Original subtitles

CHILDREN CHEER

You recognise me? Who am I?

CHILDREN SHOUT Elephant! Thank you very much.

I'm Rabbi Elephant.

Who's in this costume? Don't tell anyone!

It's a really big secret,

but it is actually Rabbi Rubin, the one and only.

Rabbi Rubin is the Senior Rabbi of Scotland, which means

he's right at the top there.

Moshe, you'd better go.

Well, here's the car keys.

What's a mensch, Tate?

A mensch is a decent person. A decent person.

What do I do?

It's a difficult one. I'm the rabbi's wife.

The rabbi's wife is called the rebbetzin.

Some rebbetzin are quite, you know, THE rebbetzin,

but I don't think I'm like that.

My name is Mark Cohen.

I own the only kosher deli in Scotland.

The customer is always right.

My name is Kathleen Hagler.

I grew up in Hungary and then I lived in Israel

and then I came to Scotland.

My name's David Simons and my grandmother said when the tram

came to the Battlefield Rest, the conductor would shout out,

"Jerusalem, next stop."

OK, everybody, are you sitting comfortably?

Which you appear to be.

My name is Rabbi Pete Tobias and I'm just back to help

this congregation find its way into the future,

whatever that future might be.

There are people who say that they're Jewish

in every part of Scotland.

For some, it might be culture.

For some, it might be family history.

SINGING

What being Jewish means to me, that's a very big question.

You probably wouldn't catch me going to a synagogue service

unless there was a particular reason.

We didn't want to get dressed up in a suit

and go to synagogue on a Saturday.

We wanted to be watching football on the telly.

I wear a kippah all the time.

I cover my hair.

This is a wig.

That's the way I've been brought up.

I don't even think about it any more.

I am not religious, so it is not the religion itself

that makes me Jewish.

It is...my history.

The history of my people.

For me, being Jewish revolves around food.

Latkes, gefilte fish.

Kosher haggis, that's the perfect

fusion of being Scottish and Jewish.

So you can be Jewish and not eat chicken soup.

The world has transformed.

I always felt this...

..almost like an umbilical cord kind of pulling me to Judaism.

There's a kind of joke - ask two Jews, get three opinions.

I love that because, as a nerd, I feel like it's a culture

that really embraces nerds.

I think today in every community, you have to be a bit more creative.

Ultimately, the outside world is going to come inside.

If we're just this unique club that you can only be a member

if you have particular genetic credentials,

there's a very bleak future for the community.

I personally take the view if you're daft enough

to want to be Jewish, then we'll have you!

# Light up the night with the candles burning bright

# On the festival of light here on Hanukkah... #

Good evening and happy Hanukkah.

Welcome to the Scottish National Hanukkah Celebration 2021.

CHEERING

These candles that we light are for the miracles and the wonders

performed by God.

HE SPEAKS HEBREW

Hanukkah is the Jewish Festival of Light and we celebrate it

by lighting a special candelabrum that we only use on this festival.

THEY SING

SHE SINGS

Well, my granny was religious and she taught me

to read Hebrew, to read the prayers in Hebrew,

but I couldn't understand a single word.

I don't think my granny understood it either.

We light it every night for eight nights

and each night, we add an extra candle.

And I think the fact that it's so dark in Scotland

so early makes it extra special.

When I first came to Scotland as a tourist in the '70s,

I fell in love with Scotland.

I fell in love with Scottish history.

I felt that the Scots suffered over the centuries...

..just like the Jews suffered over the centuries and the millennia

and I felt that I may just fit in.

No way. No, you cannot. That's cheating.

It has to be right side up. It doesn't HAVE to be right side up.

It really doesn't.

So this is the game of dreidel that we play on Hanukkah

and we're just playing for M&Ms.

The four letters on the dreidel are an acronym for a phrase

"a great miracle happen", which is a reference

to the miracle of Hanukkah.

OK, we'll play one more round.

My name is Emily Michelson.

I'm a lecturer in history at the University of St Andrews,

and that is how we moved to Scotland.

I'm Bill Shackman.

We have three children who are now 16, 13 and ten,

and the youngest was born here in St Andrews.

That's not tradition! Yeah.

We knew that we were taking a risk in leaving a Jewish community

in order to move here, erm...

..but we did. And here we are.

We're not... All right, I get the pot.

How many do you think I could fit in my mouth at once? 17.5.

What happens to the other half?

Right, just bung it on top and I'll get a box, OK?

We're busy because it's Hanukkah.

Lots of people want latkes and doughnuts.

So, latkes are like little potato fritters, but better.

