Casgliadau Arlein

Oral history recording with Tony Fraser 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 1948. My maternal grandparents were from a small market town near Nuremberg, Germany. Their apartment was attacked during Kristallnacht, and they left in 1939 and came to England to stay with an uncle in north London. Shortly after they arrived, they were interned as aliens; my grandfather was sent to the Isle of Wight and my mother went with my grandmother to the Isle of Man. After the war, they moved to Cardiff, where my grandfather set up a packaging factory on the Treforest Trading Estate, which later moved up to Porth in the Valleys. My mother had separated from my father and we lived with my grandparents in Cardiff. My grandmother prided herself on her cooking and creating a proper home. They typically spoke to each other in German and our home life was very Continental. The food smells were of German cooking – bay leaves and garlic, and there were velvet curtains and a lot of heavy furniture, and books everywhere. We lived in a quiet suburban area, and my brother and I played football and cricket in the street with the other kids. My best friend was not Jewish, and on Christmas morning I used to have permission to go to his house to see what presents he’d got, which was like visiting another world. So it was a nice mixed upbringing but there was this very odd boundary: inside the house was a German-Jewish-Continental culture and outside was middle-class Wales. People did think we were funny but I didn’t realise it. My grandfather was very well educated in Judaism. He was brought up a Liberal Jew and was a great advocate of his beliefs. So we kept all the festivals and the effort was there, but not what he saw as restrictive practices. My grandfather was a warden so we went to synagogue most Friday nights or Saturdays. I was quite pleased that my grandfather was such an important part of the community. I was bar mitzvah and I took that seriously and continued going to shul on my own for some years after that. I also went to cheder on a Sunday morning, and when I was about sixteen, Rabbi Graf made me a cheder teacher. I was also a member of a youth group called Ner Tamid. We used to meet once a fortnight in the basement of the shul. It created a social life and that was great and very important to us. My mother tried to persuade my grandfather to let her into the business, but he was very old fashioned and didn’t think women could do business. So she decided to do a course in personnel management and got a job at Cardiff University finding lodgings for students. She worked very hard and especially took pride with the overseas students, in being able to provide that little sense of comfort to people who had been like she had been at one point. My mother remarried in 1967 to a doctor and they were really happy together. She was on synagogue council for several years, but one of her great gifts was her friendship, and she was part of the glue that held the community together through her friendships. I feel very emotional about the synagogue. So much of my history is built into it. I have huge affection for it and gratitude because it was a safe container, and inside that little enclave I could be myself entirely.