Case of Rabbi Sidney Greenbaum (AKA: Rabbi Zalman Greenbaum, Professor Zalman Greenbaum) (London, England)

Case of Rabbi Sidney Greenbaum

December 31, 1929 - May 28, 1996

(AKA: Rabbi Zalman Greenbaum, Professor Zalman Greenbaum, Sid Greenbaum, Sidney Greenbaum)

England

Pleaded guilty at Hendon magistrates' court to three charges of indecent assault on young boys.

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Table of Contents:

Biography pf Sidney Greenbaum
Sidney Greenbaum in Memoriam
Kaddish should always be allowed (02/02/2006)
Modern British Jewry By Geoffrey Alderman
Google "Sidney Greenbaum" pedophile

Also see:

Biography of Sidney Greenbaum

London Global University

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/english-usage/about/greenbaum.htm

Greenbaum, Salman Mendel [Sidney] (1929-1996), grammarian, was born on 31 December 1929 at Underwood Street, Stepney, London, the younger of the two sons of Lewis Greenbaum (d. 1944/5), a tailor, and Nellie Bernkopf. Greenbaum was thus brought up in the heart of the 'Jewish' East End of London, and in a thoroughly practising Orthodox Jewish household, suffused with learning and a love of books.

Greenbaum won a place at the Grocers' Company's School, Hackney, but had to leave at fifteen following the death of his father. He earned a living of sorts through teaching Jewish religion classes in east London and officiating in synagogue ceremonial. His knowledge of Hebrew and the Hebrew scriptures was sufficient to gain him admission to Jews' College, the religious training seminary, which had an affiliation with the University of London. In 1951 he was awarded, through the college, a BA degree from the university, with honours, in Hebrew and Aramaic. Two years later he gained his MA, and meanwhile obtained, from the college, the diploma qualifying him as a Jewish minister of religion. In 1954 he was awarded a postgraduate certificate in education, and became a primary school teacher.

These qualifications enabled Greenbaum to obtain employment as a 'supply teacher' with the London county council. From 1957 until 1964 he taught full-time at the Hasmonean grammar school, Hendon, under its formidable founder and principal, Rabbi Dr Solomon Schonfield. But Greenbaum's interests had already turned from the study of the sacred texts of Judaism to that of the English language. In 1951 he had enrolled at Birkbeck College to study for the University of London's BA in English, which he obtained in 1954. A decade later, following a series of confrontations with Schonfield over matters of management, he resigned from the Hasmonean. In the following year, while continuing to teach evening classes at Goldsmiths' College, Greenbaum obtained employment as a research assistant working for Randolph (later Lord) Quirk in the Survey of English Usage at University College, London. Thus began Greenbaum's lifetime professional association with Quirk, under whose supervision he obtained his PhD in 1967.

Greenbaum's earliest monograph was Studies in English Adverbial Usage (1969). He was subsequently appointed first as visiting professor in English language at the University of Oregon, Eugene, then as associate professor at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. He had embarked on a punishing schedule of teaching, research, and publication. Verb-Intensifier Collocations in English and Elicitation Experiments in English (written with Quirk) were both published in 1970. Greenbaum was one of the 'gang of four' authors (the others were Quirk, Geoffrey Leech, and Jan Svartvik) who together wrote The Grammar of Contemporary English (1972) and the Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (1985); these volumes remained standard works of reference with worldwide currency into the twenty-first century. Greenbaum's University Grammar of English (also written jointly with Quirk) was published in 1973. Having spent 1972-3 as visiting professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Greenbaum returned to Milwaukee in 1973 to take the chair in English language. He also edited several books on the English language, among them Acceptability in Language (1977) and, with Leech and Svartvik, Studies in English Linguistics: for Randolph Quirk (1980). In addition to publishing widely in scholarly journals, Greenbaum was also interested in language pedagogy, specifically composition.

In 1983 Greenbaum succeeded to the post of Quain professor of English language and literature and director of the Survey of English Usage, which Quirk had vacated at University College, London (UCL), following his appointment as vice-chancellor of the University of London. Greenbaum's book The English Language Today was published in 1985 and from 1986 to 1988 he served as dean of the faculty of arts at UCL. While undertaking a range of administrative duties, Greenbaum also found time to dabble in the larger politics of the federal university, in which he became a senator. He did not agree with the majority of his academic colleagues at University College, who yearned for the breakup of the federation and the independence of the college, out of which the university had grown. In 1989 his support was crucial to the election as chairman of the university's academic council of Professor Geoffrey Alderman, an out-and-out 'federalist'. Greenbaum had taught Alderman at a London county council primary school in 1954. The two became close friends and allies in what became an epic and ultimately successful struggle during the early 1990s to save the 'federation' from its many enemies in academia and government. The University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee awarded Greenbaum an honorary doctorate in 1989 and in 1990 he was made research professor and director of the Survey of English Usage. A Student's Grammar of English, written with Quirk, appeared in 1990.

