The Movement for Reform Judaism

Last weekend I was in Hanover for the Biennial Conference of the European Region of the World Union for Progressive Judaism. Though you may not hold with it, we Reform Brits are part of Europe and Europe is part of the World Union for Progressive Judaism, the largest organisation of synagogues in the world. Part of the largest organisation of synagogues in the world. A fact that would have seemed truly astonishing fifty years ago when we established the first Reform synagogue in north east London — or ‘metropolitan Essex’ as my late mother-in-law preferred it to be known. That was before Essex men and women got their quite unwarranted reputation. Did you notice the word ‘we’ in ‘we founded’ this synagogue? I’ll explain that in just a second.

But back to Hanover, just one example of the astonishing revival of Reform Judaism in Germany over the last decade. The Friday night service was led by Rabbi Henry Brandt, still going strong at seventy-eight as the Landesrabbiner of Lower Saxony. Remember Henry from fifty years ago? Well I do. Not only does he conform to Rabbi Michael Marmur’s principle that everyone he remembers from his childhood here was either called Harry or Henry. But that Henry, despite his German background, played cricket with me in the playground of Gearies School forty-nine years ago.

In throwing in their Jewish lot with this emergent Reform group, based first on the Labour Hall in Ilford and then at 112 Balfour Road, my parents not only identified themselves as founder members of this community but they identified me as well. I was removed from cheder at Barking & Beacontree District Synagogue, at which my grandparents were machers and where I had been taught, if you can use the term, by Seymour Saideman, later to become President of the United Synagogue, and promptly fell in love with my new cheder teacher Sheila Clements, a love which I’ve never abandoned along with my love of Reform Judaism.

So I reckon that it’s not just the Harrys and the Henrys and the Sheilas who founded this shul but the Tonys as well. It’s something of which I am immensely proud and which changed my life. You can take a rabbi out of Ilford but you can’t take Ilford out of the rabbi.

I’m not going to reminisce and recall all of the people of my childhood. Firstly, Maurice said ten minutes and like your Synagogue Council I never argue with Maurice. Much more importantly, there would be people whom I fail to mention and that would be fatal. We may have founded a Reform synagogue but Reform Jews can do broigeses at least as well as any other stream of the community.

But I do want to reflect on those early years, on the first decade that was so formative for me. SWERS as it then was — even before it inherited the rich tradition of the Settlement and became SWESRS — SWERS was exciting, pioneering. As a young teenager I picked up the excitement. It was the injection of new life into the moribund, it was the fearless preparedness to challenge old certainties. The past, the tradition was deeply respected but nothing was beyond question. It was cutting edge and not many people have the opportunity to be at the cutting edge of religious change and innovation.

It was intelligent, stimulating. One of the other people at the European Region Conference in Hanover was a man called Geoffrey Chinn — Sir Trevor’s younger brother. Geoffrey was a lawyer who, more than 23 years ago, took his family off from Hampstead to New York for a new challenge. He was telling me that they joined a small Reconstructionist Synagogue and have been going there ever since. The emeritus rabbi is one Alan Miller. Our first rabbi, my first rabbinic teacher. They don’t come much more intellectual and cultured than Alan. Though he certainly didn’t overshadow his successor Dow Marmur whom I would argue made the greatest intellectual contribution to British Reform in the second half of the 20^th century of any one. Dow read the latest books — still does — something unheard of in the rabbinate.

Exciting, intellectually demanding, SWERS also revived the Jewish prophetic tradition of social justice. It was here that I learned that nothing is more important than the ethical, that the old prophetic tradition of concern for the widow and the poor and the orphan and the immigrant was what Reform Judaism was all about and I got some sense of the revolutionary dimension to Judaism — my father’s friend Bill Fishman, author of East End Jewish Radicals, the bundist tradition and so on. Then again, remember the buzz when Dow got us on television with a reconciliation project with young Germans at a time when people still didn’t talk about the Shoah, let alone contemplate reconciliation.

