Cardiff is an incredibly diverse city. It has the highest percentage of Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, and Jewish residents in all of Wales and although Wales is less ethnically diverse than England the Welsh capital has more of a mixture of ethnicities than the rest of the nation.
As part of this picture of diversity a Jewish community continues to survive – somewhat against the odds. Areas of Wales with once-thriving Jewish populations have found themselves with only a tiny number of Jewish families left.
Take Merthyr Tydfil for instance – one of the many areas in south Wales where a striking synagogue building has been left disused with the area's Jewish people upping sticks and leaving. The synagogue will become a museum but its congregation is gone – only five people in Merthyr identified as Jewish in the 2021 census.
READ MORE: The stark reality facing Wales' Jewish community
Although only a small number of Jewish communities remain active in Wales they have their share of stories to tell. The tales of the handful of exceptional thinkers and writers who came from these communities, placed against the backdrop of the ordinary traders and professionals in the generations before them, paint a picture of an immigrant community that assimilated into Welsh life and evolved through the years.
Among those is Cardiff's Jewish community which is now embodied in two synagogues – a Reform synagogue in Adamsdown and a United synagogue in Cyncoed. Thanks to the efforts of historians and archivists through the years we're able to find out about an MP whose thinking was ahead of his time, several prestigious authors, one of Wales' three Nobel Prize winners, and a family who have left an enduring mark on the city and beyond – all of whom were raised in Cardiff by Jewish parents.
Why aren't these stories told often enough?
"With a focus on the 1911 anti-Jewish riots in Tredegar and the numerical decline of Jewish communities throughout the 20th century Wales’ Jewish history has often had this image of being a bit of a sad and awkward chapter in our history and sometimes best avoided or overlooked," says Dr Cai Parry-Jones. Dr Parry-Jones is a historian whose research focuses on Jewish history in Wales and he's written a book entitled The Jews of Wales: A History – so he's well-placed to comment.
He adds that the fact of these stories not getting told is partially down to numbers. "Wales’ Jewish population never made up more than 1% of the population and so the history was long seen as a bit parochial and not that important... Fortunately there has been a change in the air in recent decades and since devolution we are starting to see greater efforts being made to address the history of ethnic diversity in Wales, which includes Jews."
Cardiff's Jewish population is not an inherently exceptional one – it hasn't churned out a higher number of prize-winning authors, politicians, or any other pioneering high-achievers than any other community and to claim it had would be to perpetuate the problematic myth that Jewish people are disproportionately represented in high society. In fact it started out in the way that many immigrant populations do. Dr Parry-Jones said: "To begin with it was made up primarily of itinerant traders and small business owners working in trades like tailoring, home furnishings, glazing, watchmaking, and pawnbroking... a real mixture. Some families ran small businesses that served the Jewish community like Krotosky’s kosher butchers.
"However, over time, the community began to professionalise and you do see this change taking place in the inter-war period onward when members of the Jewish community began to venture into professions like law, medicine, and accountancy. While the immigrant generation worked in trade and set up small businesses their university-educated children and grandchildren typically went into the professions and worked in industry.”
These generations professionalising and moving away from Cardiff has contributed to the closure of these Jewish-run businesses although many, including Wally's Delicatessen, run by the son of its namesake Wally Salamon, who came to Wales aged three when his family fled the Nazis in Poland, still endure. The stories of individuals who achieved great things after growing up Cardiff's Jewish community, then, help to put a face to this process of change through generations.
The MP who fought for gay rights
Leo Abse, MP for Pontypool and later Torfaen, grew up in Cardiff, the child of solicitor and cinema owner Rudolf Abse. He served on Cardiff City Council before running for Parliament in 1958 and by the end of his Parliamentary career he had introduced legislation to decriminalise homosexuality, make it easier to get a divorce, and to enable local authorities to give out contraception.
He was a "revolutionary" who "owed his success to courage, clever footwork in Parliament, the willingness to accept opportunities, hard work, readiness to chip away at parliamentary and public opinion year after year, and commitment to his constituency," reads his obituary in The Times.
A private member's bill he introduced eventually turned into the Sexual Offences Act 1967, which decriminalised male homosexual relations. Of course there was still some way for the law to go – such as in extending this to female relations and bringing the homosexual age of consent in line with the heterosexual one – but Abse's work was monumental in bringing change about.
Speaking on the Today programme in December 1966 he strongly dismissed the idea that the bill "condon[ed] something which is absolutely wrong and immoral." He said: "It is not a criminal offence to commit adultery. It is not a criminal offence to fornicate. These are not criminal offences according to our law but the fact that the House of Commons does not make these criminal offences does not mean we approve of them.
"And we do not condone homosexuality. What the House of Commons has decided is that the homosexual has enough troubles without in addition having the fear and insecurity and the blackmail that arises from the existing law."
By modern standards Abse's progressivism may not be perfect. His acceptance of the fact that the Navy should be excepted from the decriminalisation of homosexuality for reasons of "discipline", and his phrasing of homosexuality as something the House of Commons didn't necessarily "approve" of, may sound grating.
