JCC London

Other people’s money

The longest curtains I have ever seen drew in at 20 metres. Fitting drapes, I suppose, in a three thousand-room monolith, 12 storeys up and 5 down (or was it 12 down too – they never fully explained where the dungeons were), covering a mouth-watering 3.25 million square feet. All for a megalomaniac, who destroyed the homes of 40,000 people, plus the odd church and hospital, to house himself, his wife and a few retainers.

The only sad part of the story is that the poor chap died before he could move in – put out of his misery by firing squad on Christmas Day after 20 happy years of misrule. His building was called the People’s Palace.  But until he died, the very last to get inside were the hapless, long-suffering people. 

Amazing that Ceausescu got away with it for so long, duping his countrymen, taking their money, pursuing incredible schemes, ensuring it would all end badly.

I was in Bucharest as part of a conference to debate what it means to be a JCC.  We hoped to tease out the essence of ‘JCC-ness’. We explored the power of community, the importance of shared values, tikkun olam, and daily struggles to make Jewishness live in a non-religious way. We admired the pride of those who are managing to bring something Jewish back to places from which it had almost completely disappeared.

Delegates from 27 countries showed extraordinary commitment and dedication, energy and dynamism.  The object was dialogue and learning, breaking down barriers, seeing ‘community’ interpreted in many different ways.

From France, for example, where JCCs are serious, traditional, and strongly cultural, places, often struggling to attract the young, we were introduced to Moadon. Here, the kids have taken over the asylum (as it were), designing programmes, managing the centre, taking the key decisions – and in doing so, drawing in friends, parents and grandparents too. 

From Hungary, by contrast, where to be Jewish still means hesitancy and keeping your ethnicity to yourself, we heard about Siraly (the seagull), the Jewish equivalent of a squat: a derelict empty building turned into a hip and happening venue, open to all.  Fashionable scruffy said one visitor, Jewish in thought but not dogmatic, cool; a bar, a café, a comedy club, a place of heated debate, a bookstore, a venue for music. 

Meanwhile, in Bucharest, outside the just opened, warmly lit and welcoming JCC, was the teeming city.  No yellow lines, no bicycles, no parking tickets.  Music over loudspeakers in the streets, muddy pavements, stray dogs, dank courts, peeling stucco on grand houses divided into tenements, cigarettes and tobacco smoke everywhere.  Our hotel, brand new, rising eerily out of a post-apocalyptic landscape – think Repo Man crossed with Metropolis – sat desolately in the no man’s land between the crumbling old streets and the unfeasibly wide, traffic-filled, agoraphobia-inducing boulevards, lined with the brutalist apartment blocks of the maniac dictator.

The latter part of the conference was overshadowed by news from the US.  Delegates frantically checked blackberries to read about yet more key funders who were casualties of Madoff.  Many charities are already suffering; the impact on the JCCs of Eastern Europe funded by US agencies will be severe. 

Amazing that Madoff got away with it for so long, duping his countrymen, taking their money, pursuing incredible schemes, ensuring it would all end badly.

My kind of shopping

It is gratifying to see that Chanukah is keeping up with Christmas: coming earlier every year (no matter when it falls), bringing the opportunity to consume, to spend, to party.

The JCC had its Chanukah bash, 8 Nights, at Bush Hall on the very cusp of December. The magnificent Yiddish Twist Orchestra, newly minted, led us through an evening of rumba and twist in the dusky nightclub atmosphere of the blitz and the heady green shoots of post-war optimism.  What I liked most was bumping into my friend Hugh (only just on the right side of 50) who had brought his mum along!

And this last weekend, the festival month’s opener, I enjoyed my first serious foray into shopping heaven, its bright lights apparently undimmed by the credit crunch.

It was a curious juxtaposition of contrasts.  It began with an unplanned drop-in to a ‘Winterval Fayre’, in aid of Marie Curie.  It’s a fine cause – but sadly, in this case, rather more interesting than the merchandise!  We looked hard for opportunities to consume, but had to content ourselves with a modest contribution. 

So on, in contrast, to that mecca of mammon, Selfridges. No sense of recession that day: the hordes pushed and jostled; we swam, we waded, we struggled, we bobbed along in the flow and the rush of the mass filling the store’s ground floor.  We were assaulted with squirts of perfume, tempted with trays containing fragments of falafel and crumbs of cheese, bawled out with announcements, dazzled by the lasers and gleaming mirrors…  We wanted to fix some shoes – I agree, an odd venue to choose that day, but don’t ask!  Failing, we bought laces instead and headed northwards as quickly as we could.

The antidote was a gentle meander through our synagogue’s annual Chanukah Bazaar, this year reincarnated as a ‘Fest’.

What it lacked in heartstring-tugging, what it lacked in sophistication and chic, it made up for in spade-loads of real warmth, and the comfort and ease that always comes from stepping back into the community.  Friends, friendly faces – plus the same grumpy ones on those who’ve seen you every week or month for the last 10 years but still insist they don’t recognise you…

And of course, the bookstall.  Many of the books were there last year, and the year before that, but each time, they’re just a little more interesting. I buy too many. Passing over ‘Guess who’s Jewish?’, a workmanlike set of Churchill’s ‘History of the Second World War’, and the complete works of Somerset Maugham, I light upon Joseph Roth’s Reports from Berlin, eagerly seize Festivals of the Jewish Year, a Modern Interpretation and Guide (circa 1952), and pounce on Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated.  Finally, with quiet pleasure, I fall for Selfridges, the Story of the Store, 1909-1984 by Gordon Honeycombe.

How satisfying is a bookstall in a Chanukah bazaar.  And at a pound a book, what’s not to like?!