She did not have much close Jewish family for sadly, by the time she was seven, all three of her mother’s brothers had died. “When my mum was growing up, her three brothers would go to synagogue but my mum would go to dance lessons,” she said.
In her youth, she found herself the only Jewish pupil at Benenden, a girls’ boarding school in Kent where Christian prayers were recited every morning. Before then, at her Church of England prep school, the only other Jewish girl there had advised her, “We can sing the words, but we can’t sing [the word] Jesus.”
To other students at Benenden, “I was Jewish… but if I was in the Jewish community, I wouldn’t be seen as Jewish. Judaism was always part of my identity but it was almost like a top line but nothing underneath it.”
Older pupils were allowed to go up to London on some weekends and once a year she would make a point of visiting a synagogue. “I couldn’t tell you which one. I would go there and [think] ‘I don’t understand what’s going on, I don’t understand any Hebrew, I don’t know what I am meant to be doing. I feel so far away from this.’
“Just in the same sense I felt far away when I was at school in chapel, I felt really far away from what was meant to be mine.”
When asked if anyone in the congregation had come up to her to welcome a new face, she responded, “I think I was so nervous I darted in and darted out.”
Sascha Lavin[Missing Credit]
At university in York, she paid an occasional visit to the new Liberal community, which was then meeting monthly in a local Friends House. And having moved to London, she once overheard an observantly dressed Jewish man on the Tube mention he was a rabbi – “he turned out to be Lubavitch” – so she approached him and came away with an invitation for Friday night dinner. But neither experience proved a spiritual fit.
It was only in her early 30s when she began searching for somewhere to learn that she came across a half-hour YouTube video of LJS that appealed to her. After an “emotional” meeting with the synagogue’s senior rabbi, Alexandra Wright, Sascha started courses on “Exploring Judaism” and Hebrew reading. She also began attending services – “I remember the first time being so scared” but she heeded the rabbi’s assurance, “Once you come, you’ll get used to it.”
While these days people often profess to be “culturally” rather than religiously Jewish, for her the religious aspect of Judaism is integral.
“I think people of my age who don’t go to synagogue have probably had the privilege of growing up in a Jewish home. They understand everything already, I didn’t get that. Maybe there’s more of a security from that privilege, of always feeling Jewish – you don’t have to go to synagogue to feel Jewish.” Having been a weekly shulgoer, now occupied with her legal studies, she still tries to attend monthly, treasuring the Amidah’s moments of silent prayer. “It feels like an intense therapy session… Sometimes when I don’t go to synagogue for a while, I feel myself craving that moment of just being able to sit and reflect.”
Meanwhile, she has had to negotiate maintaining her own Jewish life when her friendship circle is non-Jewish. “I remember reading [Abraham Joshua] Heschel early last year and [thinking] that’s the dream.
"The way he observes Shabbat is so perfect, so gorgeous. But I could never do that because I just would not socialise and I’d feel really isolated, really lonely.” But while she may have lacked an immediate Jewish social network, she has found support from her friends. “I now have a tradition if I am a dinner party at one of my friend’s houses [on a Friday], my friend will [say]’ Wait, Sascha’s going to do the candles now.’ I’ll do a quick blessing.”
She once made a Shabbat dinner for her friends at her Hampstead flat “which I loved. I spent all day cooking. I made everyone ask a question, [such as] why are there two challahs on the table? At the end of the dinner I put words from the parashah from the week in a bowl. Everyone had to choose a word and say what that made them think of, which I think is the perfect way of getting non-Jewish people into Shabbat.”
Friends have even come with her to shul on a Shabbat morning. And when she fasted and went to shul for the first time this Yom Kippur, turning off her phone before Kol Nidre, a friend invited her to come and break the fast on curry and champagne. One of her tutors, Rabbi Igor Zinkov, is planning to set up a study circle she hopes to join. As she told him, her bat mitzvah “is not the end, it’s the beginning”.
Sometimes in synagogue thoughts of her great-grandmother who trained as a dressmaker in Riga and fled the pogroms will flow into her mind and she will experience a deep sense of connection. “It is amazing that I am saying the same prayer as they did in east Europe,” she said, “and here I am.”
Reading the Torah: Sascha at her bat mitzvah with LJS's Rabbi Igor Zinkov
