Hugo Marom - February 8, 2008
Religious Life in England
And he used to invite me after Shabbat...after the Sabbath service in our, in our youth synagogue, which was also very unique and most probably the first one in England that was...
And you attended those services.
And we went to...oh, every Saturday we went to the Saturday morning service before my bar mitzvah and after my bar mitzvah. And the entire service was normally run by the older children and I'm saying those who hadn't gone into the army like sixteen, seventeen and eighteen and following my bar mitzvah I also led the service, you know, on one Saturday I was chosen to read it. So, I knew most of the services by heart by that time because a number of times...I must say that, that the melodies sung in the synagogue were very much like the melodies...because they were German and apparently the Czech Jewish community and the Austrian Jewish community used the same melodies as opposed to Sepharadim and so forth which may have used...or Americans...in, in England perhaps different melodies were used whether it was ??? or ??? you know all these melodies so I could uh, whenever we had a meal with, with one of these Jewish families that came from London over the weekend I would be the one that would start ??? after we had our meal and so forth. Okay, uh...
But you were living with a non-Jewish couple...family.
Never li...never spent one night in one Jewish home except for the brother-in-law, the brother-in-law of Fritz Gross who invited us to his place in London...the same one that wanted to adopt us at the end of the war. They're both not alive anymore. Their daughter who was, who was six...she's six years older than myself, she lives in Israel now. She's in a pretty bad state but she's eighty-six years old and she lives here in Israel and we, we look after her and so forth as much as we can.
Did the Chancellors provide for a Jewish education for you?
At that time, at that time the general attitude was you have to go to a, to a service. There were no synagogues in Bedford so at the beginning we would go with, with whatever home we were in with the children or with, with, with these people to a service. I lived for one...I lived for sometime with a family who called themselves the British Israelites. The considered themselves Mr. and Mrs. ???. They considered themselves the Lost Tribe of Israel. Now, they invited me to their service although I already...we already had our youth synagogue at that time. I would go there and listen to the, to the sermons on Sunday which uh, sometimes...
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