Casgliadau Arlein
Amgueddfa Cymru
Chwilio Uwch
Recordiad sain / Audio recording: Mike Pitt
Oral history recording with Mike Pitt 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 Bristol in 1958. I knew I was Jewish from a very young age but I didn’t understand the significance of it. We weren’t living amongst a Jewish community; everybody else got christened and I was christened in the same way. Although I always knew I was Jewish, it didn’t really mean much to me at that time in my life, as a young boy. My first wife was not Jewish and I used to take the children to church every Sunday and became very good friends with the vicar and was quite involved in the community. I went to confirmation classes, and it was during this time that I suddenly thought to myself, this doesn’t feel right at all. I don’t know where it came from. I became a police officer in Cardiff in 1978 at the age of nineteen. The job was so diverse; you dealt with so many different things. You’d come into work and you hadn’t got a clue what was going to happen that day. Some things were extremely traumatic but other days you would have a really good laugh with your colleagues and you really did see all sorts of things. I loved the job – it was fantastic but hard. I met my second wife, Tracy, in the police force and we were married in 1997. On our honeymoon in Cyprus, we met a Jewish couple from London and became the greatest of friends. They invited us for Shabbat and Jewish weddings and suddenly we found ourselves in a Jewish world. Tracy was much more interested than I was at first. She just loved the community feeling and later chose to convert. I took a greater interest in my own roots after I worked for six months with the United Nations in East Timor. The genocide was something I’d never experienced before and it was frightening at first. The people were in trauma and the whole infrastructure had to be rebuilt. When I came back I thought about God a lot more and my own Jewish origins. The Jewish life that Tracy was finding very interesting I started to find interesting as well. We came to the Cardiff Reform Synagogue for the first time several years ago now, and from the very first moment, we both knew that this is the place we wanted to be, and for the first time ever, I felt this is where I belong: I’m home. I love going on Friday nights and I do the security side of it as well, and Tracy goes into the kitchens and does all that side of it. Tracy keeps a kosher house, which was her choice. If anything, she’d probably be more committed than I am. Initially the kids thought we were mad. They thought we’d joined the Moonies or something. It was difficult but as the years went by they became more and more interested and they come to synagogue with us now and again. We’re not pushing them. If they one day say this is a path they’d like to follow then that’s a matter for them. But they enjoy the life that we have here, Shabbat and Chanukah and all the little things that we do around the house now to keep a Jewish life, and they enjoy being a part of it. Returning to my Jewish life, to my roots, has just been incredibly rewarding and helped me fulfil myself as an individual as well. It’s been absolutely brilliant.