Alan Senitt: My friend and inspiration
With Alan, you felt that for the few minutes he was speaking to you, you were the person in the room who counted
Alan Senitt died 20 years ago on 9 July 2006 in Washington DC. He was 27 years old and at the age of 27 he had certainly lived a lot more than most.
He’d led BBYO, chaired UJS, worked at BICOM and for Lords and MPs. He had immersed himself in coexistence work, Israel advocacy, student leadership and politics. He had stood for council. He had gone to America to work on a political campaign. He was forever on his way somewhere, forever moving towards the next thing but never too busy to show off the fact that had important people’s numbers saved in his contacts.
Everyone who knew Alan had a version of his future in their head, usually because he kept telling us his plan for his own future but with some new refinement to it. Last I remember he had decided he was going to become the Minister for Sport. None of these plans felt unrealistic to those who heard them (and many heard them). Alan made ambition look not merely possible, but obvious.
That was one of his gifts. He was never embarrassed by wanting to do something significant. He didn’t dress up his ambition in false modesty. He didn’t wait for permission. He saw a ladder and climbed it. If there was no ladder, he built one. If the first rung broke, he laughed, found another and carried on. One thing I remember is that he loved including metaphors in his speeches, there was always a seed about to grow into a beautiful flower or a warm day following a cold night. These devices were his way of connecting people with the aims he had for whatever organisation he happened to be running at the time.
But this was Alan and it was part of the way he had of making people feel that they mattered. Not in the cheap way politicians sometimes do, where every handshake is a transaction and every conversation a calculation. With Alan, you felt that for the few minutes he was speaking to you, you were the person in the room who counted. He could be standing among MPs, diplomats, communal grandees and future leaders, and still make a friend feel as important as any of them.
Twenty years on, the temptation is to turn Alan into a saint. He wasn’t, he was a real person with his own hopes, dreams, fears and foibles, but he was also a very driven man who knew exactly what to do to get where he wanted to be. And really that lesson, that you can achieve the things you set your mind to, is a legacy that remains.
The Alan Senitt Memorial Trust has, through its programmes that bring teenagers from different backgrounds together, through its insistence that leadership is not something reserved for the old, the wealthy or the already powerful, has kept faith with who Alan was. Personally I also always get a kick out of seeing that there’s a meeting room in the UJS office named after him.
Twenty years after Alan died, those of us who were lucky enough to know him are older (and fatter) than he ever became. That fact does not get easier. We have had the years he was denied. We have had the ordinary blessings, the frustrations, the mortgages, the school runs, the work worries, the grey hairs, the quiet Friday nights, the family barbecues. He had none of it.
Alan was robbed of his future. No tribute can soften that. No anniversary can make sense of it. But twenty years later, his life still poses the challenge to me. Did I do all I could do, did I really chase after the things I wanted in life and achieve the goals I set for myself. I’m still trying but he made it look so easy. I do think sometimes about what he’d make of the world as it is today but he was never a philosopher, he was a doer. He would have rolled up his sleeves and simply got on with making things better.
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