Rabbi Rodney Mariner was born in Australia in 1941 and graduated from Monash University Melbourne. He studied for the rabbinate at Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem, and in London at Leo Baeck College. Since 1982 he has been the senior rabbi at Belsize Square Synagogue, an independent London congregation established by German and Central European German-speaking Jews in 1938. This synagogue maintains the unique blend of the timely and the timeless that characterized the Liberale Judaism of the middle and late 19th century in western Europe, especially in Germany, continuing up until its destruction by the end of the 1930s. Rabbi Mariner was the dramatic narrator for the 1988 world premiere in London of Neil Levin’s Vanished Voices, a musical commemoration of Reichskristallnacht on its 50th anniversary, presented at the St. Johns Smith Square. He also served in the same role at London’s Barbican Centre in 1996.