It's potato, onion, wee bit of matzo meal, which is like flour,

a lightly shallow fried.

They are incredible.

We literally can't make them fast enough.

The festival of Hanukkah,

it celebrates a miracle when a bottle of oil in the temple

lasted eight days instead of one day.

Doughnuts are fried in oil, latkes are fried in oil.

All Jewish festivals are surrounding food, basically.

Hello. Any latkes today?

They're being made as we speak.

How many would you like?

Eight. Eight.

Right, I need eight latkes, please.

This is ten kilos of potatoes,

12 eggs, six onions, salt, pepper and flour.

That's all that goes into latkes.

There's no secret ingredients.

I'm Doreen Cohen and I help my son, Mark, in his deli.

I retired from my own catering company and I thought

I was going to be a lady of leisure, but that didn't happen.

Oh. Come again.

Oh, right, right, sorry.

My mum and I work very well together.

We can shout and scream at each other

and then, by the end of the day, you've forgotten all about it.

You know, what goes on in the shop stays in the shop.

She's the cook. She can make good food.

I tried to make a chopped liver brulee -

I wanted to fuse two things that I liked together,

a creme brulee and chopped liver -

and it was horrible.

Right, so that's another...

That's two. Fresh latkes, literally just made.

Ta-da! That's eight. OK?

Oh, no, I meant eight packets.

Eight packets?! Uh-huh!

Right, so it's 48 latkes I need, not eight.

MAN SINGS

I am Rabbi Moshe Rubin.

I am the Senior Rabbi of Scotland.

My pulpit position is at Giffnock Newton Mearns Synagogue.

When I came here 33 years ago, my own congregation

had over 1,000 members.

We don't have that today,

but what hasn't really changed in Glasgow community is the buzz.

Glasgow's an interesting community.

It seems to punch way above its weight.

Hello, everyone.

OTHERS GREET HIM

My senior role deals with many other areas of work.

For instance, chaplain to Calderwood Lodge Primary School,

which is the only Jewish school in Scotland.

So, boys and girls,

each and every one of you in this room are blessed

with amazing talent.

Some of you might be brilliant at maths.

Trust me, I'm not one of them.

Calderwood Lodge is run by East Renfrewshire Council

and it combines Jewish studies and secular studies.

# Torah, Torah, Torah

# Torah, Torah, Torah

# Tziva lanu Moshe. #

The kippah is part of uniform.

The food that's served from the kitchen is all kosher.

We have a lot of children in the school who are Jewish,

but we have a lot of children in the school from other

faiths as well.

We have Muslim children in the school and children of no

denomination as well.

# Bim bam, bim bam, bim bam

# Bim bam, bim bam, bim bam... #

It's important that they have that strong identity of who they are,

of their story, of their history and the importance of community.

All this comes from Calderwood Lodge Primary School.

There are plenty of songs that you all know, so please join in

and sing along or, in true Glasgow fashion, sing "lai lai lai".

LAUGHTER

I was born in America.

I left America just after my Bar Mitzvah when I was 13 years old

and then when I was 20, I married my wife.

So, I met my husband on what's called the shidduch.

So, somebody who knows both families will traditionally call up and say,

"I've got a boy for your daughter. I've got a daughter for your son."

There's phone calls and phone calls to friends, to rabbis, to teachers,

just so you get a picture of what the family is like,

if the families are compatible.

And the funny thing was that my father-in-law was speaking

to somebody before we got engaged and said,

"Oh, I need somebody for my son, a girl for my son,

"but not from the traditional Hasidic families, I need somebody

"a bit more...with a bit more worldly view."

And he said, "What you want is one of the Cohen girls."

APPLAUSE

We're blessed with eight children.

Five are married.

Some live in America.

When we got married, we decided to come and live in Glasgow.

Almost 33 years later, it still feels like two years.

I always refer to my community as a family of families.

And, yes, I'm maybe at the head of this family

and so is my wife and my children.

You know, it's the first family in Glasgow.

You're missing one number.

What did I get wrong?

Because you didn't times it by 100.

So it's 4%, not 1.4%.

So the two kids I've got at home, Perele is 16 and Solly is 13.

He just had his Bar Mitzvah.

And even before lockdown, we were home-schooling them to make

sure that specifically their Jewish knowledge was on par

with their peers in other places.

These are the easy ones.

All you've got to do is move the decimal point.

I teach girls who are coming up to their Bat Chayil,

which is their 12th birthday.

We have guests Friday night,

so that's my domain to do the cooking.

PHONE RINGS

Hello, Mark's Deli.

