Casgliadau Arlein

Oral history recording with Judy Hornung 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 father opened a shop in Pontypool when he was seventeen, and borrowed £100 from his father and paid it back within the year. His shop was there until 1923, when he and his brother moved to Cardiff and opened Zeidmans, a big store which was there until my father died in 1965. My mother was from Exeter, and my parents met through an arranged meeting and married in Exeter before moving to Cardiff. I was born in 1931. I first became involved with Cardiff Reform Synagogue through the youth club in 1948, when I was seventeen. It was a very interesting age group – sixteen to thirty – and we had very, very nice times. We used to meet at Max Corne’s house. On the top floor he had a cinema because he was in the cinema business and they had a tennis court where we met for tennis in the summer. We moved onto the Royal Hotel for Sunday evenings, and a lot of people came from outside Cardiff, who lived in the Valleys and wanted their children to start mixing with the community. A lot of people were passing through Cardiff after the war who had lost their family or couldn’t go back to them. Many had decided to emigrate to America and Canada. A lot of the boys were much older than us girls; they’d come out of the Forces and were all very attractive young men to us, and that’s why there were so many weddings. I think we had eleven weddings in about five years before the club closed down. I’ve got a long list of friends who started off in the youth club. My husband Marcel’s family came to Cardiff during the war because Treforest Trading Estate opened up for refugees to open factories to make war-time things, like parts for aeroplanes, and later they made things like ironing boards and step stools. I still use their ironing board to this day. Then they sold the company, and Marcel and his brother joined their father in Caerphilly at Golmet, making garage doors. They were building like mad the Lady Mary estate, the Lakeside estate, and every garage door was a Golmet door in the ‘60s, so it was a boom time. I got engaged at twenty-one and married just after the Coronation. My parents belonged to Cathedral Road Synagogue, but when I got engaged to Marcel I wanted to get married in the Reform synagogue. My mother used to be very lenient with us with religion and they agreed that I could get married there. She was a member of the Orthodox shul but she would have been very happy with Reform. There was great respect for their religion but my religion was a bit more relaxed. Mine was the first big wedding because my mother was one of eleven and my father was one of seven, so there was a lot of family. Rabbi Graf was very happy to see so many people come to my wedding and the synagogue was absolutely full. We had three children, and when Marcel died young, I had fantastic support from the synagogue. It was a very difficult time because I had to bring up my children and run the house and it was a bit of a struggle. Now with six grandchildren, of course I’m interested in what they are doing. It’s just nice to have happy children doing the things they love and including me in a lot of it all.