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Recordiad sain / Audio recording: Julius Weil
Oral history recording with Julius Weil 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 on Simchat Torah,1925 in Dortmund, Germany, but as a baby moved to Cologne where my mother’s family were born and lived. My father was an upholsterer and decorator. He was a top-class tradesman and made things like settees, mattresses and armchairs. My father was a member of a number of shteibels, and on Simchat Torah, my birthday, we went to two or three synagogues, and instead of getting one bag full of sweets, I sometimes got two bags from the same synagogue. My bar mitzvah was three weeks before Kristallnacht, and after Kristallnacht the whole school was supposed to have been transferred in stages to England. I came over with my whole class in January 1939 and we lived together in a hostel in London. We were accompanied by one of our teachers, a Latin teacher who was also a rabbi. It was a very religious hostel where prayers were said three times a day. We attended a school in north west London until 1st September when the whole school was evacuated to Bedford, where we were put into different houses. We went to school and we were moved about from one house to another as people got fed up with having evacuees. There were no Jewish facilities in Bedford so two committees from the Walm Lane and Dollis Hill synagogues in London took responsibility for us and supplied us with kosher food. Hundreds of Jewish families were evacuated to Bedford, and I can remember one of the festivals took place in the Town Hall and there were six rabbis sitting in the front. During the war I worked in the canteen of an ordinance factory which was run by J Lyons and Company. I stayed there until 1948 when I was transferred to another Ministry of Supply place in Egham, Surrey. I left there eventually and found work in Staines which went on until I came to Cardiff in 1957. I came to Cardiff because my oldest friend from Bedford, Geoffrey Fisher, had come to Wales, and asked me to join his uncle’s carton manufacturing business in Pentrebach near Merthyr Tydfil. The company was called the Standard Box and Carton Company Limited, and later changed its name to Delyn plc. I joined the synagogue over forty years ago when I first approached Rabbi Graf and he roped me in very quickly, teaching and later taking services.