Next year in Jerusalem: reflections and recollections at Passover 

The thoughts of many will be turning this week to Jerusalem. On Saturday and Sunday nights, 27 and 28 March, Jews will celebrate in their homes — albeit without the normal family gatherings while in Covid isolation — the annual set meals and prayers (“Seder”) marking the start of the Passover commemoration of the escape of the Children of Israel from enslavement in Egypt. On 2 April, Good Friday will be the most solemn and saddest day in the Christian calendar, followed on 4 April by Easter Sunday, a record of the foundational events in Jerusalem of the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus Christ.

For Jews, though primarily about the exodus from Egypt, the end product of the Passover story is the eventual establishment of the temple in Jerusalem. Near the start of the home ritual, the door of the house is to be opened, the unleavened bread [Matza] is to be held aloft while the prayer leader says:

“Behold, this is the bread of affliction which our ancestors ate in the land of Egypt: let all those who are hungry enter and eat thereof … and celebrate the Passover. At present, we celebrate it here. Next year, may we celebrate it in the land of Israel. This year we are here in exile, but next year we hope to be free men in the land of Israel.”

At the end of the meal and subsequent prayers, the proceedings frequently end with the words (first recorded as recently as the 15th century): “Next year in Jerusalem.”

The invocation of Jerusalem is taken literally by all three Abrahamic faiths, with the Western (“Wailing”) Wall as a place of worship for Jews, the Stations of the Cross for Christians and the Dome of the Rock, the place where the Prophet Mohammed ascended to heaven, for Muslims. Yet, “Jerusalem” often has a conceptual meaning. At my school, as at so many others, our song was William Blake’s poem, later named “Jerusalem”, expressing the vision of building a new Jerusalem “in England’s green and pleasant land”. It is nowadays seen as a powerful appeal to social and moral values. In the Jewish world, discussions about the meaning of “Next year in Jerusalem” frequently, but by no means always, lead to a similar interpretation.

At the end of the nineteenth century, it tended to be secular Jews in the burgeoning Zionist movement who advocated a return to Israel as a practical policy. But for most, “Next year in Jerusalem” was a vision of a messianic dream in the indefinite future or an invocation of “Jerusalem” as a symbol of the Ten Commandments, Jewish precepts in general, as well as a spiritual appeal. Curiously, it is this spiritual meaning that makes most sense to the hundreds of thousands of Jerusalem’s Jewish inhabitants. After all, the wording of the traditional service has not been changed for them to “This year in Jerusalem”.

There have been interminable internal debates about whether Judaism is a religion or an ethnic identity attached to a particular homeland. This reflects conflicting interpretations of what a return to “Jerusalem” means. In ordinary non-Covid years, the atmosphere in many Israeli Seder nights is reportedly soured by bitter disagreements about whether or not Israel should declare its sovereignty over the entire territory of the UK’s former Palestine mandate. In Britain, fault lines have been about the rightful role of Israel in everyday Jewish life, whether Jews living in this country should aim to move to the Jewish State, or if they wish to build their futures here, whether they are entitled to criticise Israel’s policies and actions publicly while living outside it.

At this time of reminiscence, I recall childhood Seder meals with an extraordinary collection of leading figures in the Anglo-Jewish community, almost all of them no longer living. They were not wholly typical in that they were drawn from an elite of persons equally determined to live according to British and to Jewish values. I don’t recall “Next year in Jerusalem” even being read let alone discussed. Some of those around the table had been in the forefront of communal battles in the 1930s and 1940s. I had been drawn into this circle from another background after arriving aged four in London as a Holocaust refugee from Budapest. The beloved great aunt who adopted me and brought me up came from an old Sephardi family active for generations in the Spanish and Portuguese Jews’ Congregation, whose mother synagogue has held services without a break from 1701 until Covid in 2021. She spoke no Hungarian and, after a few months, neither did I. At a relatively advanced age, Aunt Brenda had married a widower, the Hungarian scholar-rabbi Dr Charles Duschinsky.

