This Much Is True

I have always relished being Jewish. We went to synagogue on the three holy days in the Jewish calendar: Yom Kippur which is the Day of Atonement and the holiest day of the year; Rosh Hashanah, the New Year; and Passover. Passover was the most important event of the year. Passover celebrates the deliverance of the Jewish people from slavery in Egypt and is the equivalent of Christmas, and a similarly family orientated occasion, but with less over indulgence and slumping — it’s a much more active, communal event. If you like — and if you believe — Passover is a party with God attending.

My friends and cousins invite me for Passover. Everybody wants to make it festive and delightful, the food to be as good as possible: along with the ceremonial fare, there’s a feast, usually involving matzo ball soup, gefilte fish, baked salmon, roast beef, or some delicious chicken recipe, accompanied by all manner of scrumptious vegetable side dishes. And, of course, there’s invariably a choice of several exquisite puddings.

During lockdown, I joined a Zoom Seder, but it’s not the same, because it is in essence a very intimate, sharing, joyous event. There are prayers throughout the meal, interspersed with stories and lots of songs; you clap, it’s gay, it’s happy. Everybody present at the Seder is supposed to contribute (it’s difficult to be a passive Jew), and the youngest child at the table asks four questions. The first is, ‘Why is this night different from all other nights?’ Another is, ‘Why on this night do we lean, and on all other nights we don’t lean?’ to imply that we are safe together, we can relax. If a rabbi is hosting the Seder, they invite each of the guests to talk about something meaningful that’s happened to them in the last year. Even though I’m a secular Jew (and now most Jews in England are secular), we draw on the memory of rabbis of the past and on our joint history. We remember the shtetels, where our ancestors came from, where people eked out an existence, yet they always celebrated Passover.

When the communities were destroyed during and after the Second World War, those who survived would club together, find each other wherever they were, and write a memoir of their village, a Yizkor book. They listed the names of the people they remembered; what the main street was like, the people in the shops and what the shops sold; what market day was like; and the name and description of the landlord who owned most of the property in the area. They tried to recreate, in these memory books, everything that had been destroyed, the world that they knew as children that had now been lost for ever.

They couldn’t bear the thought that all the people they had known had disappeared without trace, and nobody knew their names, and nobody knew that they lived, they were just obliterated. That’s what these books are to prevent. The Jews have become the people of these books of memory, and in nearly every village, or shtetel, that was destroyed, even if there was only one person left, they would create the memory book.

Through the Jewish Genealogical Society, I organised the collection of money for the Grodno (my paternal family town) memory book to be translated. That’s how a lot of people find out about their ancestors; you look up the ancestral village online and see that there is a memorial book for that place. In England, you have parish registers; but the Jewish people who lived in those villages — and there were millions of them — are gone: the towns laid waste, the inhabitants murdered, even the gravestones of their dead destroyed. Those who were not Jewish remained, often annexing the properties that were left by the Jews. When you visit those little towns now, some of them are terrified because they think you’ve come to take back their houses.

We Jews have always been outsiders. That gives you a certain energy and also, of course, a certain insecurity. Most Jewish families are traditionally very close-knit, something the Jewish community encourages. But now people are ‘marrying out’, as we call it, and there are fewer and fewer of us. Under threat, we Jews tend to stick together in order to try to preserve a Jewish community and its traditions. There are many Jews who don’t know anybody who isn’t Jewish. They interact with other people in the course of their day-to-day lives, but the people who come to their homes, who they count as friends, who they go to football matches with, who they play bridge with, are all Jews. That’s why many Jewish people send their children to a Jewish school. They don’t want them to be assimilated — whereas my parents did. Thanks to my school and my university, my friends come from all walks of life. In that sense, I grew up with one foot in each camp.