There's lots of places in Scotland where there is a Jewish family.

I know that because we send random things that they can't

get anywhere else.

If people want to eat kosher food, they need to be able

to buy kosher food.

We don't mix milk and meat.

We have lots of dishes in Jewish households.

You know, I have a meat set of dishes

and I have a milk set of dishes.

And then I've got a good set of milk dishes

and a good set of meat dishes.

So everything is kept separate.

I'm the fourth generation of my family

to be in the kosher food business.

My great-grandparents came to Scotland between 1900-1910,

I would think, and they all came from either Poland or Lithuania.

You know, they found their way to the Gorbals,

the centre of the Jewish community,

and they found help, you know, to settle.

My great-great-aunt was Sophie Geneen,

who had a kosher hotel and restaurant in the Gorbals.

Very well known for feeding refugees

if they came to Glasgow, for example.

So, following on from that, was my great-aunt, Annie Cooper,

who had Cohen's Deli, and people even now talk about my Auntie Annie,

you know, how they used to go in, they'd get a wee bit of wurst

if they were a kid, just to munch on so their mum could do the shopping

without any interruptions.

And she was basically everyone's Auntie Annie,

whether you were blood family or not.

So then after my Auntie Annie was my mum.

It's in our blood.

We keep the community fed on kosher food, basically that's it.

I'm Deborah Haase.

I'm Glasgow born and raised and we're in Garnethill Synagogue,

which is the oldest purpose-built synagogue in Glasgow.

I'm the honorary curator with the Scottish Jewish Archive Centre.

Garnethill Synagogue traces back to the oldest community,

which started down in the high street in Glasgow about 1823.

Edinburgh a little bit earlier, about 1816.

Dundee's coming along at that time as well.

It's the industrialisation of Scotland that's attracting people

into traditional areas for trade and so on.

Just before the First World War, we saw a big influx of Jewish people

who are fleeing from what, essentially, was the beginning

of the collapse of the Russian Empire,

so Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Belarus, Russia itself and so on,

and most of them tended to settle at that time in the Gorbals area.

There was the Jewish bakers,

the Jewish butchers,

the Jewish grocers, everything.

People lived in the area, they worked in the area

and there were a myriad of synagogues.

You could call it the Glasgow shtetl.

Couldn't recommend a good barber, could you?

LAUGHTER

Erm...

Mine's gone out of business.

I'm Ephraim Borowski.

I'm the director of the Scottish Council of Jewish Communities.

I'm an interesting hybrid.

My mother's family arrived in Scotland at the beginning

of the 20th century as refugees from Russia.

And my father was a Holocaust survivor who arrived

just before the war, which probably saved his life because six

of his siblings did not survive.

And then there's a third wave between 2-3,000 people

who escaped from the Nazis and found sanctuary in Scotland.

While a lot of people are flowing through,

A lot of people were sticking.

I don't know if anybody would consider me Scottish...

..but I consider myself, yes.

Well, I used to speak five languages.

That's Hungarian, followed by Russian,

followed by German, followed by English,

followed by Hebrew.

But...I forgot my Russian now.

If you don't use it, you lose it.

I was born Jewish.

My grandmother, who brought me up, was an Orthodox Jew.

She was a lovely, lovely person and I loved her very much.

Then I lived with my aunt,

but I was the black sheep in the family.

I wanted to learn things.

I loved education.

I loved school.

They were not interested in all those things,

so I went to live on a kibbutz.

As a child, my granny made all my decisions for me.

As a young adult, my aunt made all the decisions for me.

The kibbutz then made all the decisions for me

and I said, "When am I going to make my own life?"

So I left the kibbutz and I came to Scotland.

Inverness was, in the '70s, much smaller than it is today.

It has changed now, but I grew old here and I got used to it.

I suppose people got used to me.

Well, you wanted to see pictures.

My granny kept them.

That's the only reason I have them.

SHE CHUCKLES

That's me.

That's a small child.

Had very long hair.

Two huge plaits.

And that was my mother and my father on their wedding day

in 1930-something.

I don't even know the date.

My father was probably an accountant.

I don't know for sure.

I think that my mother was a housewife.

I never knew my parents.

My father was taken into slave labour when I was a baby.

My mother, my brother and my sister were all killed in Auschwitz.

My father never came back.

Nobody knows where he died, when he died or how he died

and nobody will ever know.

That's my brother and me.

The only reason I know his age when he died was because there is

a date on the back of the picture.

I've got the pictures of my brother, not of my sister.

She never had a picture.

My father didn't even know he had another daughter.