I hope you can hear the animation. As I say, thanks to my parents’ courageous move, it was in this community that I fell in love with a passionate, intellectually alive, socially committed, religiously radical Judaism as well as with Sheila Clements!

What is absolutely fascinating is that I wasn’t the only one. This community’s record of inspiring future rabbis far outstrips any other congregation in either the Reform or Liberal Movements. I’m taking a risk in listing them, first because I may have overlooked someone and second because I may mention someone you would prefer was overlooked. But here goes: Nigel Atkins, Tony Bayfield, Amanda Brodie, Colin Brodie, Warren Elf, Henry Goldstein, Stephen Howard, Michael Marmur, Maurice Michaels, Michael Standfield, Jackie Tabick, Harold Vallins.

I used to explain this minyan of rabbis by suggesting that there were only two ways out of Ilford — boxing or the rabbinate and that I am renowned for my physical cowardice. But the list is quite remarkable and it must have something to do with the excitement, the challenge, the intellectual questioning and the cutting edge issues that made SWESRS unique.

Synagogues both change and don’t change. All forty-three Reform synagogues (there were only fifteen in 1956) have enduring personalities. I can draw a thumbnail sketch of a community and people will recognise whom I am talking about. I won’t demonstrate what I mean lest it appear in the Essex Jewish News and someone from deeply introspective Finchley or noblese oblige West London get to read it. Synagogues have enduring personalities but they also change.

When we founded SWESRS we were a little marginal group — far smaller than Coventry Road, far smaller even than Barking & Beacontree. And as for Beehive Lane — well that was the norm, that was vast, that was the bastion of the mainstream, that was where my in-laws belonged and remained, still saying wistfully to Linda and me in 1969, ‘Can’t you possibly get married in a proper shul?’ Today SWESRS is the largest community in north east London. Whilst SWESRS is replete with a team of highly paid rabbis, Beehive Lane struggles. I say that without pleasure in the sense that I have deep respect for orthodoxy and believe that it is essential to the survival and healthy future of British Jewry but I do draw enormous pleasure from the fact that British Reform has moved in half a century from the margins to the mainstream. We are now part of the responsible heart of British Jewry and on our continuing success, much of the future of the British Jewish community depends.

To get where we have, we’ve had to change in a number of ways. You know the old quip about how many synagogue Council members does it take to change a light bulb? Change a light bulb? My grandfather, alav hashalom, gave that light bulb. In the early days of SWERS no one would have known who gave the light bulb because we had a very un-Jewish attitude to fundraising which has had to change as we have built our programmes and institutions.

And who would not have been shocked, let alone who would have believed fifty years ago that we would have created Akiva and Clore Shalom and Clore Tikva and are now about to embark upon one of the largest capital projects ever undertaken by the Jewish community, our new secondary school for 1300 children in partnership with ORT and Norwood that will, please God, open in September 2009.

We have come a long way and though I remember my teenage years with enormous pleasure, I don’t long nostalgically for that past, I look forward with enthusiasm to the next fifty years of SWESRS.

We will need all that capacity for change and adaptation and innovation if we are to play our new, responsible role at the heart of the community and help it to meet the challenges of demography and building a rich and cohesive multi-faith society.

We will need something else as well. For those of you who are as old as me and remember the Labour Hall and 112 Balfour Road and the various schools we used for cheder and an exceptionally keen but truly outstanding young man called Maurice Michaels whom Dow recruited to teach, please also remember the excitement, the fearless questioning, the preparedness to challenge, the vigorous intellectual debate, the thrill of learning, the cutting edge engagement with social issues and with issues of reconciliation and interfaith. That is the legacy of the founders of this community fifty years on and what their successors will need if they are to take the Jews of metropolitan Essex forward over the next fifty years.

In the words with which Jacob blessed Joseph’s two sons: May God make you all like Harry, Henry and Sheila and may the future of this synagogue be as rich and positive as its past. May that be God’s will."

TrackBack URI for this entry

Comments (0)

Subscribe to this comment's feed