis. Although born in pre-war Europe, Aba spent the majority of his life in England, where he was active in both communal work and the business world.
Early years
Aba Dunner was born in Königsberg (today known as Kaliningrad), then part of Germany, on 13 November 1937. His father was Rabbi Josef Hirsch Dunner, a scion of the distinguished Dunner family of Cologne, and from 1936 chief rabbi of East Prussia. His mother, Ida, was the daughter of Dr Wilhelm (Zev) Freyhan, a leading member of the Jewish community of Breslau, and one of the original founders of Agudat Israel at the Kattowitz Conference of 1912. Ida's mother came from the illustrious Hackenbroch family of Frankfurt-am-Main; her great-grandfather was part of the original strictly orthodox group who split off from the main community and invited Rabbiner Samson Rafael Hirsch to lead a breakaway community.
Arrival in England
As the officially recognised Jewish religious leader of East Prussia, Josef Dunner was arrested on Kristallnacht; the Nazis were unable to transport him to concentration camp in Germany, however, as the Poles would not allow the transfer of political prisoners through the Polish Corridor. As the Nazi authorities considered their options, Ida got in contact with Solomon Schonfeld, and was able to obtain through him a rabbi's visa, enabling the small family to come to England via the Netherlands in December 1938. On arrival in London, the Dunners settled briefly in Golders Green. Before very long Josef was asked to become the rabbi of Westcliff, until 1940, when he was briefly interned as an enemy alien on the Isle of Man. On his release, Josef was appointed as a rabbi to immigrant and evacuated Jews in Leicester, where the family remained until 1947.
Stamford Hill
In 1947, Schonfeld arranged for the Dunners to move to Stamford Hill, north London, where Josef established and ran the Beth Jacob seminary for girls. He went on, in 1960, to replace Schonfeld as rabbi of the Adath Yisrael Synagogue, and as the presiding rabbi of the Union of Orthodox Hebrew Congregations, the most senior religious position within the strictly orthodox community of the UK. Aba attended Yesodey Hatorah School, completing his high school education at the Gateshead Jewish Boarding School, where his classmates included Rabbi Avrohom Gurwicz, Rabbi Matisyohu Salomon, and Rabbi Chaim Kaufman, all of whom went on to become leading figures in orthodox Jewish education in the UK and beyond. After leaving school, Aba learned in yeshiva in Kapellen, Belgium, and then in Luzern, Switzerland, where he studied under Rabbi Moshe Soloveitchik, with whom he maintained contact throughout the remainder of his life.
After Yeshiva
In 1957 a sudden stomach illness brought him home from yeshiva and confined him to the Jewish Hospital in the East End of London for several months. Having decided not to return to yeshiva, Aba began to try out a variety of jobs, including selling fabric and working at a butcher shop, to see what career he should choose. Although a brilliant salesman, no job in the commercial arena appealed to his instinctive desire to be involved in communal activism. So, in 1959 he was engaged by Rabbi Schonfeld to be his personal assistant. Within a matter of months Schonfeld dispatched him across Europe to explore the idea of creating an organization which would unite all the strictly orthodox communities of Europe. Schonfeld then sent Aba to the still nascent State of Israel, to see whether one could build small synagogues, to be referred to as community centres, in the many secular kibbutzim that existed there. To reach Israel, Aba drove from London to Naples, Italy, in a Land-Rover, and took a ship to Israel, landing in Haifa just in time for the Independence Day celebrations of 1959.