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Recordiad sain / Audio recording: Michael Rosen
Oral history recording with Michael Rosen 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 Dundee in 1927, in the front room of our house, on a Monday. My mother noted it because it was a washing day – the washing didn’t get done that morning. My grandfather was the first president of the Dundee Jewish community, and then my father was president for twenty-one years. The community was small, about 100 Jews, and often had difficulty getting a minyan. I remember as a young boy being sent to ask someone in the local shop whether they’d come and make up the number for the service. It was a poor community, and there were no rabbis, only ministers who were paid very badly. Most of them were foreigners, and they were men of all types – they were shochets, they taught in the cheder, they took the service, and they officiated at deaths and funerals. I did get a Jewish education, and I did my bar mitzvah in 1940, but Dundee was an introduction to an Orthodox view of religion that was not particularly well taught, nor very profound. I left Scotland after graduating in medicine from the then University College, Dundee. I went into the army as a lieutenant doctor in 1952 and was sent to Egypt for about a year. I then got a job as an anaesthetist in a hospital in Newcastle. I met my wife, Sally, at a party, and we were married within a year. After two and a half years in the Newcastle hospital, I got a job as a senior registrar in Cardiff. I was awarded a professorship, became president of the Association of Anaesthetists in Great Britain and Ireland, and was the founding president of a new Royal College of Anaesthetists. I stayed on for three years as chairman of the department in Cardiff after I retired in 1996, and I still dream about anaesthetics today. When we first moved to Cardiff in 1957, we joined the Orthodox synagogue in Cyncoed, but a Jewish colleague of mine suggested that we have a look at the Reform synagogue. We liked what we saw and we joined, and we’ve been members ever since. I can’t say we go very frequently. We go to say Kaddish; we go for the festivals and when there are important occasions. When I was eighty-three, I decided to do my bar mitzvah again, and was the first in the synagogue to try and do it. I had to learn the Torah again and relearn reading Hebrew. It took me a good year to get it right, and it was a struggle, but it was worth it. I wanted my grandchildren to see that I did care about it and Jewishness does mean something. I would describe myself as Jewish-Scottish. I’ve always been conscious that I am a Jew; I want to be a Jew, never felt I want to be anything else. It brings its burdens, but it brings its pleasures and its rewards as well. Being Jewish gives a sense of ethical rules of how to behave and how to conduct your behaviour. It’s more than a religion; it’s an ethnicity as well. Most of my life was filled with non-Jews and I’m used to living in communities with non-Jews. I like the mixture. I wouldn’t like to live in an isolated community; I’d feel foreign. I want to be part of the community. I’m not ethnically Welsh but I value living in Wales and Cardiff is a wonderful city to live in.