Casgliadau Arlein

Oral history recording with Eva Lavine 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 Prague in 1924. My parents came from Russia and my father was a bespoke tailor. My parents were Orthodox and my father used to go to synagogue and lay tefillin. My mother was a typical Jewish mother, cooking and looking after the children. For a year I went to a Jewish school, but then I went to an ordinary school but there were quite a few Jewish children. When they had prayers every morning we just sat - the Jewish children didn’t pray. I was in a Jewish youth movement called T’chelet Lavan, and we all wanted to go to Palestine, which I did in 1940, when I was sixteen. Before I left I was interviewed by a Nazi doctor and a Jewish one, and you had to be healthy and reasonably intelligent, I suppose, and they let you go. My best friend, who was very, very clever, but she had a murmur heart - she didn’t get through. I was lucky but you had to be almost perfect. Most of the Jewish children from my school unfortunately went to concentration camps. I was one of the lucky ones, very lucky. When I left, there was a curfew from about 9 o’clock in the evening, and I remember my parents bribed a taxi driver and brought me to the train station to go to Genoa, and we were sitting in the train and singing “Hava Nagila” and all the songs. We didn’t think and didn’t know what happened to our parents when they went back. When you are young you don’t think. In Palestine some went to a moshav for girls and some went to private homes, but I went to a school in Ben Shemen, so I was lucky to have had education for two years. The school was mostly people from Europe. The first ones were from Germany, I think, and Czechoslovakia, and the last aliyah when I was there came from Bulgaria. I don’t think we realised what was happening in Europe. We had a good time enjoying ourselves. I was lucky to get into this school – it not only saved my life, I had an education. I got a diploma in agriculture. I became a teacher to mentally handicapped children in a school in Tel Aviv. I met my husband in Ben Shemen. We got married in 1945 in Tel Aviv, in the chief rabbi’s home. We wanted to go to City Hall and friends said, “Your parents wouldn’t like it”, and they told us to go and marry in the chief rabbi’s. So we had all our friends, no family. We came to Cardiff in 1947 to visit my husband’s parents, who had a factory which made unbreakable pencils. I became pregnant with my daughter so we stayed. We joined the Reform Synagogue because there was Hebrew, but it wasn’t so religious like the Orthodox. I was involved with chevra kadisha with Mrs Graf, the rabbi’s wife, and collected for the garden parties. But I don’t need to go to synagogue to feel or be Jewish. I’m Jewish even if I sit at home. My whole life was Jewish but it’s nothing to do with being religious. It doesn’t mean that you’ve got to be kosher or that you go to synagogue. I’m born Jewish and I feel Jewish and it’s inside me; it’s part of my heritage. It’s something that I am and I wouldn’t like to change. I’m very happy, very proud of it.