Family & Education
Celebrating yomtovim in a small community
A northerner exiled in London feels the pangs of nostalgia for the Yorkshire chagim of his youth
September 6, 2018 09:44
By, Marcus Dysch
3 min read
A northerner exiled in London feels the pangs of nostalgia for the Yorkshire chagim of his youth
September 6, 2018 09:44ByMarcus Dysch, Marcus Dysch
Perhaps it was the rarity of having the whole family together around one table, or maybe it was the lavish lunches that began late in the afternoon after hours in shul and rendered you comatose on the sofa, farshtopt for days to come.
The thing about growing up in the North of England in the 1980s and ’90s was that even in a small community, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur were major events. This was the High Holy Days as a box-office attraction; the single biggest feature in the calendar.
Days off school; special time with grandparents and extended family; my mother spending months planning the menus; the shul smartened up for its two packed days of the year.
These golden days hold a special place in my memory, the nostalgia tugging on the heartstrings every autumn. Because life is now rather different and these northern Yomtovim days are, for many reasons, a thing of the past.
Thirteen years after leaving Hull for London (perhaps I’m due a southern barmitzvah?) I feel qualified to assess the differences between the way things were done in the North for the chagim, and how life now plays out in the bustling, ghetto-like hub of British Jewry in the capital.
My time in London has taken me through a trio of local communities: Hendon, Belmont and Mill Hill. Each offers something different, but none could have the warmth or camaraderie of one’s own shul — by which I mean the one you grew up in.
What is the key difference between the High Holy Days in the North and the South? Mainly the number of shul attendees, but from there stems so much else.
On Yom Kippur at Mill Hill United Synagogue last year, hundreds, nay thousands, of people were milling around, chatting loudly, producing iPhones, dressed up like they were going to Royal Ascot — and all this on supposedly the most solemn day of the year.
As is the case in many other London synagogues, once you have got over the fact you are being evicted from the shul building you sit in year-round to be relegated to a temporary chair in an annex, it’s downhill from there. So many people turn up that no one knows who anyone else is and everyone ends up treating each other like some sort of invasion force — surely the absolute opposite of what we should be aiming for at this time of the year.
Don’t get me wrong, the temporary marquee I sat in at Belmont Synagogue for a few years was rather quaint, offering an atmospheric venue for the moving sounds of Kol Nidrei in particular, even if I did have to sit with my tallis over my raincoat all day and wear two pairs of socks.
But let’s be frank, you get none of that at home. One of the benefits of a small community is that you know no one will sit in your seat, you won’t need to register for a ticket or provide ID documents to get in, and you are likely to be met not by an army of well-meaning volunteer “greeters”, but by the familiar faces you grew up seeing every Shabbos.
My overwhelming feeling around Rosh Hashanah now, at the age of 35, is that the special Yomtovim of my childhood can never be recreated.
The reality is that going home to Yorkshire for the festivals is almost completely different to how it was. So many diminished northern and Scottish communities are split between exodus and return at this time of the year. Those in my parents’ generation travel to London to be with family probably in greater numbers than my own peers return to the north — meaning few shuls outside the capital heave as they once did.
The heart-breaking thing, on reflection, is that so many of these communities could easily accommodate dozens of visitors from rammed London shuls, not just at any time around the year, but especially for the Yomtov days.
We — myself, my wife and our young daughter — are spending this Rosh Hashanah back in Hull, for what is likely to be, for a number of reasons, the last time.
I imagine I will spend my time in shul and at my parents’ dinner table considering whether in 35 years I will be looking back on decades of happy chagim in Mill Hill with the same misty-eyed memories as I do the Yomtovim of my youth.
Sadly, I suspect it is going to be almost impossible to top those heady childhood days of steaming piles of tsimmes, a whole row in shul of blood relatives, and my grandmother feeding me turkey as I lay stricken with flu on the sofa on a long Rosh Hashanah afternoon. Happy days.