Casgliadau Arlein

Oral history recording with Vernon Jenkins 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 1928 in Gorseinon, an industrial town west of Swansea. I was fortunate to have been brought up in a small cottage on a fairly large plot of land so my childhood was a very happy one. My mother, who was a very influential lady, made me have lessons on the piano from when I was about eight years old and attend the local church as a choir boy. I began organ lessons and, in effect, became the church organist about the age of thirteen. In 1955, I began to play organ for the Cardiff Reform Synagogue and I’ve been there ever since. It’s been a happy relationship. I’d been an organist for a number of years, so I didn’t have any fears about being able to do the job ultimately. But what I hadn’t anticipated was that the service was so different from a Christian service and the fact that it was fifty per cent Hebrew. I hadn’t really thought that through and also hadn’t bargained for the High Holiday services. The other services were small pie compared to the Day of Atonement. I mean, I never thought I’d be getting involved in anything as long as that. My best memories of the High Holiday Services are with Ian and Fiona Karet because they were amateur singers, but they were good-quality amateurs and they knew their stuff. They were synagogue-going people and involved in Jewish choirs, and everything was a piece of cake with them. I had no rehearsal worries of any kind and we just clicked immediately. I think Rabbi Graf was particularly fond of music himself and he expected high quality deliveries. There are tunes that I love in Jewish music that I’d never have known about and are completely different music from anything I’d ever played in a Christian context. I’ve had the big advantage of being introduced to a whole repertoire of music that I would not normally come across ever, some very lovely music, and also the advantage of playing for professional singers. In a church, hymns will change every week, but in a synagogue you’ve got one set of pieces that you play week after week. You might say that to be a synagogue organist must be an exceedingly boring job but I’ve never found it so. Occasionally, new tunes and accompanying new words have been introduced. We’ve got a few tunes for “Adon Olam”, for example, and I tend to rotate those a bit. But apart from that things haven’t changed that much. I’m not an outgoing person, or certainly wasn’t at an earlier age, so I would have been a bit shy about pushing myself into situations. So, for many years, I didn’t commune really with others except Rabbi Graf, of course, and the singers that came from time to time. But not for many years did I even go down to a kiddush, but in recent times I’ve got to know people more, so I’ll sometimes go and have a chat and have developed a friendship with many people there. It’s been a very slow process, really, but I feel most at home in the synagogue and so did my wife, and we didn’t regard that as an accident. We felt that we were naturally close to the Jewish community and very happy there.