I was stolen out of the Munkacs ghetto as a toddler

and was brought up by my maternal grandmother and my aunt.

They realised there is something wrong. Very, very wrong.

They paid somebody, a Christian man, and he went to try to get us out

from the ghetto.

The idea was to get my brother out.

He was nine years old by that time.

I was saved by mistake because my brother was ill at the time,

so he couldn't go, so he took me out instead.

And then he went back a week or ten days later to get him out.

By that time, there was nobody left.

Have you ever heard about... the idea of survivor's guilt?

I survived...

..but I shouldn't have survived.

It should have been my brother who should...

..should have survived.

I don't think I can ever forgive myself...

..for being the one who survived.

It's not that... I don't think about it every day.

It's not my fault.

I realise it's not my fault.

Nothing is my fault.

But...

..my brother should have survived, not me.

I'm just not a religious person by nature,

but there is a prayer that I say six times a year.

It's called Yizkor, which means "remember",

and it's to remember not just my parents, but to all the Jews

who were killed over the history.

If anybody made me Jewish,

it was Hitler that made me sure that I remain Jewish forever.

Oh, gosh. Look at that.

That is the best.

This is challah.

SHE SPEAKS HEBREW

Challah's become a special bread for Shabbat, to remember the manner

that we had when the Jewish people were wandering in the desert

and on a Friday it would be a double portion because they wouldn't be

able to go out on the Sabbath to collect it,

so to remember that, we have two challahs at every meal.

It is like a special woman's mitzvah,

a special, like, woman's commandment,

so I guess the women in the house... Do it together.

..do it together, yeah.

Is it always women that do the baking?

Is that... Are men allowed to?

No, there's plenty men who do it.

There's men... men in the community who do it.

The men in our house don't do so much baking, erm...

..but they do quality control, so...

For normal Shabbat, we do either a four plait or a six plait.

It is quite time-consuming,

so when my older children were little,

I didn't do it for many years.

Now you see them all grown up, it's fabulous.

And then they come home and become children again!

LAUGHTER

PHONE CHIMES

Oh... Speaking of which! That's her. That'll be her, from Israel.

Hello. I haven't spoken to you since Monday, I just realised.

"I didn't speak to you since Monday!"

LAUGHTER

They call, like, at least three times every day.

One sister, I think, one time, called eight times in one day

and she was like, "Oh, I made a new record."

I will speak to you later. Bye, Mum. Bye!

So that was daughter number three in Israel.

Shabbat is a special day when everybody goes to the synagogue.

On Shabbat, you really stop everything.

No electricity, erm... and so that includes no phones.

And so, for 25 hours, even in the 21st century,

you're not checking your emails

or doing this or doing that or even cooking.

Like, you're just...just being. Just being.

It's four o'clock now and Shabbat starts in just about two hours.

So, because we don't cook on Shabbat and we don't turn electricity

on and off, we need a way to keep food warm,

so we have this lovely hotplate and all we have to do on Shabbat

is remember to put the food on it a couple of hours

before we want to eat.

So it will be on until ten o'clock tonight.

And we have a massive urn so that we can have a hot drink

without heating up the water

because even heating up the water counts as cooking.

The Sabbath, Shabbat, has rules about things that you should do

and rules about things that you should not do,

and that's intended to help you have a day of rest.

And we rest.

We rest really, really hard, I would say.

At sunset or just before sunset,

we will light the Shabbat candles and that is the moment

when Shabbat starts.

I tend to light them and then say...

SHE SIGHS

.."we made it."

To be perfectly honest, I will say that when we say goodbye

to Shabbat on a Saturday night, the first thing that happens

afterwards is that everybody runs for their phone -

and I have to include myself in this -

and, at the moment, we have to...

..we have to maintain our Wordle streaks.

When we moved here, we moved to a place that didn't

have any Jewish infrastructure.

There were no other Jewish families, to our knowledge.

Yeah, the closest synagogue was in Dundee. It sadly closed.

When we realised we were here for the long term,

we very consciously started having Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur

services here for the students.

We lived in Jerusalem, we lived in New York City.

I miss having a Shabbat community.

I missed having a synagogue.

I miss the learning opportunities that my kids have not had.

Our kids won't to have a community in the way that we envisioned

and would have wanted ideally for them.

And, unfortunately, to feel really comfortable in a Jewish community,

it really helps to have practical skills,

like some level of comfort with Hebrew language,

knowing your way around a prayer book,

knowing the festivals enough that you don't feel intimidated

around certain practices.

And it's much harder to give our kids that on our own.

