Casgliadau Arlein

Oral history recording with Elaina Rothman collected as part of The Hineni Project, an insight into the life and stories of a Jewish community in all its diversity. Hineni was a collaborative project between Cardiff Reform Synagogue and Butetown History & Arts Centre.

I was born in Woodford, Essex in 1948 and had a very ordinary upbringing, which wasn’t very religious. When I was twenty-one I moved to Canada where I had intended to remain. However, I met my husband, Gerald, in Montreal, and because he lived in the UK, we moved back. After being married for five years, we moved to America, where I decided to increase my Jewish studies. I started studying at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, just for the pleasure of it really, which became an even greater pleasure when I decided I wanted to become a rabbi. I thought the best thing to do with my Jewish education was to give it back, and it appealed to me to be a congregational rabbi. The rabbinical qualification took five years, and because I had moved back to the UK, I did my studies mostly in London but also in Israel. In my fourth year at Leo Baeck College, London, which trains rabbis for both of the British Jewish Progressive movements, I spent six months in a Liberal congregation and then a Reform congregation. I chose to come to Cardiff Reform because I had never been to Wales. After I finished my placement, the Cardiff congregation was looking for a rabbi and I was interested in applying. I became their rabbi – first as a student and then after my ordination – on a part-time basis, coming down from London every other week, from 1990 until 2002. While female rabbis are not all that unusual, they were not common, but I was fortunate in Cardiff because my predecessor had been a woman. Rabbis do all the obvious things. You visit people in hospital and at home; you do a bit of counselling, a bit of interfaith work; a bit of civic duty and you lead services. You also teach, and I taught the bar and bat mitzvah classes, an adult education class and led a discussion group. I have many favourite memories of Cardiff: the achievement of a bar or bat mitzvah child, the pride you take in a community pulling together and moving on, the enrichment of a particularly good service. But above all it was the privilege of working with a small community where I knew everybody. You’re given access to people’s lives in a way that you rarely get normally. Sometimes it was the privilege of burying somebody – that’s very difficult but it is a privilege to bury somebody whom you knew well, and it gets more difficult the better you knew them because they were a friend. I left Cardiff in December 2002. It was sad leaving but it was the right time. My husband, Gerald, retired that year and I thought it would be good to retire so we could both spend more time together. We live in London and we’re members of the local Masorti synagogue, where I have a voluntary role teaching Hebrew and running their programme for adult conversion. Judaism is life enhancing and is an important part of my everyday life. Reform Judaism is a thinking person’s Judaism and is about making intelligent, informed Jewish choices. It plays a fantastic role in educating a broader Jewish population about the role that Judaism can play in their life. I will always have an ongoing relationship with South Wales. I regularly do a Friday night dinner in London and almost invariably there’s a Cardiff person present and it’s a lot of fun catching up. Being the rabbi for Cardiff Reform was a wonderful opportunity that I took by chance and it turned out to be the most fantastic experience.