“It was great the way the people got together and barricaded this street. They used old furniture... anything they could find.” Her father, she said, “was always proud to be Jewish”.
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Shirley Mckeon, 75, from Sidcup, remembering her father Isidore Yasnitz[Missing Credit]
Her mother, despite being so young, felt she had no choice but to help in the efforts. “If you have got Blackshirts going up and down, being violent to Jewish people, the little businesses, smashing windows... you would be involved,” Mckeon said.
Ralph Goldstein, 79, from Richmond was there to honour his father Leonard Goldstein and another relative Jules Goldstein. Before the battle, Jules would always “come round and speak about the growing threat of antisemitism”, but his father never thought much of it. Living in Surrey, the family was removed from the concerns of the East End community.
“[My family] didn’t really see themselves as being Jewish or different from anyone else,” Goldstein said. “It was only when my father went to join a golf club and they said he wasn’t allowed, did he start to learn the word antisemitism.
“I think the people that are of that generation that were there at Cable Street and lived through the war [could not] actually believe what’s happened [now] in this country."
TV executive Debbie Lee, 61, said her mother Frida Stockell was six years old when she saw the Blackshirts marching past outside her bedroom window. Frida was caught between wondering where her father was and looking after her three-year-old sister, Rita.
The girls’ father was out helping put up barricades. “My mother said it was the first time she’d ever experienced a feeling of fear and anxiety, because until then she always felt very safe,” Lee said.
Ralph Goldstein, 79, from Richmond, remembering his father Leonard Goldstein, pictured here is his relative[Missing Credit]
“They lived in poverty, but they were always fed and warm and always felt secure, so it was a really strange experience for her to feel this fear in the air.
“I think we look at our grandfather on that day and our great-grandfather on that day, and they were so brave.”
“Coming from pogroms, they thought they were relatively safe in London, but when they realised they weren’t, they stood up for themselves.
“I hope Jews today will take that spirit of Cable Street – and the pride – and know that we must speak up for ourselves, because if we don’t, no one else will.”
