It was an ovation unlike any I had heard before, or since, for a politician.
When David Cameron walked off the podium at the Holocaust Educational Trust dinner in September 2013, the applause was thunderous.
The great-great-grandson of Emile Levita, a German-Jewish émigré banker who came to Britain in 1871, had sown the seeds for what will inevitably come to be seen as the stand-out Jewish legacy of his six years as Prime Minister.
In that speech, Mr Cameron, who leaves Downing Street today, had launched his national Holocaust Commission, a cross-party, multi-faith group aimed at securing the future of Shoah education in Britain for generations to come.
The move was prompted by a Cameron family visit to Berlin, where he had “tried to explain to my children the enormity of what happened” in the 1940s.
His commission led to the birth of the UK Holocaust Memorial Foundation. A statue and learning centre will follow and could one day be seen as the physical embodiment of Mr Cameron’s strength of feeling, affinity, perhaps even love, for Britain’s Jews.
There had, in the early days, been stumbling blocks in the relationship, not least with Mr Cameron’s reference in Parliament to Gaza as a “giant, open prison”, followed later in a speech in Turkey by a similarly-worded attack on Israel’s position.
But by the time he spoke in the Knesset in 2014, he was able to pledge to be with Israel “every step of the way”. Within months he backed up that promise with unparalleled support during the Gaza conflict.
Cynics could say his defence of Israel was politically motivated, aimed at drawing distinctions between himself and then Labour leader Ed Miliband’s harsher position. Indeed, ahead of last year’s election, 64 per cent of British Jews believed Mr Cameron had the best attitude towards British Jewry.
But that would be to ignore the reams of other evidence. Surrounded by close Jewish friends – Lords Feldman and Finkelstein chief among them – Mr Cameron was at ease in and around the community. He admitted their Judaism had rubbed off on him “quite a lot”, he “admired” Jewish family life and found going to a chuppah “very special”.
There were speeches filled with jokes told partly in Yiddish, references to his trawling of the JC archives for details about his Jewish ancestors, meetings with leading rabbinical figures to explore that history. On and on the love affair went.
His sentiment dripped through into policy, too. A strong defender of Jewish religious practices, Mr Cameron toured a kosher slaughterhouse in his Oxfordshire constituency to meet a shochet and get a better understanding of shechita.
On universal jurisdiction and the prospect of senior Israelis being arrested in Britain, his government acted quickly in an effort to end the practice – imperfect though the new legislation may be.
Money flowed from Cameron’s government to the Community Security Trust, Holocaust Educational Trust and others for the community’s security, education and welfare needs.
Two months before entering Downing Street, he told the JC he would ban Hizb ut-Tahrir, the extreme Islamic group. He failed to do so, although he later blamed it on his former Liberal Democrat coalition partners.
But his words on extremism were repeatedly laced with concern about the impact of such hatred on Britain’s Jews. In a speech a year ago, Mr Cameron said antisemitic conspiracy theories could lead to Islamist extremism, and attacked those who justify suicide bombings against Israelis.
He also told this newspaper how he had put himself “in the shoes of the Israeli people” when considering responses to terrorism. The jihadi attack on Brussels’ Jewish Museum had been a turning point in his thinking, he said.
There was criticism last year from Jewish human rights groups over his reluctance to admit a greater number of Syrian refugees into Britain.
But the true sense of Mr Cameron’s warmth towards us came away from the policy forums and security briefings.
Well-attended Conservative Friends of Israel lunches took on a new dimension, with hundreds of Tory MPs scrambling to fill as many seats as possible to hear their boss’s latest thoughts on the Middle East.
Downing Street’s annual Chanucah party – always one of the most joyous events of the year, with Jewish volunteers mixing with government ministers and communal machers – became one of the hottest tickets in town. Shoah survivors and school children would queue down Whitehall to get into Number 10 and see Mr Cameron light the menorah.
He praised the way Jewish families lived, worked and cared not only for themselves, but for the country and wider community. And in turn, many British Jews came to look on him as an associate member of that extended, national Jewish family.
The EU referendum cost him his job and his political legacy, but in years to come, we will undoubtedly look back on David Cameron’s premiership as a golden era in the relationship between the Jewish community and the leader of the government.
