After the attack, David Mansoor, 25, dropped his Christian father’s surname and assumed his Mizrahi mother’s, while Felix Klein, 17, left his mainstream secondary, where antisemitism had become widespread, and is now happily enrolled at a Jewish school
October 1, 2024 16:14
David Mansoor
My father is not Jewish and for the duration of my parents’ marriage I never heard him speak about Judaism. It was a like a poltergeist that he both ignored and feared to invoke, an apparition that became vivid only with my maternal family, a colourful clan of Mizrahi Jews, and especially when we’d visit my mother’s parents in Israel.
My parents divorced, messily, 17 years ago when I was eight and thereafter Judaism became prominent in my life. Despite my father’s protests, I went to a Jewish school and I visited my grandparents in Israel almost every year. Whey moved back to Stamford Hill, where my mum was born and bred, I saw them regularly. My father, meanwhile, moved to the countryside and we grew distant. He took my younger brother with him.
A few years ago, I went to America to stay with my mum’s brother, who proclaimed himself my surrogate dad, and who endeavoured to make a man out of me. During a hike in Griffith Park, in Los Angeles, he asked me why I had my dad’s name. I said it felt like keeping things the same was the best way to maintain peace. Perhaps, like many children of divorce, I wanted to please everyone and keep things steady. But I knew what he meant. My relationship with my mother’s name, with my Judaism, had grown stronger.
Then October 7 happened and everything changed. I can split the heartbreak into four distinct parts. There was the attack itself, a world-shaking earthquake for Jews everywhere, followed by the eerie quiet of people’s indifference, a stillness that recalled a tideless beach before the tsunami strikes. Then came the monster waves of hatred. And for me, throughout it all, there was the deafening silence of my father.
On October 8, I went to see my grandparents. My grandad gave me a golden ring inscribed with his initials that had been made for him many years ago in Aden from where, like so many Jews, he had been expelled, violently driven out. The ring was like a piece of El Dorado, a relic from a lost city and it immediately felt a family heirloom. It is a little big for me but I have worn it every day since October 8.
One Friday evening in November, after I’d worked seven night shifts in a row, I awoke to a call from my mum. My uncle in America had died. I spent the days after thinking more intensely than ever about October 7, Israel’s war on Hamas in Gaza, about my uncle and my grandparents. And I realised that I had never felt more distant from my father.
Soon after, I went to a solicitor to begin the process of changing my surname. The lawyer asked the smoking-caterpillar question: who are you? Finally, I could answer with surety something I had pondered for many years. I was a Mansoor.
My mum and other members of the clan were delighted. At my uncle’s memorial she told my granddad I had taken his name. My grandfather, a man who his wife calls the golem and who does not often speak about anything, a man who I always think of an ancient effigy from a lost world, stirred and said: “He’s a good boy.”
What’s in a name? I think it is the participation in something larger, in a story spanning generations. I still need to change my passport, which is a bigger faff than organising a deed poll signature, but more important still, perhaps, I am yet to tell my father that his surname is no longer mine. There is always the temptation to say nothing, but the world changes around us, and with it the option of stasis is removed.
My brother still has our father’s surname. His home in the British countryside is a Tolkien-esque pad of study into the history and myth of the British Isles. Fascinated by language, he has dedicated himself to learning ancient Celtic and in this I see in him a deep longing to belong to something ancient and beautiful.
When I caught up with my brother some time after October 7 I was surprised how affected he had been by the massacre, and was touched to learn that the next language on his list is Hebrew. You could say he has embodied the meaning of his own name: God remembers.
Felix Klein
I’ve just turned 17 and for most of my life I haven’t really felt Jewish. My mum was raised in the Church of England and my dad is a very secular Israeli. So I felt Israeli without really feeling Jewish, if that makes sense. We’ve been on lots of family holidays to Israel and both my mum and I have always felt close to my dad’s relatives, but I didn’t have a bar mitzvah and when I was 11 I had the option of going to a Jewish school, but didn’t pursue it.
My feelings about my identity have now changed though, and that’s because of what I experienced after October 7 at school, a mainstream comprehensive in north London where approximately one in five students are Muslim.
When Hamas attacked I knew bad things were round the corner and I was right. A couple of weeks after Israel went into Gaza, the “end apartheid” stickers that I had always seen in tucked away places in my school multiplied and everyone seemed to be constantly talking about the conflict.
If you said you supported Palestine, it was a route to popularity and for students to think you were intelligent, that you understood current affairs. In my year, in a bid for popularity, for acceptance, the only other Jew in my class said he was on the Palestinian side and the other students approved. “Yeah, you can be Jewish and not support Israel,” they said. It felt like a betrayal.
I’m blond and to my most people my surname sounds German rather than Jewish, so I could have hidden who I am but I didn’t. I spoke up because I knew that if I didn’t defend Israel and share the things my dad had explained to me, no one would hear, let alone understand, Israel’s position full stop. But it didn’t help. The leaflets and stickers continued and on a dress-down day shortly before our GCSEs one boy, a Bangladeshi student who was known for being openly antisemitic, said he was going to come dressed as a Jew. “I’ll have a long nose and lots of money and there will be lots of dead kids around me.”
I lived with the constant dread that racist slurs could be made at any moment, even by my close friends, none of whom once defended me when vicious comments were made about Israel or about me for having an Israeli dad. During during the actual GCSEs I even spotted a “Free Palestine” bracelet on the wrist of the one of the exam invigilators. I felt I was drowning in hostility.
I didn’t talk about what was going on at school much at home, but I know my parents were worried about me.
In the middle of all this, the Jewish school where I am now at sixth form held an open day for prospective students and I went along with my parents. I absolutely loved it. It was such a relief to see an Israeli flag openly displayed in the school foyer and to know that all the students I could see were Jews like me, and in some instances also presumably Israeli. I became determined to leave my old life and its everyday antisemitism behind and studied really, really hard to get the grades I needed.
My instincts were spot on, but this doesn’t mean I regret the past. The antisemitism I experienced has shaped me. Without it, I don’t think I’d really know who I am. I now say that I am Jewish and I feel it in my bones.