However, with most of their readers knowing who they are anyway, the Crownes have decided to finally unmask themselves – and appear at a fifth anniversary celebration next week at JW3 (their creation is already immortalised on a nine-storey mural of London Jewish life on the side of the building).
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It will be a chance for subscribers to meet one another, to take part in interactive quizzes to win original artwork and to buy merch and Oy!-themed citrussy cocktails (the “Halachically Dubious Etrog” is one of Tilla’s most popular cartoons).
They had already been having fun pre-Oy!, with Tilla creating mock versions of newspapers, including the JC, as presents and Ben writing a newsletter dissecting the accounts and shenanigans of Jewish charities. Together, they did DNA tests on kosher sausages in the hope of discovering some pig or horse (all they found was “quite a lot of chicken in the beef”).
But Tilla decided that the Eye provided the perfect format to meld the 39-year-olds’ two sets of interests, with the serious news and investigations (by Ben) at the front and the joke features (illustrated by Tilla) at the back.
Like the real thing, the Oy! boasts fascinating original reporting, into everything from census data to the Charity Commission opening an investigation into 105 Stamford Hill organisations.
For issue 18, they had two and a half pages about the bizarre history of the Jewish Daily Post in Whitechapel, which shut down in 1935. For issue 19, they investigated the Strangers Cay island bought by Solomon Schonfeld in the Bahamas to try to provide his own visas to escapees from the Nazis (it was later bought by Jay-Z as a gift for wife Beyoncé).
Ben travelled to an archive in Southampton to secure that scoop and a library in Cambridge to research the Kray Brothers’ accountant. He is currently planning a field trip to track down a 13th-century halachic text by a tooth fairy-like rabbi who put a question on a piece of parchment under his pillow and woke up each morning with an answer. Ben also dreams of a jaunt to the Chabad archive in Brooklyn to get his hands on a letter from the Rebbe about the Board of Deputies (where he serves as treasurer).
Pastiches of regular features of the Eye also abound. The Number Crunching concept is applied not to Westminster but to the inflation-busting increase in the price of cholent meat since the previous issue of the Oy!.
Tilla takes inspiration from other august publications too. The Beano’s Bash Street Kids are rendered as the Bash Street Yids – a perfect device to riff on intercommunal disharmony. “It’s very easy to start because you just know that you’re going to end up with a cloud with fists and random Stars of David popping out of it.”
The magazine is professionally printed but posted out free of charge. The Bevis Marks members fund the whole operation, and stuff all the envelopes, themselves. It allows them to personalise some of the packages. “When one of our subscribers became an MP,” says Ben, “we amended their name on the label.” Half a dozen envelopes are sent to the Houses of Parliament. Many readers are non-Jewish, including what Tilla classes as “the frum Christians – priests and reverends, who recognise the communal dynamics”.
With printing, increasing stamp costs, and up to £4,000 a year on research trips and archive subscriptions, Ben says: “We think it’s like if I had a model railway, or if Tilla had a motorbike. It’s the cost of a nice, well-resourced hobby.”
The duo know that the Eye is “at some level aware of our existence” – one Oy! story was printed almost verbatim in its progenitor. (Ben recently had his own letter published in the Eye; the £15 reward will go to fund the Oy!.) But they hope the homage is taken, says Ben, as “a very loving parody of a parody”. Adds Tilla: “I don’t think two idiots from Bow are really much of a threat to them.”
The real Eye is notorious for the number of writs it receives (after losing a libel case brought by media mogul Robert Maxwell, editor Ian Hislop once quipped: “I’ve just given a fat cheque to a fat Czech”).
The Oy! has so far avoided any such trouble. “We have upset one, unnamed, person various times,” says Tilla. “But his response is to bitch to Ben’s dad at kiddush on a Shabbat morning, asking: ‘Can’t you control your son?’.” She pauses. “I’m not sure if that’s a formal complaint.”
Celebrating 5 years of Private Oy! is at JW3 on 16 October
jw3.org.uk
