Last Wednesday I felt normal. I got to enjoy doing the things other communities in our country do without a second thought. I went to see a series of short films for Jewish culture month: “Best of British” commissioned by UK Jewish Film.
This community event wasn’t hidden. Sure, I glimpsed two police officers checking in to see if everything was okay, and there were bag checks at the screen entrance. But other than that, there was no heavy security and no protesters objecting to our existence. It was as normal as life gets for us these days.
And the screening was not tucked away within a Jewish part of town. It wasn't in JW3 or in a synagogue. It was at a Curzon cinema on the high street in Wimbledon. And it was packed. To say people knew each other was an understatement. There was lots of waving every time someone walked in. My son’s former nursery school teacher was there. Someone commented “this is a bigger congregation than we had at shul last Saturday”. Then the lights went down.
What followed can only be described as a celebration of the complexities of Jewish life, performed by an embarrassment of top-notch, recognisable actors.
The first film, Beshert, starred Anton Lesser in a touching story about an unlikely friendship between a reluctant bar mitzvah boy and a man in an old people's home. By the end the room was full of sniffles and eyes being dabbed.
We were shown the rich tapestry of what it means to be Jewish in this country and beyond. Sydney Turtlebaum, starring Sir Derek Jacobi, gave us an eccentric, gay, bitter con man in Golders Green. Hannah Cohen’s Holy Communion transported us to 1970s Dublin, seen through the eyes of a seven-year-old girl desperate to take communion so she could fit in with her friends. When the priest offered her the body of Christ, she felt her Magen David necklace and turned it down – offering him a homemade biscuit instead. He ate it and said thanks. It was a small, perfectly observed story about the loneliness of being the odd one out – something most Jews will recognise, wherever they grew up – but also about how simple human connection can cut through everything else.
The only reference to the heightened security that now shadows Jewish life came through comedy. The 10th Man, set in London's East End, imagined dwindling congregations so desperate for a minyan that elderly members were at risk of being kidnapped by rival synagogues. My dad laughed when I told him the plot – his synagogue suffers from the same problem (the elderly congregants and the minyan, not the kidnappings). Stephen Berkoff, Warren Mitchell and Gerard Kearns from Shameless all made appearances (in the film, not at my father’s synagogue).
Community tensions dissipated through laughter. The Chop followed a cocky kosher butcher who fell out with his boss and pretended to be Muslim because the only available job was at the Halal butcher in Hoxton. Two different communities sharing the same problems as everyone else. For the individual it’s finding a job, and for businesses it’s about finding someone good to do difficult, unglamorous work.
Other films zoomed in on aspects of Jewish life that perhaps we don't think about enough. Orphaned Burial Grounds explored forgotten Jewish cemeteries in provincial towns, where Jewish communities once thrived but have long since moved on. The community has become concentrated in major cities – Manchester and North London – while the headstones of those who came before sit quietly unvisited elsewhere. It was a reminder that British Jewish life has a geography as well as a history, and that parts of both are slowly being lost. And yet people still care to look after these places and keep them standing.
Jewish identity was shown as personal, varied and utterly authentic. A fascinating animation, Growing Up Mizrahi, captured the confusion over the filmmaker's identity – from non-Jews who couldn't place her and Ashkenazi Jews who didn't quite know what to do with her. It spoke to something rarely acknowledged: that the Jewish community contains its own internal bewilderments, its own failures of recognition. A documentary, Primordial Chicken Soup, followed a tight-knit group of women from Liverpool in their late fifties, friends since they were four years old. Asked whether they would be friends if they met today, the honest answer was probably not – suggesting that what holds them together is not personality but something deeper: cultural and historical ties, and a lifetime of shared experience.
The diversity and quality of these stories were quite something. There was beauty, wisdom, humanity, comedy and tragedy – a roller-coaster ride of Jewishness, told without apology and without the weight of current events.
Last Wednesday, our community got to enjoy being British Jews at the Curzon on the high street. No justifications required. Just us, watching films about ourselves, laughing and crying together. If you get the chance, go along to something during Jewish Culture Month. Because this was a triumph.
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