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Recordiad sain / Audio recording: Mishy Helman
Oral history recording with Mishy Helman 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 Israel in 1952, in a place called Kibbutz Ha’Ogen. My father was one of the founders of the kibbutz which had about 700 people. I grew up on the kibbutz, and at that time children lived in a children’s house, not with their parents, but we saw our parents daily. There were about sixteen of us living and eating and looking after ourselves in the children’s house with a housekeeper to help us. It was fun; I really liked it. At school we learnt almost everything under the world but there were no exams or anything. We had one teacher until we went to high school, and some professional teachers for music, sport and English, which we started learning when we were ten. We had our own little zoo and an allotment where we grew vegetables. I thought it was really good. The kibbutz wasn’t at all religious. We had our own culture and our own script for the festivals, like on Yom Kippur, it was up to the members to decide to take a day off or keep it as a normal day because we had animals that needed to be fed and oranges that needed to be watered. After finishing high school in 1971, I went to the army for three and a half years and became a tank officer. After the army I went back to the kibbutz and worked in the orange grove – a family tradition. The idea of the kibbutz then was you give what you can and you get what you need, so I wasn’t paid but I had a flat provided and was given an allowance. The kibbutz provided you with everything. I was in charge of the workforce for a year and saw how important our plastics factory was in bringing money to the kibbutz, so I went and worked in the factory for a few years. I met my wife, Marilyn, in 1979 when she was on an ulpan on the kibbutz, learning Hebrew in exchange for being part of the workforce. We got married the following year at the Reform Synagogue in Cardiff, where she’s from, and had a ceremony on the kibbutz as well. There were three couples, and it was the last wedding the kibbutz ever organised. We stayed on the kibbutz another eleven years, and all of our three children were born there before we moved to Cardiff in 1981. I’ve had several jobs since I’ve been here but am now working in the Orthopaedic Centre in Llandough Hospital as a porter in theatre. I like it on the whole, but I’m getting near sixty and I’m working with young people just qualifying and not experienced in life, so it is difficult sometimes but it’s rewarding in a way. I don’t support the Reform community as much as I should or I could. I used to attend synagogue more often when the kids were young. I will go on Kol Nidre and Yizkor mainly because of Marilyn, not because of the need for myself. And it’s the same with other holidays like Pesach. We do the seder because we always loved doing the seder in Israel; it was good food and it was fun but the whole religious thing hasn’t got a lot of meaning to me. However, I admire people going to synagogue because I think that for Jewish people here it’s important to go to synagogue because that’s how they feel that they’re actually Jewish. I don’t have the need to feel Jewish, living forty years in Israel, and I’m an Israeli first.