Casgliadau Arlein

Oral history recording with Cyril Cohen 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 Cardiff in 1919. I was brought up in a Jewish household but my upbringing wasn’t religious at all and we didn’t really go to synagogue. My mother was traditional and kept a kosher house. My father was a semi-atheist, I think, and yet he was very Jewish. I went into the poultry business where we used to buy live poultry, kill it, prepare it and sell it to fish and chip shops. I got married and I retired when I was about seventy-two. I’ve been active in Cardiff’s Reform synagogue since it was established in 1948. I remember when we first started, we used to conduct the service once a week at the Temple of Peace. We rented a hall-like room until we moved to Moira Terrace in the early ’50s. It was then when the congregation sprang into life. We were very active in the first twenty-five years, and the synagogue used to be packed during the Jewish New Year and festivals. A lot of our early members were Continental refugees. Most of them have now died, and the picture of the membership has changed. We are all now mainly of British stock. I’ve been very involved in the community over the years. I looked after the synagogue’s repair and maintenance, I took care of the funerals for about thirty years, and I still organise the communal seder for Passover. My late wife, Ray, was also involved and was one of the teachers in the religion school for many years. It’s not what you would call a big, healthy, thriving community, and it is getting smaller, unfortunately. It’s a dying community. I’m not a particularly religious Jew, but I wouldn’t like to see the synagogue close and the community having to hire a room once a week for a service. There’s no community spirit then.