What was to be a short but happy marriage before he died almost did not take place. The social divisions between long-established Sephardi families and the Germanic and central and eastern European Ashkenazim, who had come by the 1930s to form the large majority of Anglo-Jewry, were so severe that the Spanish and Portuguese Congregation refused to allow Aunt Brenda to marry a “Tedesco” in one of its synagogues. The controversy led to a fierce correspondence I still possess. The exchange of letters in 1934 about the inadmissibility of a mixed Sephardi-Ashkenazi marital union was all the more remarkable for the internal ethnic intolerance it demonstrated among Britain’s Jews, merely a year after Hitler came to power in Germany.

Our host at the Seder was Aunt Brenda’s nephew, Manuel Cansino, son of an affluent Sephardi Manchester merchant. The Cansinos were related to the Belishas (Leslie Hore-Belisha, who introduced Belisha beacons and was Minister of War from 1937-40, was a cousin) and the Hamwees (forebears of Sally Hamwee, now Baroness Hamwee). Not surprisingly, their families had been and largely remained avid Manchester supporters of the Liberal Party. This may have been why they also mixed with a prominent Ashkenazi in the city, Nathan Laski. It had been in Laski’s home that Winston Churchill was introduced to the recently arrived Chaim Weizmann, later Israel’s first president. Laski, an anti-Zionist, was to be no friend of Weizmann. Laski’s elder son, Neville, was a regular at the Cansino Seder gatherings. He had been admitted to the Sephardi congregation in London after marrying Cissie, the formidable eldest daughter of its “Haham”, or senior minister, Moses Gaster.

Neville had played a major but underappreciated role as president of the UK Jewish Board of Deputies in the 1930s. Like his father, he was an avid anti-Zionist, which accounted for his ouster in 1940. Condemned by Zionists as a toady and criticised for works such as Jewish Rights and Jewish Wrongs, warning refugees from Germany to lower their voices in public and to refrain from complaining in Hampstead that things had been better in Germany, he actually had worked tirelessly to negotiate with unsympathetic British authorities to promote the admission of Jews to Britain from lands where they were being persecuted by the Nazis. He had arranged for undercover infiltration of UK pro-Nazi groups. A King’s Counsel by the age of 40, he had been informed after the War that he would not be made a judge because of the leftist activities of his more famous younger brother, Harold Laski. Eventually he received the consolation prize of the Recordership of Liverpool. My Aunt Brenda knew him well and Neville acted like a surrogate father to me.

Cissie Laski’s father, Haham Gaster, had been the stuff of legend. Aunt Brenda told me that at gatherings at the Gaster home in Maida Vale, plates of sandwiches would be marked “FKO” – Family Keep Off – directed at his very large brood. She also passed on the rumour that Gaster’s famous library had been built partly by borrowing and not returning valuable books. These were not the only stories from her youth. Gaster had been a prodigious academic from Romania, from which he had been expelled for political activities. He was a Zionist leader at Theodore Herzl’s time and it was to be in his Maida Vale residence, “Mizpah”, that the initial version of what was to become the Balfour Declaration was drafted in 1917. It is reported that Churchill, Lenin and Freud had all visited “Mizpah”. Not surprisingly, the Elders of the Spanish and Portuguese Congregation did not all appreciate Gaster’s activities, eccentricities and absences. He retired prematurely from his rabbinical office.

Also at the table were Manuel’s brother-in-law, Robert Nunes Carvalho, his wife Esther Sebag-Montefiore and one of the son’s of Robert’s Oxford friend, the High Court judge Sir Alan Mocatta. During the War, Alan served as a lieutenant-colonel in the War Office, engaged in planning for the occupation of a defeated Germany. Tom Bower’s researches for his classic Blind Eye to Murder, an exposé of the failure after 1945 adequately to bring suspected Nazi war criminals to trial, reveal that it was due to Mocatta that the decision to withhold publication of the horrific films made after the liberation of Bergen-Belsen was reversed. Alan’s behind-the-scenes activities while in military service contrasted with his appearance on many Sabbaths at the Lauderdale Road synagogue. He was an able, immaculate and always prompt reader of parts of the service assigned to lay members. On days when test matches were being played nearby at Lord’s cricket ground, he apparently expected the chazan (cantor) to finish the service by 11.30 to allow him to reach Lord’s shortly after the start of play. A member (like Manuel) of the MCC (Marylebone Cricket Club), Alan sometimes could be seen after changing from synagogue suit into cricket flannels going to the nets for a practice. A governor of Jews’ College, the UK rabbinical seminary, he asked the future senior rabbi of the Congregation, Dr Abraham Levy, at his entrance interview whether he played cricket. The combination of intense activity and roles in British professional and public life with support for Jewish communal organisations meant that Mocatta did indeed seem to have found the Jewish new Jerusalem in Britain’s green and pleasant land.

