Tony Bayfield

Who is Tony Bayfield?

Rabbi Dr Anthony Michael Bayfield CBE is a Reform rabbi and President of the Movement for Reform Judaism, the second largest organisation of synagogues in Britain.

He was born in Ilford, Essex in 1946. He was educated at the Royal Liberty Grammar School in Romford and Magdalene College, Cambridge. He studied law and had a doctoral place at the Cambridge Institute for Criminology and then moved to the Leo Baeck College to train as a rabbi. He received rabbinic ordination in 1972 from rabbis John Rayner, Hugo Gryn and Louis Jacobs.

He was a congregational rabbi in Surrey for a decade, then director of the Sternberg Centre for Judaism in Finchley. He was head of the Movement for Reform Judaism from 1994 until 2011. He is now President of the organisation.

Bayfield is a specialist in modern Jewish thought and contemporary Reform Judaism. He also specialises in Jewish-Christian and Jewish-Muslim dialogue and has published quite widely in this area. Bayfield has also written about Christian–Jewish reconciliation.

He is a widower with three children and six grandchildren. His younger daughter, Miriam Berger, received semichah in July 2006 and is a respected rabbi in her own right.