OPINION: How a Torah from Hove found new life in Richmond and preserved my family’s legacy
Alex Brummer on the rededication of a Sefer Torah from his childhood shul and the heritage it carries forward
Alex Brummer is a Jewish News columnist and the City Editor, Daily Mail
A vital part of the closed Hove Hebrew Congregation (HHC) has found a new home in Richmond. When the independent HHC finally closed its doors last year, after more than a glorious century serving the community from its stunning bright white building on Holland Road, the most precious content was the Sifrei Torah scrolls.
Most of them, several flawed, were transferred as a gift to the United Synagogue. The honorary officers Stanley Cohen and Michele Cohen, in an act of great generosity, offered one of the few ‘kosher’ scrolls to me as a gift in memory of my dear father Michael Brummer (z’’l), a life president of the synagogue, and my brother Daniel (z’’l). In the last several decades, he had been the life and soul of the community.
Most of my early life, before leaving Hove for university, was bound up with the overwhelming spirituality of the Hove community. It was born, like so many synagogues across the world, out of the need to have two traditional shuls. The one you went to and an alternative.
Holland Road was founded by Eastern European Jews, escapees from pogroms in the early part of the last century and, latterly, in the 1930s and 1940s, refugees from fascism and the Nazis, including my father, and later survivors of the Shoah. HHC offered a different choice to the long-established 19th-century Middle Street community steeped in the formality of Anglo-Jewry. My father’s brother Hillel Brummer, the Cantor in the war years and early 1950s, and the Rabbi wore dog collars, as was customary at the time.
At HHC it was very different. The Rav Beryl Wilner, with a significant unkept grey beard, hailed from Lithuania and spoke in heavily accented English. His sermons were forged in the white heat of Zionism. He had an ability to move a congregation to tears with his evocation of how the vision of a Jewish state (to where he retired) had been accomplished. Rav Wilner spoke passionately of the fulfilment of a return to Jerusalem as invoked in daily prayers.
His fellow ministers, my dear teacher and father’s great card-playing friend, Chazan Kalman Fausner, the man with the sweetest voice, was a sparkling personality who served HHC for more than six decades. Kalman had been ‘discovered’ by the Shul’s president on a visit to pre-Israel Tel Aviv, where his wonderful voice and precision Ivrit lifted services at the historic Allenby Synagogue.
The Sefer brought to Richmond represents part of a Shoah-impacted chain of Judaism
The third stalwart was the Rev Shlomo Josephs, the Schochet with a gravelly voice, who was a follower of Satmar. His first family had been wiped out in the Shoah, and he made a new life with a second family in Hove. He could be seen on the seafront, on Shabbat afternoons and Yom Tov, in full regalia, including his ‘shtreimel’. My father, as a farmer turned kosher butcher, poulterer and delicatessen owner, enjoyed a close relationship.
There were both Hungarian and Yiddish speakers, hailing from nearby towns on the Hungarian-Czech borderlands (now in Ukraine). Both Chazan Fausner and Rev. Josephs officiated at my wedding.
Together this trio of ministers provided an atmosphere of a former, splendid world of pre-Holocaust Europe in the heart of Hove. The Shul was not only a mecca for Brighton sharp-suited bookmakers and antique dealers but also attracted Charedi holidaymakers by the dozens in the summer. Among the visitors were the good and the great of British commerce, including the Wolfson family – founders of Great Universal Stores, or GUSSIES as it was fondly known to its Jewish shareholders.
The Sefer brought to Richmond represents part of a Shoah-impacted chain of Judaism. It was transported by our brilliant young Rabbi Chaim Golker, with a strong Brighton connection, to North London for examination and repairs by scribes chosen by the US. Back in my home, my wife Tricia, a textile artist who has designed and made Torah mantles for shuls across London – from Westminster to Finchley – set about making a new cover. She chose themes from the fruits of the Middle East, with highly decorated pomegranates the main feature.
On Shabbat Bemidbar, in the presence of the extended Brummer and Golker families, the Torah was rededicated. The relationship between my family and those of Rabbi Chaim’s family dates to the Second World War. The Rabbi’s grandparents were evacuated to Brighton. My father, who owned a small farm on South Downs, bred chickens and kept the Golker and other Jewish families supplied with Shabbat chicken.
As is customary, the newly decorated Sefer was brought out of the ark where it had greeted the present incumbents. All were paraded around the Shul, and there was dancing with the Seferim in front of the Aron Kodesh and in the rear of the Shul by the women members. Among them is the matriarch of the Golker family, still thankful for wartime poultry!
The Torah had its first outing for the layning. My newly barmitzvahed grandson Benjamin enjoyed his first post-ceremony call-up. My older grandson Rafi had his first Hagbah and managed a good 360-degree spin. His good fortune was that the rededicated scroll is light and easy to manoeuvre.
HHC may have closed its doors, and loyal remaining members transferred to West Hove and the newly built Shul at the Brighton & Hove community centre. Jewish continuity lives on with a slice of the history of Eastern European Jews in Britain safely preserved in Richmond.
Paradoxically, our shul was founded by members of Anglo-Jewry’s distinguished cousinhood who would retreat at weekends from the City of London to the quietude of the Thames and the pastoral landscape of Richmond Park. How the world turns!
- Alex Brummer is city editor of the Daily Mail
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