In the early 1990s, building on his early pioneering experimental techniques investigating English grammar and usage, Greenbaum founded the International Corpus of English (ICE), a major research project based at the Survey of English Usage. The aim of the ICE was to establish identically constructed corpora in different countries of the English-speaking world. He described the project in an edited volume, Comparing English Worldwide: the International Corpus of English (1996). The British component of ICE (ICE-GB) was the first corpus to be completed and become fully searchable, using dedicated state-of-the-art software whose early development Greenbaum supervised. In an age when computers were still the prerogative of the scientific community, Greenbaum was tenacious in advocating computing for the humanities; as dean of arts at University College he was the first academic to insist on adequate funding of humanities computing and on the provision of professional training in computing for humanities teachers and researchers.

One of Greenbaum's last publications was The Oxford English Grammar (1996). This work was innovative because it was based on real-language data taken from the International Corpus of English. Widely reviewed in the British press, it was both praised and criticized for its tolerance of non-standard usage. Greenbaum wrote that:

good English is sometimes equated with correct English, but the two concepts should be differentiated. Correct English is conformity to the norms of the standard language. Good English is good use of the resources available in the language. In that sense we can use non-standard dialect well and we can use standard language badly. (The Oxford English Grammar, 17)

On his return to England from the USA Greenbaum had re-established his links with London's Jewish communities and with Jews' College. He assisted Dr Immanuel Jakobovits, the United Synagogue's chief rabbi, in the English translation of the centenary edition of the Singer's Prayer Book (1990), the standard book of prayer used by Orthodox Jews throughout the British Commonwealth. He was a member of a number of Jewish organizations including the Jewish Historical Society, the Society for Jewish Studies, the Sternberg Centre for Judaism, and the Maccabeans. He was also a member of the Reform Club. Yet Greenbaum was a very private, intensely lonely, and in some respects tragic person, generous to his friends but awkward in female company and quite lacking in social graces. Unusually for an Orthodox Jew, he never married. He was at his best when entertaining family and colleagues. While drinking a glass of whisky and smoking a cigar he would sit in his favourite chair, talking to his guests. Towards the end of his life he suffered increasingly from ill health.

In 1990 Greenbaum resigned the Quain chair at University College on personal grounds but was able to continue directing the Survey of English Usage. On 28 May 1996, while delivering a lecture at Moscow University, he died of heart failure. His body was brought back to London by a colleague and by friends and was buried on 3 June 1996 at the Federation Jewish cemetery, Edmonton.

Sources

Who's who in the world, 13th edn (1996) · The Guardian (31 May 1996) · The Independent (31 May 1996) · Jewish Chronicle (14 June 1996) · The Times (5 June 1996) · files of the Survey of English Usage, UCL

Bas Aarts and Geoffrey Alderman. From: The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. © Oxford University Press.

Tribute

ICAME meetings will never be the same without that portly, amiable figure with a stinking pipe or a fat cigar stuck between the lips of his grinning face.

I first met Sid in 1964 when he turned up at the Survey of English Usage, University College London, to discuss a medieval research topic with Randolph Quirk. While already in his mid-thirties when taking up the serious study of modern English, he succeeded in making an extraordinary contribution to this field of research during his next 30 years.

Sidney Zalman Greenbaum was born on 31 December 1929 into a poor and deeply devout Yiddish-speaking family in the East End of London. Sid was an orthodox Jew. I remember occasions on Friday afternoons when, as we in the Gang of Four were carrying on a heated discussion of some moot point of English grammar, Sid might just drop his pen, in mid-sentence, and retire to his Sabbath. No go for the grammar that weekend! He acquired a minister's diploma from Jews' College, London although he never practised as a rabbi and a teaching diploma from the Institute of Education. He became a teacher of Hebrew at the Hasmonean Boys School in Hendon but felt that the scope for teaching modern Hebrew was very limited in the mid-1950s and took up the teaching of English, while simultaneously studying for an Honours English degree at Birkbeck College.

