Born in Frankfurt, Rakow came from an illustrious central European rabbinical family. In 1939, the family was granted asylum, and settled in London. But it was Gateshead that father and son regarded as their spiritual home. The Gateshead Jewish community was established at the end of the 19th century, as an act of revolt. Eastern European Jewish refugees rejected the religious laxity of the Newcastle-upon-Tyne congregation, and crossed the river to set up their new synagogue. Their ambition was to establish an entirely independent community on eastern European lines, owing allegiance to no other.

The then Chief Rabbi Joseph Herman Hertz did his best to thwart their attempts to establish a yeshivah in opposition to Jews' College, which was under his control in London. But he failed. During the Nazi era, Gateshead benefited from the arrival of orthodox Jewish refugee businessmen. They funded the expansion of the yeshivah and the addition of a women's seminary, a teacher-training institute and a kollel, or centre for postgraduate rabbinical studies. With the destruction of the centres of orthodox Jewish scholarship on the European mainland, Gateshead became the largest such centre outside the United States and Israel, and the largest orthodox Jewish education complex in postwar Europe.

Sent at 18 to the Gateshead kollel by his father, Rakow quickly established a reputation as an interpreter of the Talmud and a challenging teacher. In a city of rabbis, he rose to prominence by dint of his genius. In 1948 he moved with his wife to Montreux, Switzerland, where Rakow taught in the yeshivah, but in 1964, following his father-in-law's death, he returned to Gateshead to assume community leadership, thus becoming one of orthodox Judaism's recognised world leaders. His impact in shaping Gateshead Jewry and consolidating its position as a powerhouse of Torah orthodoxy, can scarcely be exaggerated.

He found himself at the centre of debate over the interface between Jewish orthodoxy and the features of modernity that he perceived as threatening orthodox values. His rabbinic judgments reflected this approach: he once ruled that Jewish young men and women in Gateshead were to do their shopping at different times of the day, to prevent unsupervised mingling of the sexes.

This conflicted with the views of the then Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks expressed in his book The Dignity of Difference (2002), which suggested that Judaism might learn from other faiths. Rakow publicly demanded that Sacks repudiate the thesis of the book and withdraw it from circulation. Gateshead Jews had never recognised Sacks' office as having any authority over them in any case. Sacks reissued the volume, removing the passages that Rakow had found so offensive. Never before had the power and primacy of the communal rabbi of Gateshead been so starkly demonstrated.