And so I fear that they will someday move to a place with more community,

and although they have felt really Jewish their whole lives,

somehow they won't feel welcome or they won't feel like they know

enough, or they won't feel like they're similar enough to other people.

They won't feel at home. They won't feel at home. Yeah.

It's a big gamble and we won't know how that pays off.

This is our heritage and our tradition.

And it's important to us and important to pass on. Yeah.

And we hope that they also want to carry it on in some way.

The Jewish experience in Scotland has changed so much in my lifetime.

I mean, when I was growing up in the '50s,

there must have been around 15,000 or so Jewish people in Glasgow

and maybe 20 plus or whatever across Scotland.

I mean, now we argue is there are four or five or 6,000 Jewish

people in Scotland.

My name is David Simons and I'm a novelist.

We're standing outside the old Queen's Park Synagogue.

This is where I had my Bar Mitzvah, it's where my parents were married.

And, and it's now been turned into a block of flats.

This was a very bustling and vibrant community,

not just during the week, but especially the high holidays

of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

There weren't enough seats, I mean, and it is a big synagogue.

And so we always remember that we used to have to lay out rows

of folding chairs to accommodate the overspill.

And it's hard to believe now that that is no longer the case.

I was brought up in in Pollokshields.

My maternal grandfather was one of the founders

of Langside Synagogue, which sadly is now just a shell of a building.

I mean, the irony is if you took your religion seriously,

then probably Glasgow wasn't,

it wasn't Jewish enough or religious enough to, to be an Orthodox Jew.

And so you would move to Manchester, you would move to Leeds

or you'd move to, you know, more than likely to London.

Then there's a lot of intermarriage which dissipated the community.

Many of the children grew up,

they went to London, they went to Israel.

And the parents, you know, once their own houses got empty,

they followed and they went to live near their children.

Orthodox people will want to have a synagogue within walking

distance because they don't drive or travel on Shabbat.

And, therefore, it's inevitable that as people move,

the synagogue that's no longer within walking distance

gets left behind.

It's like a brick wall.

You take a little brick out of the wall,

the whole wall threatens to crumble.

And that does affect the community.

When a shul closes here a shul closes there,

it just leaves a mark,

it leaves a feeling the community is shrinking.

I mean, there may still be a significant number of Jewish

people, but their lives don't centre around the synagogue any more.

RADIO: Monday morning. Good morning, Scotland.

And our thought for the day comes from Rabbi Pete Tobias

of the Glasgow Reform Synagogue.

Good morning, Gary. Can this really be happening?

Are we really on the verge of another war in Europe?

The war to end all wars ended just over 100 years ago,

and yet was followed by another just two decades later.

And once again, it would seem...

My name is Rabbi Pete Tobias.

When I first got here, people only joined the synagogue

because they were not allowed to join an Orthodox synagogue

because of Judaism's fairly strict rules about Jewish status.

I'm not sure how much that's changed, but in a traditional Jewish

world, if your mother ain't Jewish, then you ain't.

The reform movement takes a slightly less rigid view.

Shabbat shalom to you, Zoomers, and Shabbat shalom

to those of you who are here this morning.

When Reformed synagogues were first established over 200 years ago

in Germany, initially they were based on the idea that it's meant

to be far more inclusive.

In a reformed synagogue, men and women sit together

as an acceptance that some, if not all,

of what's in the Torah was written by human beings.

HE SINGS IN HEBREW

Everybody has a kind of a different point where they draw a line

where they decide, "Yes, I'll do that on the Sabbath,

"even though I know I'm not supposed to".

Reform Judaism encourages people to make their own decisions on these matters.

"And no fire shall be lit in any of your settlements

"on the Sabbath day."

So once the rabbis got their hands on, it led to a whole series

of interpretations of Sabbath ovens,

and not switching this on and not heating that up,

suddenly became a big part of the observance of Shabbat.

Judaism has always adapted. Always.

I mean, if Moses turned up in Glasgow tomorrow and he went

to an Orthodox siddur, he wouldn't recognise any of it.

PRAYING IN HEBREW IN DISTANCE

UNTRANSLATED

Now, in Orthodox tradition,

three times a day we have our services.

So we have morning, afternoon and evening.

In order to be able to do the service properly,

you have to have ten men.

We work hard to make sure we get that and sometimes

we have a have to send out a WhatsApp.

"We need an extra man, extra two men."

Why do we have ten?

So, ten, the number ten signifies community...

..and the Orthodox tradition is a tradition of followers that we say

that what was taught in the Torah was taught to us from Mt Sinai.