In 1983 Sid, the Londoner, returned home to succeed Randolph Quirk as Quain Professor of English Language and Literature and Director of the Survey of English Usage at University College London. Most of his corpus work will be familiar to readers of ICAME Journal and need not be described in detail here. Yet it is remarkable that, while not particularly computer-literate, Sid clearly saw the possibilities of the new techniques that were opening up in the 1980s with the advent of more efficient electronic tools, hard and soft. During the previous decade we had already started, at Lund University, the production of the electronic London-Lund Corpus of Spoken English, and Sid now took to transforming all the paper slips of the London-based Survey filing cabinets into computer readable data files. At this time he also launched ICE, The International Corpus of English, a global project which most appropriately was dreamt up at the Reform Club of which he was a fond member, in the footsteps of Phileas Fogg. ICE is a grand plan to collect a representative sample of different Englishes worldwide, and it is to Sid's great credit that he managed to engage academic colleagues in over twenty countries to take part in this effort. It is only to be hoped that this important project can be continued and brought to a successful conclusion by Bas Aarts, the new Director of the Survey of English Usage.

Just before Sid's death his Oxford English Grammar appeared, which was an unusual event in that it created media interest a rare form of celebrity for a grammarian! He published some twenty books, including Acceptability in Language (1977, editor), The English Language Today (1985, editor), a revision of Gower's Complete Plain Words (1985, with Janet Whitcut), A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (1985, co-author), Good English and the Grammarian (1988), A Student's Grammar of the English Language (1990, with Randolph Quirk), An Introduction to English Grammar (1991). His last work, Comparing English Worldwide, was published posthumously in August 1996.

Sid continued his predecessor's achievement in maintaining the Survey's role as a centre of English corpus studies but also in keeping an open house policy to make Foster Court a place of pilgrimage for English language researchers from the outer and expanding circles. There are many of us, colleagues and students, who will remember with gratitude his generosity towards globetrotting scholars of English who landed at the Survey and were able to benefit from its corpus resources, the staff 's professional expertise and his own personal friendship.

Jan Svartvik. From: ICAME Journal 21, April 1997, 127-128.

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Sidney Greenbaum in Memoriam

By Jan Svartvik

http://icame.uib.no/ij21/svartvik.pdf

To us who saw Sidney Greenbaum as a keen and active participant at last year's ICAME conference in Stockholm, it came as a terrible shock to hear the news, only a few days later, that he had died on 28 May 1996, at the age of 66, while lecturing to a Russian audience in Moscow. ICAME meetings will never be the same without that portly, amiable figure with a stinking pipe or a fat cigar stuck between the lips of his grinning face.

After joining the Survey in the mid-sixties as a research assistant, he started work on his PhD thesis which was turned into his first book, Studies in English Adverbial Usage (1969), where he developed the technique of elicitation experiments with informants. After completing his doctorate Sid went west, to America: first to Oregon University from 1968 to 1969, then to Wisconsin-Milwaukee University from 1969 to 1983, interrupted briefly in the early seventies by a period at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 1983 Sid, the Londoner, returned home to succeed Randolph Quirk as Quain Professor of English Language and Literature and Director of the Survey of English Usage at University College London. Most of his corpus work will be familiar to readers of ICAME Journal and need not be described in detail here. Yet it is remarkable that, while not particularly computer-literate, Sid clearly saw the possibilities of the new techniques that were opening up in the 1980s with the advent of more efficient electronic tools, hard and soft. During the previous decade we had already started, at Lund University, the production of the electronic London-Lund Corpus of Spoken English, and Sid now took to transforming all the paper slips of the London-based Survey filing cabinets into computer readable data files. At this time he also launched ICE, The International Corpus of English, a global project which most appropriately was dreamt up at the Reform Club of which he was a fond member, in the footsteps of Phileas Fogg. ICE is a ground plan to collect a representative sample of different Englishes worldwide, and it is to Sid's great credit that he managed to engage academic colleagues in over twenty countries to take part in this effort. It is only to be hoped that this important project can be continued and brought to a successful conclusion by Bas Aarts, the new Director of the Survey of English Usage.

Sid continued his predecessor's achievement in maintaining the Survey's role as a centre of English corpus studies but also in keeping an open house policy to make Foster Court a place of pilgrimage for English language researchers from the outer and expanding circles. There are many of us, colleagues and students, who will remember with gratitude his generosity towards globetrotting scholars of English who landed at the Survey and were able to benefit from its corpus resources, the staff's professional expertise and his own personal friendship.

