Casgliadau Arlein

Oral history recording with John Minkes 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 London in 1953 and grew up in Birmingham. My father was a university lecturer and my mother a teacher, so we were comfortably off. I went to a small private primary school. There was no prejudice or discrimination, and the school invited a local Jewish minister to provide religious instruction for the Jewish kids. My family were middle-of-the-road Anglo-Orthodox. We belonged to Singers Hill, the big Orthodox synagogue. I had my bar mitzvah there, but if we went to shul, which wasn’t very often, we usually went to the local old-age home, a ten minutes’ walk away. But in those days everybody belonged to the shul and the social life was either family or other Jewish friends. My parents thought when they had children, they’d give them a choice, which seems to have worked out, because I’ve been both ways religiously in the course of my life. In my teens a friend invited me to join the Jewish Youth Study Group, and I also started going to shul regularly and got more into things. Until a year after graduating from university, I was quite strict in my religious practice. I believed that God was watching what I did and I had to do what I was supposed to. After I went on a summer course in a yeshiva in Jerusalem, I realised that there were attitudes within ultra-Orthodoxy that were unacceptable to me. I also came to feel that God didn’t follow what was happening from day to day, and things started to be less significant, and once you’ve stopped doing one thing, it’s a bit like dominoes – it was easier not to do the next thing. I studied economics at Cambridge, but then trained on a social work course to become a probation officer because it combined helping people and thinking about crime and why people did it. I worked in that field for nearly twenty years, but now I teach criminology at Swansea University. I think if I hadn’t gone into probation and been a social worker I would never have learnt to talk about feelings, and I learnt (eventually) to speak my mind a bit more and to be firm with people. I’ve also been involved with amateur theatre for many years. I began by prompting, and after I joined Telstars in Cardiff, I did two or three technical things, but then like most people who say, “strictly backstage” I got the bug and now more often than not I’ve been on the stage and enjoy it. But it’s also been a very important part of my social life as Telstars is a small and tightly-knit group. I’ve always been interested in football and went to my first game when I was ten. I’ve had season tickets at Watford, Swindon and now Cardiff, and at one point I was going to over fifty games a season. Now that I’m married, I’m cutting down on the non-league grounds! When I moved to Cardiff, I joined the Reform synagogue. I didn’t hesitate because I liked many of their policies and Reform is nearer to what I believe. Through Rabbi Elaina I got to know people. I’ve led services, have been on council, and am currently the Treasurer. I want to keep some element of tradition going, and Reform makes it much easier for people to belong. Although I have a residual belief in God, what motivates me now is that I like the familiarity of the liturgy, and the company and the sense of belonging. It’s a nice community and it’s a pleasure to go.