And whatever was taught, don't change.

In an Orthodox world,

by and large, women can only be spectators.

That is changing.

There is a very large Orthodox feminist movement that is engaging

with Torah learning.

I was born into an Orthodox Jewish family,

so I really don't have much choice. I'm a Jewish person.

I just could not reconcile this question in

the Orthodox tradition that women play no part in the service.

And it seemed to me terribly, you know, sort of sexist

and I didn't, I didn't like that.

THEY CHANT IN HEBREW

Part of the idea of why we have the men

sort of in one area and the women in another area

is so that, is not... It's just to keep distraction to a limit, right?

You know, so it's not about one gender being, you know,

lesser than another gender.

I believe in equality.

And yet every time I go into an Orthodox prayer service,

I have to kind of put that aside in order to participate.

We come from a background that says men and women can participate

equally in leading a service...

..in reading the Torah.

BOY CHANTS IN HEBREW

You know, I think the pride I have in my son standing

there and reading the Torah is that he can do it.

Now, I don't know if he wants to go into the rabbinic,

so I don't know if that's his... Maybe he's more into music.

Might want to become a rock star. I don't know, maybe.

CONTINUES CHANTING

My dad makes me do it, actually.

But no, it's fun.

It's good. It's a good skill to have.

And it gives you a sense of, of reward,

being part of a community more.

Being on the egalitarian part of the Jewish spectrum,

for me, means being able to contribute to my community.

My name is Ash. I live in Dundee.

I'm a voice actor and an illustrator.

I wasn't born into a Jewish family.

I wasn't raised Jewish.

I'm in the process of converting to Judaism.

A few years ago, I started reaching out to synagogues in Scotland

that I thought I might want to visit.

I eventually found the Sukkat Shalom community in Edinburgh.

I noticed that there were a bunch of people with pride flags,

like badges on and things, so I was like,

"Ah, right, this is a place where other queer people feel safe".

And that was really, really important to me

as a queer-trans person.

SINGING IN HEBREW

CONTINUES SINGING

I mean, I've been in transition since 2013.

It has been a bit like a second adolescence.

I've been kind of joking about having a Bar Mitzvah at some

point because I never, you know, got that,

not, not being brought up Jewish and

not knowing I was a boy at the time.

For me, community and belonging is really, really important

cos I didn't always have that.

I grew up in a place where being different was not OK,

like any kind of different.

So for a queer neurodivergent kid, it was not a healthy place for me.

So once I was in my 30s, I, and kind of living independently,

I sort of realised that that had been holding me back my whole

life and I didn't really know who I was.

We're at Tentsmuir Beach.

It's a place that I've always associated

with peacefulness and reflection.

I don't know any other Jewish people in Dundee, so I had to do a lot

of things to do with festivals or to do with ritual observance on my own.

So I like to come here quite a lot now.

It can be so hard to measure Jewishness.

My perception of it certainly is

it's kind of a sort of three-pillar system where there's,

there's the ethnicity component, there's the cultural component

and the religious component, and you can have any one of them

and be Jewish.

You don't need to have all of them, but you do need at least one.

I feel very at peace when I'm with these people.

So it's really, um...

SNIFFLES

Sorry.

I already feel like I'm part of it.

I felt like I was part of it from the first day I went.

So for me, this is just kind of making it official.

My name is Elisa. I grew up in Aberdeen.

I live in Edinburgh and I'm a marketing executive.

May I please have two flat lights?

Course you can. Thank you.

I roast it all myself.

Hellishly strong and devilishly good.

We'll see about that.

Judaism in Scotland is a topic that is, by and large, completely

untouched by Scottish education.

I was the only Jewish person in my primary school.

I was the only Jewish person in my secondary school.

Which meant that when you know little about something, you stick

to the stereotypes, because that's all you tend to know.

And unfortunately, those were strong anti-Semitic tropes.

In primary school, it manifested mostly in physical bullying.

I wouldn't say that the kids knew exactly what they were talking

about, but just regurgitating things maybe their parents have said

or something they've read online.

You know, "Hitler should have finished the job",

which was, like, as a 13-year-old,

quite nasty to hear and quite scary.

That being said, being Jewish in Scotland,

actually I'm met more with curiosity now,

rather than immediate up-front anger or violence.

Up until the 1500s, coffee was known as the Devil's Drink.

Oh, no kidding?

My God, every day's a school day.

Thank you.

My parents, whilst ethnically Jewish, aren't practising Jews.

So as a child, I remember researching how religious women

would wrap their hair in scarves, much to the horror of my mother.

But I always felt this strong connection.

