An elderly Holocaust survivor, a young woman who suffered from antisemitism at school and a trans man converting to Judaism all feature in a fascinating new BBC television documentary exploring the Jewish community in Scotland.

“I have been frightened about being Jewish all my life,” says Hungarian-born Kathy Hagler, most of whose family died in the Shoah, and who ended up in Inverness via Israel after being forced to leave Hungary as a child in the 1930s.

“But I fell in love with Scotland. I felt that the Scots suffered over the centuries just like the Jews have suffered over the centuries and the millennia.”

401279.JPG.article-962

Bullied: Anita Spivack

Marketing executive Anita Spivack recounts how she was the only Jewish pupil in her Aberdeen primary school and secondary school. Bullying followed, including vile slurs from other children such as “Hitler should have finished the job.” She now lives in Edinburgh. “I always felt this umbilical cord, pulling me to Judaism.”

Voice actor and illustrator Ash talks about his conversion to Judaism at the same time as going through a personal transition.

He jokes about having the barmitzvah he never had as a youth “by not being brought up Jewish and not knowing I was a boy at the time”. Ash has joined Edinburgh’s Liberal Sukkat Shalom community, the only Scottish shul whose numbers are going up.

At one time, explains the documentary, Scotland had a Jewish population of around 20,000 which supported 20 synagogues and a thriving collection of kosher butchers, bakers and grocers.

MN - Deborah Haase

Deborah Haase

Novelist J David Simons recalls a tale he heard from his grandmother, while growing up in Glasgow’s Gorbals. She said the area was so Jewish that the tram conductor would shout out, “Next stop Jerusalem”.

The Jewish community’s origins in Scotland date back as far as the 1700s, small in number before growing substantially as a result of emigration from Germany and other European countries due to Nazi oppression.

The BBC Scotland documentary, Being Jewish in Scotland, was directed by Sarah Howitt. It includes many other stories of remarkable Jews.

Mark Cohen, owner of Scotland’s only kosher delicatessen, on the outskirts of Glasgow, describes his kosher haggis as “the perfect fusion of being Scottish and Jewish”.

His mother Doreen, famous for her former kosher catering business in Glasgow, now runs the deli kitchen. In the university town of St Andrews, lecturer Dr Emily Michelson from America lovingly describes the importance of celebrating Chanukah. Describing the nightly candle-lighting ceremony, the mother of three says: “I think the fact that it’s so dark in Scotland so early makes it extra special.”

Two-thirds of Scotland’s Jewish population live in the Greater Glasgow area, particularly in the middle-class suburbs of Giffnock and Newton Mearns, where synagogues have had to merge due to falling numbers.

To illustrate why Jews are not persecuted in Scotland, Mr Simons quotes a character’s opinion from his own book The Credit Draper.

“We Jews have been treated well here. Do you know why Scotland is such a fine place for us? There is so much hatred between the

Protestants and Catholics, no one has any hatred left over for us Jews.”

‘Being Jewish in Scotland’ can be viewed on BBC iPlayer