Neviim Tovim, blogs by Gillian Gould Lazarus

I grew up in Upper Clapton, on the north side of Hackney, considered a little more bourgeois than Hackney Central, where my maternal grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins resided, in a house in Amhurst Road. Each floor was home to a family and the basement was converted into a flat for the widowed and remarried Uncle Simy. One of my cousins, zichrona livracha, once said, ‘It wasn’t a house, it was an institution.’

In our house in Upper Clapton there were just my parents, my sister, me, and my paternal grandmother, Booba Malka. Booba used to light the shabbat candles and occasionally went to shul, I knew not where.

Cazenove Road, off of Upper Clapton Road, was inhabited almost entirely by haredim whom the mainstream non-orthodox Jews called ‘frummers’ – meaning devout people. My parents were not actually mainstream as they were atheists and socialists and my father was a school teacher, which meant he had a higher level of education than anyone else in the family at that time. Lest you imagine that their socialism stood in the way of their Zionism, it did not. They were proud of Israel, Ben Gurion and the kibbutz system.

I sometimes heard my father called ‘Jack the teacher’ by visitors to the Amhurst Road house, a hub for card games, delicatessen and – to a lesser degree- political talk, but only for the men. If we had lived in Wales, would my Dad have been ‘Yankel the School’? At Amhurst Road, all the adults smoked. My parents did not smoke and I must say they were blessed with greater longevity than any of their siblings, or their parents. The smokers did not drink, but my father had respect for alcohol and chose wine and liqueurs carefully. In our cocktail cupboard were bottles of Benedictine, Kirsch and lime green Chartreuse, and, in the fridge, Aquavit from Denmark.

Sometimes, from beyond the end of our garden, behind the shed, came the sound of riotous male singing. These, said my mother, were the frummers, who had a shul or a yeshiva opposite our back fence. Was it Simchat Torah or perhaps the Hallel sung at some other festival? I was an Apikoros* and did not know.

At my primary school, about a third of the pupils were Jewish and about the same at the girls’ grammar school I attended but there I met girls from orthodox families – girls who had attended a Jewish primary school and now, remarkably, were allowed by their parents to enter secular education, a prize no doubt for passing the Scholarship aka the 11 Plus. Some were friendly and talked and joked with everyone; others kept their distance. My best friend and I made an atheistic, argumentative twosome. What did they make of us? Not much. One girl showed me a photo of her brother, a grown up man, bearded with peyos and a streimel.

The frummers were sometimes resented by the non-frum. It was as if their enclaves and haredi dress code might bring the rest of us into disrepute. In the 1950s and 60s, some degree of assimilation was considered desirable. Our very names were secular: Gillian, Jacqueline, Angela, Sylvia, Melvyn and Howard. It was the aunts and uncles who were called Rae, Issy, Hymie, Manny, Leah and Esther. I did have a cousin, born about 1930 (he had been a Bevin Boy in the war), whose name was Judah, but he was universally called Jack. His surname also was changed to something more English than the original. Why call your boy Judah and then give him an English-sounding surname?

It is easy to sneer at the anglicisation of names but these were people who had fled from pogroms and would rather be safe than sorry. Great Britain allowed us to be British, so we grasped the opportunity and were gefruntzled to see the haredim passing it by.

We used the word ‘hasids’ rather than haredim. I had no idea of the different sects. A Lubavitch House was opened in Stamford Hill in the late sixties, after we had moved out of the area. Everyone was moving out, to Ilford, Redbridge, Southgate, Hendon or Finchley. Meanwhile, the frummers remained. ‘Hackney is all cowboys and Indians now,’ was a popular waggery. The ‘Indians’ were Asians and the ‘cowboys’ were haredim in their wide-brimmed hats.

I sometimes wonder why there was such a pervasive impulse among the Jews of Hackney to regard the ultra-orthodox as separate from ourselves. Did it cut both ways? No doubt they regarded the women of our families with uncovered hair and short sleeves as being not properly Jewish, despite the mezuzot on our doors.

Everything was driven by a sense of danger. What was divisive was the perception of danger, where it would come from, what trigger would activate it. The sense of danger is no less in 2025 and neither are the differences among us of how best to weather the storm. What would we have to do, to weather it?

I think of Rabbi Akiva’s parable, related in the Talmud Bavli, Berakhot 61b.

The Sages taught: One time, after the Bar Kokhba rebellion, the evil empire of Rome decreed that Israel may not engage in the study and practice of Torah. Pappos ben Yehuda came and found Rabbi Akiva, who was convening assemblies in public and engaging in Torah study. Pappos said to him: Akiva, are you not afraid of the empire?

Rabbi Akiva answered him: I will relate a parable. To what can this be compared? It is like a fox walking along a riverbank when he sees fish gathering and fleeing from place to place.
The fox said to them: From what are you fleeing?
They said to him: We are fleeing from the nets that people cast upon us.
He said to them: Do you wish to come up onto dry land, and we will reside together just as my ancestors resided with your ancestors?
The fish said to him: You are the one of whom they say, he is the cleverest of animals? You are not clever; you are a fool. If we are afraid in the water, our natural habitat which gives us life, then in a habitat that causes our death, all the more so.

• ‘Apikoros’ is a term within Jewish discourse, signifying a departure from established religious beliefs and practices, its most emphatic meaning being something like ‘heretic’.