For Robert Carvalho, the combination of British patriotism and the forwarding of what he saw as Jewish interests proved harder, as it had for Neville Laski while he had led the Jewish Board of Deputies. Robert presided over the Anglo-Jewish Association (AJA). This rather conservative institution, established in 1871, found itself losing influence to the Board of Deputies and UK Zionist bodies. In the mid 1950s, around the time of my Bar Mitzvah, Robert on behalf of the AJA criticised a statement by the chairman of the Zionist Federation of Great Britain which referred to the ten-year old State of Israel as “our country”.

A longer piece would sketch several others: the genial matriarch Judith Hamwee, who eventually went to live with one of her sons in Buenos Aires, where he reportedly had acted during the Second World War on behalf of British intelligence; Aunt Rhoda de Pinto, the most glamorous of the Pinto sisters, who had spent years before the 1939-45 war in Paris, where she worked for the eccentric Huntley and Palmers heiress the Dayang Muda of Sarawak, met Jean Cocteau, Man Ray and other equally interesting members of the Montparnasse art crowd, and had a serious love affair with the White Russian officer Michael de Paltov. During the War, she worked for the Free French in London. After an embrace and kiss from General de Gaulle, she refused for days to wash it off her face. There was Jonathan Cansino, who played bridge for England but was to be prematurely damaged by a benign brain tumour. And more.

The conflicting approaches to the Anglo-Jewish history of modern times tend to coincide with different views on the role of Israel and Zionism in Jewish life in this country. The topic has sometimes become too contentious to allow for reasoned disagreement and careful research. This problem has even been seen in contrasting pieces in TheArticle.

I do not wish to resort to a bogus moral high ground of tolerant ambiguity or to the old Jewish joke of the rabbi who says “You are right” to successive members of his congregation expressing diametrically opposite views. (The punchline, to the few readers who will not have heard this before, is the rabbi’s response to the third congregant who protests that they couldn’t both be right: “You know what, you’re right.”) At the same time, it surely is acceptable and realistic to argue that “Jerusalem” (if that is a code word to Jews for a good Jewish life) may and does mean different things to different people. Taken in its narrow geographical sense, “Next year in Jerusalem” clearly brings the prospect of the blessing of being able to live in a community where there are few others not of the same faith but also the problem of how best to solve the often cruel issues of ethnic conflict.

The son of a late Christian academic colleague who was Jewish under terms of religious law, because his mother and grandmother were of Jewish stock, described his dismay when he attended his first Seder as an adult. What struck and shocked him was the stress in the Haggadah (the Seder service) on the plagues visited on the Egyptians, the killing of their first-born, their drowning in the Red Sea. We Jews understandably tend to put Jewish suffering over the ages, during the Holocaust and more recently, at the centre of our world view. We cannot ignore the age-old and repeated “blood libel”, claiming that a Christian child found murdered had been killed by Jews in some non-existent alleged ritual for making unleavened bread. We cannot safely disregard nuclear threats to the Jewish State. Yet, it may also be necessary to safeguard against complacency and the conviction that Jewish behaviour will always be beyond reproach.

Self-questioning, recognising that few pathways avoid all blockages, that different moral and practical visions may co-exist, that personal and family relationships are more valuable than abstract principles, may be the best we can hope to achieve in our quest to reach the city on the hill.

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