Sometimes the dead can help us live better lives

I bring good news – because someone has to, in a world where Jews are feeling attacked and gaslit. Strangely, both of my titbits of positivity involve graveyards, but that’s 2024 for you.

The first involves my father’s grave, the wording of which has been a subject of hot debate with my siblings. We agreed at last on the finer details of punctuation – yes to Oxford commas, yes (reluctantly) to full points after abbreviated letters (Dad’s OBE naturally), and after much discussion about meaning, approved Dad’s favourite biblical quote. All of this would have delighted Dad, who encouraged debate among his children, and was prone to making up statistics in order to stir us to find out the actual facts to win the argument.

But once the wording was agreed we hit a problem. The word God, the stonemasons insisted, had to be written G-d. I felt very strongly that this was an out-dated piece of superstitious nonsense (‘It’s a piece of stone, not a scrap of paper!’), and after all, God is an English word, not a Hebrew one. Eventually the question was referred up to an eminent Dayan. Who said, no problem, you don’t need the dash, either version is fine.

Thank you very much! Orthodoxy need not mean narrow-mindedness; compassion and common sense meant that sunshine and light ruled. It cheered me up enormously that we didn’t have to have a fight or pick another quote altogether, and I felt the Almighty – as well as my father – would have approved.

The other spark of graveyard-based positivity came at the UK Jewish Film Festival last month, at the evening devoted to short documentaries backed by the Dangoor Education fund. Every year I look forward to these films, made on a shoestring, some by seasoned film makers, others by absolute beginners, each one shining a light on some aspect of British Jewish life in less than five minutes.

This year the lights shone on Stamford Hill’s Adeni community; Pini, a blues singer who grew up Charedi and sings in Yiddish; and a poultry shop in the East End run by the glamorous Rochelle Cole, whose great-grandmother set up the shop in 1890.  Any one of these films could have been a full length documentary, and I hope that one day they will be.

Carol Isaacs’ beautiful film Torn was about the ripped and defaced posters of hostages around London, and the people who desecrate them. In her imaginative animation she takes the scraps torn down and fashions a golem out of them.

Then came the graveyards – “Orphaned graveyards” in fact, Jewish burial grounds in towns like Wolverhampton, Kings Lynn and Bath where there are no longer enough living Jews to maintain a synagogue or a community and our dead sleep on alone.

At first I thought Jonny Weinberg’s film was going to be utterly melancholy, as he filmed overgrown seemingly forgotten pockets of land, hidden behind high walls and locked gates. But then we heard about groups of residents getting together to care for the graveyards, restoring broken headstones and tracing the history of the people buried there.

In Bath, local people broke into the cemetery in order to care for it. Christina Hilsenrath, who leads the Friends of Bath Jewish Cemetery, has written a book, Jews in Bath: a community and their Burial Ground 1700–1945, which was published this week. It tells the story of a community which flourished and then faded. It includes the lives of women such as Maria Michael, one of the first women in England to petition for divorce in 1861 after long years of suffering her husband’s “beating, striking, throwing plates and knives and threatening to kill her” and refugee Eva Jablonski, who in the years after the First World War threw herself from an upper window of her lodging house after a policeman asked her about her registration papers.

Christina herself had a mother who came to England on the Kindertransport, and it was exploring her family story that sparked a wider interest in Jewish history and fuelled her hard work in restoring the cemetery alongside a group of volunteers. The graveyard has now become a hub for Jewish life in Bath. A place for the dead is creating connections among the living.

The film makers are mentored by Benjamin Till of UK Jewish Film, who fizzes with enthusiasm and creativity and talen. He believes passionately in the need to cherish British Jewish history and the importance of creating safe spaces for those who are “outsider” Jews, gently exploring their heritage.

He’s been taking the films around the UK. I asked him about going to Bath. “The graveyard people set up a little stall in the cinema and greeted everyone who came in and thanked them for coming,” he said.

“All these Jewish people from the city were arriving and saying that they’d hitherto thought that they were the only Jews in the city. People were finding each other. How amazing is that?”