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Kaddish should always be allowed

By Geoffrey Alderman

(UK) Jewish Chronicle - February 2, 2006

http://www.thejc.com/home.aspx?AId=41909&ATypeId=1&search=true2&srchstr=Geoffrey Alderman greenbaum&srchtxt=1&srchhead=1&srchauthor=1&srchsandp=1&scsrch=0

I have a great deal of sympathy with the management of the United Hebrew Congregation of New-castle-upon-Tyne, which has barred a congregant from reciting Kaddish for his deceased mother on the grounds that he is a convicted sex offender and shouldn't feel he's welcome within the Newcastle community.

Some of you have contacted me to ask what the justification could be for this extraordinary prohibition. The Kaddish consists of a recitation in praise of God. In reciting it, the mourner declares, before his brethren, his continuing devotion to and faith in the Almighty, in spite of his loss.

I understand that the gentleman in question — Mr Jonathan Warrents — was barred from reciting Kad-dish (or more precisely from entering the synagogue for this purpose) following the death of his mother. Now, the recitation of Kaddish for a departed parent is a religious obligation. Preventing Mr Warrents from fulfilling this obligation could, on the face of it, be regarded as blasphemy. The fact that the bar might have had rabbinical sanction — and I understand that the rabbi of the synagogue in question has not objected to the bar — would not of itself make it any the less blasphemous.

Mr Warrents has been convicted of an act of gross indecency with an 11-year-old boy, for which he served a prison sentence. This was not, alas, his first sex-offence conviction.

Recent events in the public and political domains relating to sex-offenders apparently being permitted to teach in schools have acted as a sharp reminder to us all of the dangers posed by such individuals even after they have served the punishments exacted by the state. In that sense, the punishment of a sex offender extends well beyond any prison sentence or other criminal penalty. A sex offender never quite pays off his or her debt to society. The debt is lifelong. The forgiveness can never be complete.

I understand fully the revulsion that the Jews and Jewesses of Newcastle must have felt following Mr Warrents's trial and conviction some five years ago. And I fully understand the fear that, if permitted to enter the synagogue, especially on a Shabbat, Mr Warrents will, unless very closely supervised, in-evitably come into contact with young children.

The act for which Mr Warrents was imprisoned was wicked and sinful. But does the fact that Mr Warrents committed a wicked and sinful act, for which he has paid the penalty exacted by the state, give us — his fellow Jews — the right to impose further punishment upon him, especially when this punishment would appear to consist of erecting a barrier preventing dialogue between Mr Warrents and his maker? I do not believe that it does.

Fifteen years ago, it fell to me, as a senior office-holder in London University, to concern myself with the sordid case of a very prominent Jewish academic, Professor Zalman Greenbaum, a lifelong paedophile (as it turned out) who had pleaded guilty at Hendon magistrates' court to three charges of indecent assault on young boys. I insisted that Professor Greenbaum (who was given a suspended prison sentence) leave the university. But he was never — to the best of my knowledge — prevented from saying Kaddish for his parents, and I personally would never have entertained such a suggestion.

Some time later, I was peripherally involved in the case of another convicted Jewish paedophile, a married man who was alleged to have sexually abused one of his offspring. The man protested his innocence but the fact was (as I reminded him) that a jury had found him guilty.

On his release from prison, he started attending a local synagogue, and inquired whether he might be given an aliyah. Inevitably, perhaps, a whispering campaign was got up to prevent this happening.

I lent my support to those who argued differently. What this man needed, I argued — what all who are in his position need — is to be brought closer to God, not to be barred or banned therefrom. Eventually, the aliyah was given, but at a Thursday morning min-yan.

The United Hebrew Congregation of Newcastle-upon-Tyne must not and cannot ban Mr Warrents from reciting Kaddish for his late mother. If he is permitted to enter the synagogue, the necessary steps must be taken to prevent him coming into contact with any child, perhaps by restricting him to weekday morning services.

But, if the opposition to his entering the synagogue is too great, the congregation should take upon itself the obligation — the mitzvah — of making other arrangements, for example an occasional and discreet morning or evening minyan in a private house.

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Modern British Jewry By Geoffrey Alderman

Oxford University Press

ISBN 019820759X

page 409

The previous year (August 1990), the eminent scholar of the English language, and Jews' College alumnus, Professor Sidney Greenbaum (1929-96) had pleaded guilty at Hendron Magistrate's Court to three charges of indecent assault on young boys; his elegantly crafted obituary in the Jewish Chronicle made no mention of this recorded and verifiable fact.<100>

<100>

JC (14 June 1996), 25. At the time of the disgrace Greenbaum held the prestigious Quain Chair of English Literature at University College London. He was it transpired, a long-time abuser, whose paedophile activities were well known within Orthodox circles in North London.

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