And, in fact, he was criticised at the time by the Homosexual Law Reform Society for not consulting them over the bill. But, as with his work on divorce reform, the benefit of hindsight shows how his work kickstarted decades of change in the law – and, as a politician in the 1960s, his attitudes were radical for their time.
His legal background came as his work as a solicitor. He set up Leo Abse & Cohen solicitors in 1951, which became one of the biggest firms in Wales and was acquired by Slater and Gordon in 2015.
...and his relatives who made waves in literature
Abse's younger brother Dannie also made quite a career for himself as a poet after starting out as a physician in a chest clinic. He published one of his most famous works in 2007 after moving to Hampstead in London.
The Presence was published in 2007 – a memoir of the year after his wife died in a car crash, which won the Wales Book of the Year prize and was dramatised for Radio Four. He was later made a CBE for services to poetry and literature in 2012 at the age of 88.
The family's talents didn't end there with their aunt Lily Tobias having been a Welsh-speaking novelist. Tobias wrote about her experience of growing up as a Jewish child in Wales although she was born in Swansea, not Cardiff, and grew up in Ystalyfera.
Her parents, Jewish immigrants from Poland who spoke Yiddish at home, were in the business of selling wallpaper and glass decorations. Her story has only been properly unearthed in the last few years after Swansea University's senior creative writing lecturer Dr Jasmine Donahaye unearthed her out-of-print books.
In 2015 Dr Donahaye said: "I was dismayed that she had been lost from view. The subject matter of her writing was fascinating and unusual and her life, as I discovered, was marked by trauma and tragedy but she was an impressive and courageous woman who carried on against the odds.
"Now with this biography and the republication of her moving and unique first novel I hope she can be rightly recognised for her remarkable literary and political contributions as a Welsh and Jewish author."
Tobias' work drew upon her pacifist and socialist beliefs and she moved to British Mandate Palestine in the 1930s. She died in 1984 and her nephews Leo and Dannie died in 2008 and 2014 respectively.
The first woman to win the Booker Prize
Bernice Rubens shows how the career choices of Cardiff's Jews changed through the years, said Dr Parry-Jones. Her father emigrated from Latvia and worked as a draper but Bernice was destined to be a writer.
Born in Splott, Rubens became a famous novelist and was the first woman to win the Booker Prize for her book The Elected Member. Her brothers were classical musicians with one, Cyril, going on to play in the London Symphony Orchestra.
To this day Rubens is the only Welsh author to have won a Booker Prize while she was shortlisted again in 1978 for A Five Year Sentence. The plot of her 1989 book Brothers has echoes of her own family's story.
The book's blurb describes it as a story that "follows four generations of the Bindel family as they fight for survival in a hostile world" leading one part of the family to the Welsh Valleys. Although the book is a work of fiction it's believed to be based on her family's history.
The Sherman family's gift of a theatre
Closer to home the Sherman family's history is more closely intertwined with Cardiff itself. Two of the family's four brothers, born in a house in Gloucester Street, became some of the city's biggest employers when a business venture took off.
They made enough money to put it back into Cardiff and their name lives on in a thriving theatre in Cathays. But, as Dr Parry-Jones said they were "by no means a typical Cardiff Jewish family".
He added: "A lot of people may have this perception that the Cardiff community was self-contained but Jewish communities had connections all over.... With the Shermans there is that connection with other parts of south Wales."
Abe Sherman lived just behind the Merthyr synagogue, was active in the synagogue's community, and is buried in the Jewish cemetery in Merthyr. He ran a pools business – an early form of lottery, which was basically made up of betting on the outcome of football matches – along with his brother Harry.
The business became a huge employer in Cardiff, said Dr Parry-Jones. At one point it was reported that they were collecting £10m in stakes every year.
The business was sold to Littlewoods in the 1960s. They gave money to the city's Orthodox synagogue, which was used to create the Sherman Memorial Hall and funded philanthropic work in Israel.
But residents of Cardiff will recognise them for the Sherman Theatre. The brothers financed the building of the theatre to the tune of £180,000, according to the Jewish History Association of South Wales. The theatre still gives a voice to new Welsh writing to this day and plays host to touring productions from across the UK.
When Harry Sherman died in 1961 he included 11 charities in his will, the South Wales Echo reported. Abe, who was president of the Merthyr Synagogue, died in 1965.
The Nobel Prize trailblazer
Only one Welsh-born person has ever received the Nobel Prize for Physics and he's one of only three Welsh-born people to have won any Nobel Prize. His name is Brian Josephson and he was born in Cardiff to Jewish parents.
Now aged 82, Josephson won the prestigious prize in 1973 and shared it with physicists Leo Esaki and Ivar Giaever. He was only 22 when he did the work that eventually won him the Nobel Prize for discovering the 'Josephson effect'.
He credits his teachers at Cardiff High School with sparking his interests in physics. Speaking in 2012 he said: "I had some very helpful schoolmasters. The physics master, Emrys Jones, lent me a book on theoretical physics. I got amazed by the things you could actually calculate the properties of... so that made me interested in theoretical physics."
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