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Oral history recording with Lionel Bernstein collected as part of The Hineni Project, an insight into the life and stories of a Jewish community in all its diversity. Hineni was a collaborative project between Cardiff Reform Synagogue and Butetown History & Arts Centre.

I was born in Merthyr Tydfil in 1946 to a fairly Orthodox family. We kept kosher and we kept all the festivals. My father was one of ten children, and they all lived on our street, the Avenue, where most of Merthyr’s Jewish community lived. We were such a small community, and it was up to us to attend every synagogue service. So when I was eight or nine my average week would be: go to synagogue on Friday night and Saturday morning; do a bit of studying at the rabbi’s house on Saturday afternoon; two hours of cheder Sunday morning and some weeknights. It was quite a busy week. When you had your bar mitzvah at thirteen, you didn’t have to go to cheder anymore – that was like your gate to freedom. If you didn’t go to synagogue every Saturday, the rabbi would be ringing asking why aren’t you there. Ever since then it’s been in my blood to go to synagogue every Friday and Saturday, and I’ve continued that most of my life. Going to shul is part of my way of life. What I remember quite a lot about Merthyr as a child was walking to synagogue on the High Holidays, and the amount of shops in the high street you’d pass with a notice “Closed due to holidays.” Although there were only twenty-five families, I think everyone had a shop. They were either doctors or merchants. I left school at sixteen. I had a family business to go into, started earning money and was quite happy. The business was based around Merthyr and we did general textiles – curtains, bedding and things like that. The family used to do the markets around the area. We used to do Pontypridd market, and had a stall in the indoor market in Newport. When I started work, I was on the verge of giving it up. I didn’t think it was right for me but I just grew into it. We went through hard times and that was the encouragement for me to find more interest in it. Now my son has gone into it, and I’ve got a third generation continuing the business. I met my wife one Saturday night out in Cardiff, and she didn’t want to live in Merthyr, so we lived in Cardiff. I joined the Reform in the ’70s and a year later I was on the council. Three years later, they made me their chairman at the age of thirty-three, so I was probably the youngest chairman they’ve had. The running of the services has always been my interest. When I became warden, I tried to bring some of the Merthyr spirit into our services, where we used to talk and laugh and joke. There was bit of a buzz going on throughout the synagogue and occasionally there’d be a “shhh” and you’d quieten down a bit. The whole atmosphere when I was growing up was all based on the synagogue and on the Jewish community, and unless you lived in that experience you don’t really get the wonderful atmosphere we had. Everybody’s house was open, and if you walked in at the right time, you’d get the right food, so it was a really, really wonderful childhood I had. I wouldn’t swap my childhood in the Valleys, Merthyr, for anything.