Rabbi Rabinowitz came from Lithuania to be the Rabbi of the Yiddish speaking communities in Edinburgh in approx 1898. On the eve of the War, his wife Sarah, then a few months pregnant with her tenth child, went to visit her family in the Heim. While she was away, war broke out and they never saw or heard from here for the next four years, during which time Rabbi Rabinowitz relocated the whole family from Edinburgh to London where he became the Rabbi of the Dalston Beth hamedrash. Some time after the war, his wife returned to England with a four year old daughter in trail.
The eldest child of the family, my grandmother Ida (later Newman whose husband Rabbi Dr. Julius Newman was the minister of the Notting Hill Synagogue from the 1920's to the late 1940's)) effectively became the mother during these four years which largely explains why she, unlike the remarkable story of three of her sisters all of whom trained to become doctors in the first twenty years of the twentieth century (not only women but women from an orthodox Rabbi's family, in a period when women training for medicine were few and far between), missed out on the chance of higher education.. One of these three daughters (Annie) was married to David Hillman who stained glass windows are to be found in many London synagogues. His father, Dayan Shmuel Hillman had come from Lithuania to Glasgow, following which he also relocated to London and became the head of the London Beth Din, an office he served throughout the first World War - and, I would assume, had to deal with numerous cases of Jewish war widows and agunot.
Another child of Jacob Rabinowitz, a son, Rabbi Professor Louis Rabinowitz was later a chaplain to the armed forces during World War II, Chief Rabbi of South Africa in the 1950's, and eventually settled in Jerusalem where, for a short period of time in the 1960's, he was Deputy Mayor of the city. he had been a young child growing up in Edinburgh and then London during World War I.
Another of the doctor sisters, Fanny, moved to Israel (after years of having a surgery in North West London during WWII) soon after the establishment of the State and was responsible for the founding of the Hadassah Nurses school. Both she and Louis received the honorary citizenship of Jerusalem in their later life - the only brother and sister to do this - but retained their strong Scottish accents till their dying day.