So I'm beginning to delve further and further into Judaism.

While I was at university, being surrounded by Jews my age

was a complete revelation for me.

So I choose to practise in a reform way.

I go on my phone on a Friday and Saturday.

I dress in jeans during the day.

Some women feel comfortable covering their hair,

and that's their choice.

But I don't think I will ever reach the point of doing that myself.

However, I guess it depends on who I marry.

If they feel particularly strongly about, I would consider it.

I think there is a great deal to learn from Ultra-Orthodox Jews,

which is why I do go to Chabad,

which is an Ultra-Orthodox synagogue.

I think it is counterintuitive that, as a young person,

I am drawn to that kind of orthodoxy.

DIRECTOR: Arranged marriage.

Is that something you would contemplate?

Oh, yes.

But I feel like in this day and age, it's...

..difficult to try and explain and to justify why

you're considering it to, to non-Jewish people.

But, yeah, a husband would be nice.

Cut that out.

Don't leave that in.

SHE LAUGHS

LAUGHTER DROWNS OUT DIRECTOR

"Jacob Stein raised his arms to his side as if to weigh the worth

"of what he was to say next.

"'Justice and fair play.

"'Never forget that, Avram.

"'We Jews have been treated well here.

"'In other countries, we were persecuted for our religion.

"'In other countries,

"'to be a Jew is to carry a death sentence over your head.

"'And do you know why Scotland is such a fine place for us?'

"'No, sir.'

"'There is so much hatred between the Protestants and the Catholics,

"'and when they are not hating each other,

"'they combine to hate the English.

"'Ha, what a wonderful city Glasgow is.

"'No-one has any hatred left over for us Jews.'"

All writers are writing about themselves.

And I think for me, when I look back now, writing the Credit Draper,

was the opportunity to write about my Scottish-Jewish identity.

But what was interesting for me was that I expected

there to be all kinds of conflict when this sort of, you know,

these Jews would turn up in these villages and Scotland and so on.

But I actually found that there was a lot in common between Scottish

and Jewish cultures.

The violin music, there would be the schnapps, the bran...

You know, the little the whiskies and the brandies.

There would be social values, I think, you know,

respect for education and social justice, which I think are both part

of the Jewish and Scottish culture.

Growing up, for me, there was quite a divide between my Jewish life

and my non-Jewish life.

We used to come as a family to the synagogue here,

Queen's Park Synagogue.

And I think that walk sums it up for me.

Here we were sort of all dressed up with,

with these prayer shawl bags,

with a star of David on it, kind of quite conspicuous walking,

not walk of shame, but certainly a walk of shyness or embarrassment.

I went to a cheder, the, you know, Jewish school, after school,

three weekdays and on the Sunday.

You know, learned Hebrew and studied the, you know, the Talmud.

And I don't think my non-Jewish friends really had any idea

what was going on with us after school.

And we had our separate assemblies.

The Jewish kids were, were siphoned off.

And of course, we had different holidays as well

when we would be off and it would be very conspicuous

that we were different.

Yeah, there's a definite feeling of being alien.

Anti-Semitism is a form of racism directed against Jewish people,

stereotyping Jews as having particular traits.

There's a long history of conspiracy theories about Jewish control

of the media or the banks, as well as religious persecution, I suppose.

I grew up in Hungary where being Jewish was a problem.

As a small child, I remember myself actually lying about it when people

asked me because I was afraid.

I've been frightened about being Jewish all my life,

so it didn't just change all of a sudden.

Because people feel vulnerable, they are less inclined to display

open signs of Jewishness.

My friend, who lived across the road, was not Jewish

and she was a member of the local tennis club and I wanted to join

and they would not let a Jewish child join.

If you went through the Gorbals or places, you would see signs,

you know, "No blacks, no Jews, no dogs".

That's what it was.

We have moved on a lot.

In more recent times, it's much more focused on anti-Israeli

sentiment and the way that the Israeli government behaves

towards the Palestinians.

There are political problems concerning Israel,

and I have the same problems concerning Israel.

But because I'm Jewish, the problems become my problems.

Och, that's lovely.

I'm looking at a film that was made of my mum and dad's wedding.

They got married and Pollokshields Synagogue

on the 22nd of March, 1949.

Four coats.

It's March the 22nd, they've all on their fur jackets.

LAUGHS

Och, there's my dad and grandma and grandpa.

Och, that's lovely.

Oh, that is fantastic.

It's my mum under the chuppah, so a very traditional Jewish wedding.

But then there was also a big working-class population

and the weddings would not have been quite like that,

not in Pollokshields Synagogue.

