Opinion
Unfortunately, we cannot all fit into Douglas Murray’s cellar
From Thornton-Varley hats to Friday-night theatre, a Jewish life through some uncertain times
April 17, 2025 10:30
4 min read
From Thornton-Varley hats to Friday-night theatre, a Jewish life through some uncertain times
April 17, 2025 10:30How Jewish are you? I mean, how observant? Have you tailored your customs and traditions over the years to match your lifestyle?
I mean, I live with a man who by my standards is frum. His house is frummer than mine, with separate milk and meat kitchenware and he goes to shul about 14 times more often than I do. He has many learned sets of books called things like The Steinsaltz Neviim, and they’re not for show. He may have actually read them. He has a Sefer-Torah in the study, a gift on his 16th birthday and, believe it or not, it comes from a shul in Hull. It feels like I sent out an advanced party.
We had three shuls in Hull, so I’m not sure if it was the learned shul, the posh shul or ours, the waifs and stray shul, which was basically two houses knocked through. The women skulked at the back behind two pillars. My mother hated that shul. You could spend £20 at Thornton-Varley on a hat with fuchsia petals and there was no one to look up at you in the balcony and admire it. There was no balcony. You looked at the backs of 30 double-breasted suits bobbing and swaying in a language you knew not of, and you gossiped in a loud whisper to anyone who’d listen until some man in a threadbare tallis shouted: “Sha! Sha!”
It was a conventional, nominally Orthodox upbringing with gentile schooling during the week and far-from-gentle cheder at weekends. I had to be prised from my bed every Sunday with threats involving “Reiben Shnuks” and no Quatermass Xperiment on the TV for the foreseeable future. I learnt nothing, disrupted hugely and my concentration was that of a fruit fly – but there was an unspoken understanding that it didn’t really matter because I was a girl.
A bat mitzvah was as rare as a hen’s molar. We didn’t write or ride our bikes or eat out on Saturdays but my father’s shop was open and we drove the car to as near as dammit and walked the rest of the way. It was confusing but familiar. The rest of the community did the same with small variations. Education in the secular world mattered for a girl but “Yiddishkeit” I would pick up – enough to serve me when I settled down with a nice accountant and got a Teasmade and a Morris Oxford.
It was not to be. I auditioned for Lamda, started eating the odd prawn and escargot in Il Palio di Siena on the Earl’s Court Road, found I hadn’t been struck by lightning, and ran rogue for a few years. Theatres play on Fridays and Saturdays and producers don’t take kindly to requests for nights off for Kol Nidre and matinees off for Yom Kippur. I lit my Friday candles in scores of dressing rooms all over England and fasted 25 hours in York and Norwich where the first blood libels began.
I once spent Rosh Hashanah in a shul in Sofia, Bulgaria whilst filming Plebs. There were only about 15 women upstairs and one of them sat herself right next to me and spoke in angry Bulgarian. I mumbled that I didn’t understand… I was English – whereupon she hit my knees, knocking my crossed legs apart. In her form of Judaism, crossed legs first signified signs of the Cross. Politeness and kindness to foreign, fellow Jews came second.
My boundaries became clearer when I met my late husband Jack Rosenthal in Manchester. We married in the West London Reform Shul, Upper Berkeley Street. It made sense to me, I loved the 1870 building, the choir, the mixing of men and women congregants and the quiet, respectful, comprehensible services. We adored Rabbi Hugo Gryn and when we had our own children to schlepp to shul and cheder, we would discuss his humorous, erudite sermons all the way back to Muswell Hill. No one questioned how we had got there or whether we bought our Viennas and worst at Greenspan’s or Waitrose.
My visiting mother, however, found it “too p’tunct” – a little too flavourless. She didn’t like reading the service in English. It made less sense to her than the meaningless, comforting babble of the noisy Hebrew service she had never understood. Yearly, our north London Seders were a mishmash of remembered snaps from our childhood services, mis-matched Haggadot, inherited wine-stained guipure tablecloths, and slight embarrassment towards our non-Jewish guests at the archaic telling of our Passover tale. “As it is said”, “we sojourned”, “with outstretched hand”, “the simple son who knew no better”, all delivered at a rapid pace in order to get to the roast potatoes sooner.
Now, of course, the story has never seemed more relevant. Now, after 545 days of hostage slavery in Gaza and trending antisemitism, it is just a little harder to laugh over the silly songs and wear the funny animal masks and eat the egg and salt water without remembering that the hostages were given salt water when they were parched and weakened in their underground prisons. Now the assimilated are drifting back to the heim, and communities are swelling as we realise we need to check up on each other’s wellbeing.
So, for my colleagues who say, “Oh, I never speak out. I’m not political,” I say, “The way you bring up your kids is political and the way you buy your clothes and drink your coffee is political and perhaps you might consider how many of your non-political, non-affiliated friends would hide you? We can’t all get into Douglas Murray’s cellar.”
Visiting South Hampstead shul, which my partner has helped to prosper and grow, has been something of a revelation. It is breathtakingly vibrant. Noisy, like the shul of my childhood, but happy for kids to play football in the foyer. Inclusive and attentive to their women congregants, full of humour and irreverence but steeped in both tradition and as much modernity as United Synagogues can allow. There is cholent bubbling in the community hall, classes and debate in rooms all over the building and backchat between rabbis and congregants. It feels freer than many other shuls I’ve visited.
Mind you, as one of the congregants, Meir, a young Jewish refugee from Iran now living in Israel, pointed out to David when commenting on the Muslim wars between Shia and Sunni: “It’s a good thing the ten tribes of Israel got lost or every year there’d be another ten broigeses to contend with.”
