Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1991, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is a religious leader.

Brought up in an Orthodox Jewish family, he went to the local grammar school in North London and then to Cambridge,

where, like his three brothers after him, he won a double first. His belief in the importance of

Judaism was reinforced when he was 19 and Israel fought and won the six-day war. Ten years

later he qualified as a rabbi and now only 13 years

after his entry into full-time religion he is to become very reluctantly he

says the leader of Britain's Jews.

He is the chief rabbi-elect, Dr Jonathan Sachs.

Reluctants apart, Dr. Saxon, we'll come to that later.

The other surprising thing about you is that you don't have a

luxuriant and lengthy beard. Is this a new rabbinical trend? Well I left it in

Jerusalem. I've just come back from Jerusalem where I was staying with my family during the Gulf War.

And of course in the weeks before the war we'd been warned about the possibility of chemical attacks and the rule was as soon as an alarm goes

go into a sealed room and put on your gas masks but for those who have beards

gas masks will not fit and please remove your beards. So when the sirens went, everyone

else dive for their masks, I dived for my scissors and shaver and remove my beard. My children actually were extremely scared and I was quite

worried for them. But when the all clear came and I took the mask off and they saw their daddy for the first time ever without a beard.

They absolutely collapsed with laughter.

My wife said, how romantic, this is the man I got engaged to and from that moment onwards the tension

was broken and we were able to be relaxed. I presume when when your wife met you you

...