‘The JC was a big part of my childhood’

EVERY THURSDAY my wife says: “Simon have you brought the

home?” If I haven’t, I am in big trouble. But my connection with the starts very impressively — in Finchley, north London, with the announcement of my birth in 1960.

Years after that announcement I discovered my best and closest friend, Simon Levine, was announced in the same issue of the paper, four names down from my own.

It was thanks to my parents, who kept the issue of the paper with my birth in it, that I discovered my friend’s name underneath my own.

In the traditional Jewish way I remember going over to my grandparents’ house on a Sunday. They took the and, having finished it over Shabbat, gave it to my parents to take home with them.

That was a very big part of my childhood and it was there my parents would read it.

I glanced though it a bit, but in my younger days I was never an avid reader.

But I remember discussions around the Louis Jacobs affair, [over his controversial views of the Torah], and his eventual breakaway from the United Synagogue to form Masorti.

I remember the paper’s reports of the Yom Kippur war in 1973, and the appointment of first female rabbi two years later.

After my parents finished reading the it would lie on the coffee table for people to pick up as they pleased.

My father would always get it first and my mother would get it after him. My dad would never look at the sport, he went straight to the news pages. My mum loved Evelyn Rose’s recipes.

There came the seminal moment where my parents decided they would get their own copy of the

I think it was shortly after my grandfather had died, but I clearly remember it was quite exciting to be suddenly getting the delivered every week. We no longer had to wait till Sunday.

I was about 15 at the time, and I loved reading newspapers. But I was never that involved in the community so it didn’t resonate with me in the same way it does now.

Of course, when I got engaged it was announced in the paper and when my children were born, it was in there too.

But it’s since I’ve been at Jewish Care that I have truly understood the paper’s importance. I’ve been here now for 20 years and when I started, I began to read the and see reports about me and Jewish Care. I realised I needed to get my own copy and carry on the family tradition.

Today my sister, Abigail, is chief executive of the Jewish Museum, so there is rarely a week that goes by without one of us being in the paper.

My uncle often calls me up to say: “Oh, you can’t be doing a good job because I haven’t seen you in the this week.”

It is very much part of my life, and my family’s. And it defines what it means to be Jewish in this country. Growing up it was always talked about; everyone got it and everyone referred to it, it was part of the furniture of the Jewish community, no matter who you were.

So for me, when I think about it, I want the paper to survive and flourish.

It is a really important aspect of British Jewry, but like all of us in the community, it needs to work out how it continues to meet our needs. Copies of the JC were flown to New York in 1965 for American readers