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Recordiad sain / Audio recording: Sally Rosen
Oral history recording with Sally 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 Plymouth in 1935, one of a family of five children. My parents and grandparents were born there. I would say most of the Jewish people in Plymouth were related to us. I was called Sarah, after my grandmother, but always known as Sally because my maiden name was Cohen and my mother thought it sounded too Jewish. We left Plymouth in 1939, just before the war started. My grandfather and father had been presidents of the synagogue. My father thought: we’ve got to leave Plymouth, which was a very wise thing to do. We eventually found a lovely house in a village called Coffinswell. It was up a lane in this village and had a huge garden and fields and we kept ponies. One funny thing I remember: every year my mother was asked to open the church garden fete, so they knew we were Jewish, but it didn’t bother anybody and we just sort of fitted into the community. Our nearest synagogue was in Torquay, in a church hall. It was a long drive and not easy to get there because of petrol shortages, but we did go for the High Holidays. We had poultry in our fields, and the minister from the synagogue used to come and kill them in the kosher style. The war sort of brushed over me. My parents had a worrying time because my brother went off to the army when he was eighteen for six years. We did hear air-raid sirens because Exeter was near, and Newton Abbot was bombed. But all I can remember was that it was a lovely childhood living in the country. I only lived there ‘til I was thirteen, but I’m definitely Devonshire – Devonshire-Jewish. We then moved to London and that was a revelation. After living in the depths of the country, going to London was amazing. When I was seventeen I had this yearning to be a fashion model, which my parents thought was stupid and they said that I couldn’t even go and have training or think about it until I did a diploma course at the Cordon Bleu Cookery School, which I did reluctantly. But when I got there I quite enjoyed it. I did start modelling for a bit and enjoyed it, and I met interesting people and wore interesting clothes and it was quite exciting. When I was nineteen I met Michael, so that was sort of the end of it because we got married when I was twenty. About a month after we came to Cardiff my mother died, and I didn’t know anybody and it was terrible. But soon we met people and everybody we met in the Jewish community introduced us to other people. We first joined the Orthodox synagogue because we had been brought up Orthodox, but it didn’t suit us. We met the Bogods, who asked us if we would try the Reform. We went for a little while and decided we liked the idea of going into shul as a family with our children, instead of the boys going with Michael, and my daughter, Mandy, coming up with me. Being Jewish is important to me. I’m very proud of it and never hidden it, never pretended I wasn’t Jewish in any way, never had a need to. I think in my parents’ day, they wouldn’t talk about being Jewish. If anything cropped up, any mention of something Jewish, they would go, “Shh, shh, wait till later”. Our generation never felt that. Michael and I have got this unique thing that neither of us lost any family in the Holocaust – not one. They’d all come here already, which is amazingly unusual