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 1994, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is a rabbi, From a life mutilated by antagonism,

he has preached the message of conciliation.

He was born in Czechoslovakia,

but his well-ordered childhood was thrown

into turmoil by the Second World War. He spent two years in

concentration camps and survived. He came to Britain where he won a place at

Cambridge, then trained as a rabbi in America. After working in India, Africa and the Middle East,

he returned here in 1964.

Since then, as President of the Reform Synagogue of Great Britain,

and perhaps more conspicuously, as a panelist on the BBC

programme The Moral Maze he has advanced the arguments for better relations

between people of differing faiths. He is Rabbi Hugo Green. You've been a Rabbi in London, then Hugo,

for 30 years, always in the West London Synagogue. Man and boy, 30 years

coming up exactly to that anniversary. But were you always destined to become a rabbi? Was it always on the cards for young Hugo? No, no. I'm not sure what I was destined to be. I suppose a life of leisure and comfort is what I hoped it would be well-to-do family, very hard-working.

Most of our family were actually in sort of agriculture.

My father was a forest developer, and then through we had vineyards and I suppose that's where I would have been hitting.

Do you find it surprising then where one ends up in life perhaps is often surprising but that you a boy from a small

check town at the foot of the Carpathian mountain should end up spending his life in

West London ministering to thousands of people not even having been taught English as a child.

Well, my grandpa would have said if you live long enough you see everything.

...