Burns Night hots up

Few people could fairly be claimed as a favourite by both Abraham Lincoln and Bob Dylan. And yet 250 years after his birth in rural Ayrshire, the power of the poet Robert Burns still resonates, making him the ideal fund-raising vehicle for Glasgow’s Jewish expatriates.

The self-explanatory charity committee, Glasgow Girls in London, got together two years ago to raise money for education and welfare charities in their home city.

This year, it celebrated Burns Night in a more spacious venue — Finchley Synagogue’s Kinloss Suite — where 200 tartan devotees thrilled to the skirl of the pipe and the steam of the (kosher) haggis, raising over £10,000 in the process.

Guests settled themselves on trestle tables — in the grand tradition of Burns Night suppers — each named after an iconic staging-post in Glasgow Jewry’s collective memory bank. One was called Geneen’s, after the legendary but now defunct kosher restaurant; another, Coplaw Street, recalled the one-time home of the Glasgow Jewish Welfare Board.