Call the Midwife’s kosher delivery

A dramatic premise brimming with a blend of medical intrigue and social struggle: that is the magic formula that has made BBC1’s Call the Midwife such a smash hit.

But in this Sunday’s episode, the midwives of Nonnatus House will deal with a Jewish family for the first time.

They get called to the house of a couple living above a fur shop. She is pregnant and in fine fettle; he has a chest condition and is suffering from an anguish that is hard to articulate.
So far, so Midwife — but this is no typical storyline. These are the Rosens — Sammy and Orli — and he is a Holocaust survivor.

And it is Sammy’s trauma from escaping the death camps with his life, while his relatives perished, that takes centre stage as he becomes a father for the first time.

When Orli gives birth, Sammy’s behaviour becomes worryingly erratic. He is distant and tearful with his new son, and won’t take off his coat, despite working in the heat of his father-in-law’s fur business downstairs. The nightmare of what he went through before has returned now he has a son of his own.

Then he strikes up a strange bond with Sister Hilda, played by Fenella Woolgar, who encourages him to talk about what is at the heart of the issue.

What he comes out with surprises even those who thought they knew him best. And Sister Hilda comes up with a plan which, while it won’t heal him, helps ease some of his darkest thoughts.

Call the Midwife creator Heidi Thomas told the JC: “This is something I have always been interested in as I have friends who are the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors and so I learned about how this would affect people for many, many years afterwards.

"The way trauma expresses itself is often provoked by another life event. And that is how we came up with Sammy Rosen’s story.”

The story was created with extreme sensitivity. It was written by a Jewish writer Lena Rae and the script was checked by a congregant from the Sandy’s Row Synagogue in Spitalfields, the oldest surviving Ashkenazi synagogue in London, where a key scene was also filmed.

All the actors in the storyline are Jewish, with Alex Waldmann playing Sammy, Alexis Peterman as his wife Orli, and Jon Rumney as his father-in-law Joseph.

“Jewish culture and history is very distinct and deserves to be celebrated for that,” said Ms Thomas. “

This is our third Jewish storyline in Call the Midwife and one of the things that has always fascinated me is the Jewish East End story, which by that time was shrinking. As the families had prospered, many had moved out to the suburbs and a new wave of immigrants were coming in.

“But when names are being read out at the maternity clinic, we always make sure there is a dusting of Jewish names too to reflect the history that was there.

One of our Call the Midwife drivers has an East End background and is often telling me about the Jewish community he grew up with there in the 1950s and how he would sometimes be called upon to make a minyan if they couldn’t find enough men.”

Ms Thomas is an Anglican but Judaism is increasingly creeping into the home she shares with husband Stephen McGann, who plays Dr Turner in the series.

Their son Dominic has become a dab hand at challah-making most Friday nights as he has a serious Jewish girlfriend and the entire family now joins in with Shabbat meals, as well as festival meals.

Ms Thomas revealed she was also in the process of creating a series based on the well-loved trilogy Almonds and Raisins by Maisie Mosco, an epic story first published in 1979 about a Jewish immigrant family settling in Manchester at the start of the 20th century.