On Saturday my dad will be called up to read from the Torah. Not only will it be the first time he will perform this mitzvah, it will be the first time in his life that Dad will have been in a synagogue on Yom Kippur.
Let me explain how secular my Jewish family is.
First, and I realise this might unsettle some readers, my father, my brother and my son are not circumcised.
Second, when I was growing up in suburban Cardiff in the Eighties, I did not have a bat mitzvah, my brother was not barmitzvahed, and it was Brownies and Cubs followed by Guides and Scouts, rather than Jewish youth groups for us.
Third, while we would go to my grandfather’s house for a Seder almost every year, Mum and Dad never held one in our home.
They wouldn’t have known how to. The holes the Shoah left in my mother’s family, the Loewenkopfs, followed by intermarriage on almost every branch of the Glaser family tree, meant my parents grew up with absolutely no Jewish custom and practice. An amusing and illustrative anecdote: when I joined this paper first time round, as a junior reporter in 1997, I couldn’t understand why my colleagues kept talking about the US all the time. Did America really play so central a role in Anglo-Jewry? That’s right, I had never heard of the United Synagogue.
Yet earlier this year my father became a member of a Liberal synagogue. And although my Polish-born mother has not formally joined the warm and welcoming congregation in London, she is what I believe is called an associate member (and an enthusiastic baker of Mitteleuropa cakes for the shul’s monthly havura suppers). Another anecdote: my mother’s once-large Jewish family in Warsaw was so secular there was bread on the Seder plate. (And a blue Jewish National Fund box on the living room mantelpiece.)
So what spurred my father, a dyed-in-the-wool atheist since his early teens, to join a place of worship? The answer is October 7.
After 80 years of moving in mostly non-Jewish circles, my citizen-of-the-world father now feels more at ease in the company of Jews. However, if you had told him ten years ago that he’d join a shul, he’d have replied that that was extremely unlikely.
To be clear, Dad has always felt very Jewish but his connection was entirely emotional, historical and Israel-centred. In his words: “I felt moved that I belonged to this remarkable people who, despite millennia of expulsions, pogroms and antagonism, were still here, still walking this planet to which they have contributed so much. But Judaism, like all religions, did not have much meaning for me.”
It still does not. Dad will stand on the bimah and read a transliterated verse of the Torah. But do not expect a moment of sudden or great revelation.
The antisemitism and antagonism of which my dad spoke have returned with vengeance this past year, have they not? Physical attacks, verbal abuse, online threats, hate marches and student protests: we have had proof beyond our worst nightmares that antisemitism is the hatred that does not go away. We know this because the sewer erupted on October 7 itself, the deadliest single day for Jews since the Holocaust.
It was as if people had been stirred, excited by the sight and smell of Jewish blood. Can 2,000 years of antisemitism really enter the psyche? It sounds crazy, but that is how it feels to many of us. As one friend put it: since October 7 hostility towards Jews has become so commonplace that if someone doesn’t express overt antisemitism, I feel grateful.
Another friend wrote on her Facebook page that for the first time in her life, she feels Jewish first and British second. How could she not, she said, when she now sees things so differently, when she feels the same things her forebears who were forced to leave eastern Europe must have felt, decades before the Nazis marched across Europe.
When I asked Dad if this described how he now felt too, he rather reluctantly and with sadness agreed that it did. So this is why, all his reservations about organised religion notwithstanding, you will find my dad in shul on Yom Kippur. On the bimah, noch.