They would have been in one of the shuls in the Gorbals at this time.

Look at this line of cars.

Absolutely fantastic.

Ay, ay, ay!

Ay, ay, ay!

LAUGHS

That's a very good question.

What kind of a Jew am I?

It's my being, isn't it,

even though I'm not an actively religious, observant person?

I still don't like the negative bits about it.

And there are lots of negative bits about Jewish religious life

and, and so on.

I'm the youngest of three and we were absolutely brought up

in a Jewish-Orthodox, Jewish environment.

When I got to university,

equal rights for women, equal pay for women.

Women's right to choose was a very important campaign for me.

I was quite aware that that did not sit comfortably

with Orthodox Judaism.

It's like, in a way, I decided to give up eating meat

and the last thing I gave up was my mother's chicken soup.

It was quite a thing to go home and say,

"I'm not going to eat your chicken soup".

So you're kind of living a parallel life in a way.

But I do like tradition.

My mum and my dad.

I tend to come before Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement,

and just pay my respects, talk to them,

bring them up to date with the news.

SHE LAUGHS

The question of the Jewish way of death.

The tradition is, in the Orthodox, is that it's burial

and it should happen as quick as possible.

I mean, when my mother passed away, she died in the morning.

We buried her in the afternoon, which might seem shocking.

After somebody has died,

there's a period of a week where, of shiva,

where you're in deep mourning,

and you will remember the person who's gone and stories

and people will come and give their condolences and so on.

And it's an incredibly nurturing and supportive kind of period.

When it comes to the bit,

I'm, I'm a member of the Burial Society.

I want to be buried in that graveyard.

It's not the most pretty one in the world, but that's the one.

Yes, I pay my dues so I'm going to end up here.

SHE LAUGHS

We joke about all the characters.

I mean, I obviously don't know,

there are so many people buried here.

So I kind of have this vision of this underlife

that's going on, or upperlife,

but I think of an underlife that's going on.

But how does one make sense of, of death?

It's part of what happens in life.

And... But it's not, it's not easy.

I am here today to go to the mikvah,

the next stage in my conversion process.

I always sort of gravitate towards the really colourful ones.

I'm really excited.

This has been a two-and-a-bit-year process of kind of actively working

towards this moment.

You can do this in a kind of have natural free-flowing body of water.

But in Scotland that's not ideal.

I thought about going to Tentsmuir for it and I think if I'd been doing

this in July, that might have swung it.

But in March, no.

I think I joked once about it being putting a Jewish coating on me.

Symbolically, that's kind of what it's about,

is because the water has to touch every part of you.

I mean, I think I see a lot of parallels between my Jewish

journey and my trans journey.

They are both kind of transitions that have taken a lot of time,

but have also been essentially just confirming

what has always been there.

Mazel tov. Mazel tov.

Thank you so much.

Why am I extra happy today?

Why am I extra happy?

Oh, it's...

I forgot...

THEY SING

Do I consider myself Jewish and Scottish?

Yeah.

That is the Jewish story of being everywhere and anywhere.

There's no conflict... Exactly, yeah.

..being Scottish and Jewish, that's absolutely fine.

The beauty of being Jewish is that you could be Jewish anywhere.

Growing up, I lived in a tenement in Pollokshields and we were only

half a block away from a kosher grocer.

There were Hebrew classes after school in the local state school.

So in that sense, we felt at home.

You know, I think Scotland is pretty welcoming.

We were exactly the same.

Don't forget that. We were asylum seekers and economic migrants.

That's who we were.

Being Jewish means being part of a conversation

that goes on over centuries.

This is a tradition that is 3,000 years old and we carry with us

all of that evolution.

Well, hopefully, while there's a community in Glasgow,

there will always be a kosher deli.

No two ladies buy the same chicken stock for making their chicken soup,

and they'll make the best chicken soup as well.

There is a very particular kind of Jewish humour,

finding things to laugh about when things are really dark.

And I can very much see why that's a really important part

of the Jewish character.

I'm immensely glad that my family washed up into Glasgow

and allowed us to have peaceful lives.

I was a happy child and I'm a happy adult

and I'm a happy old person.

I'm very lucky.

I'm slowly learning about where my boundaries are with the religion,

but I bake really good bread,

so maybe that will be my redeeming factor.

SHE LAUGHS

INDISTINCT

My sisters always come here and when they eat the challah

that my mum makes, they just give, like, the sigh of, like,

ah, it's like it's home.

It tastes like home, it tastes like our home.

MAN SINGS IN HEBREW