Casgliadau Arlein

Oral history recording with Michael Bogod 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.

My grandfather was from Vitebsk, now in Belarus. In 1895 he opened a haberdashers and general merchants shop in Cardiff. He was first joined by his eldest son, Wilfred, and later by his younger son, Harry, my father. The business is continued today by our three sons, the fourth generation. My parents were married in 1920, and I was born in Penarth in 1928, their third son. We were members of the Orthodox synagogue on Windsor Place and I was bar mitzvah there. My father also went into the cinema business and had a cinema on Queen Street. Through this my father became friendly with Max Corne, one of the founders of the Cardiff Reform Synagogue, and through him my parents got involved with the shul. There were several reasons behind the motivation to start the Reform synagogue. There were many Continental refugees who knew about this outlook of Judaism, so they were quite pleased and joined. Intermarriage was already becoming an issue and the Reform and Liberal movement had a more open view towards it. My parents were enthusiastic in the Reform shul and I came on the scene in 1950 via a youth-representative council post. In 1952 I got involved with the building and the refurbishment of the Moira Terrace synagogue. Over the years we introduced various things; for example, the communal seder, which has been a very big success, and provided a real service to the community and to the peripheral people because of where they lived. And then we had the Ladies Guild, which was another very powerful institution within the synagogue. It was very successful from a social point of view and raised money with the garden party, an annual fixture which everyone enjoyed. Our first rabbi, Gerhard Graf, of blessed memory, turned out to be the right person for us at the right time. He gave us thirty-one years of continuity, which gave the congregation a sense of stability. I think that, on the whole, the community has done a very good job. The trouble is, in some ways we’ve done too good a job. We educated our children and then sent them away to universities; they’re seeing the world so it’s not surprising they see the prospects in big cities, particularly London, as being better. They have taken their skills to other communities in other cities. Our loss has become their gain. I would say in the next fifty or hundred years there’ll be Jews in Cardiff. A certain number will carry on. But Jews have always moved on and I don’t think there’s any reason why this should have stopped. I think we’re basically restless. But you can see what’s happened in my own lifetime, where places like Pontypridd, Merthyr, Newport, Swansea, had flourishing, active communities and no longer do. But I’m not pessimistic about how things are going to change; we have to make the best of it and I believe we shall.