Hasmo Legends XIV: Conversations with Osher

[Followed by Osher: The Postscript (featuring melchett mike‘s Osher Poll)]

A couple of hours after posting Hasmo Legends XIII: A Legend (Osher) Strikes Back, I received a phone call from a fellow ex-Hasmo Tel Avivi (single, no dogs) who couldn’t believe the coup of having Osher Baddiel on melchett mike:

“If you could have chosen anyone,” Jonny said excitedly, “Osher would have been in the top five . . . perhaps even the top one!”

And over two hundred comments in three weeks is testament to the fact that – agree with his views or disagree, and whether you liked him at Hasmo or not – Osher Baddiel is almost the definition of a legend: “a person about whom unauthenticated tales are told” (The Concise Oxford Dictionary).

Much of my initial, 45-minute telephone conversation with – or, more accurately (for the first twenty minutes or so), lecture from – Osher (see Hasmo Legends XIII: The Background below the main post) centered on the right to exist. Not of Israel. But of Hasmo Legends. According to Osher (I hope Mr. Baddiel will forgive the impertinence . . . it is how we all knew him), the series is a necessary evil which encourages only mischief and is causing only hurt: “A fat lot of kiddush Hashem it is doing.” And he repeatedly urged me to remove all posts and comments at once: “Close it. Kill it. Bye-bye.” (But Osher’s unambiguous views on the subject are there for all to read, and rehashing them here serves no useful purpose.)

When (during the initial barrage) I managed to get a word in edgeways, I informed Osher that my motives for penning Hasmo Legends were anything but malicious – I had a lot of warm and amusing memories of Hasmonean, and had been amazed to find little or nothing written about the institution on the Web. I told him that if he would actually read my posts (and turn a blind eye to the odd indiscretion), he might even find them amusing and of merit. In spite of having an Internet connection, however, Osher seemed intent not to be seen to be condoning the series, the blog, or their author (though he did eventually concede that I was “not a bad fellow”, but had just “made a very silly mistake”).

It is Osher’s disapproval of Hasmo Legends, and of melchett mike, which makes the fact of his posting all the more startling, according both a certain degree of ‘official’ approval which they did not previously have. Of course, I had no intention of telling him that. And his express precondition for posting, that I refrain from editing his words, was entirely superfluous. I had no intention! Whilst chosen to damn me – and my fellow “overgrown babies” – those words merely incriminated their author and, in many ways, Hasmo’s former religious ‘elite’. Indeed, they are a far better record of the ethos of Hasmonean Grammar School for Boys than our cumulative testimonies. And, every time I read them, I am taken back to the pottiness of those musty, dilapidated classrooms.

However surprising the fact of his posting, it confirms Osher’s status as Hasmo’s primary maverick. Excluding the posts of Tony Pearce – who only had a cameo (however unique) in the carry-on that was Hasmonean – and a brief comment from Clive Fierstone, no other Hasmo Legend has had the courage or imagination to rear his head. We hardly expected DJ or Jerry Gerber to speak out, but one of the renegade English department, for example, could quite easily have done so without jeopardising a Golders Green shtiebl membership (in spite of his son being a regular contributor to melchett mike, unearthing information on Nazi war criminals has proved a simpler task than obtaining anything whatsoever on Jeff Soester).

I tried telling Osher that comments to Hasmo Legends indicate that the Hasmonean experiences of many ex-pupils (certainly many more than I would have imagined) were far from idyllic (and again, far further than I would have believed). Osher dismissed out of hand, however, the “online therapy” justification for the series.

When I brought up the issue of corporal punishment, Osher responded that “there was very little malice” at Hasmonean, that “those things were done in those days”, and that “sometimes a kid gets what’s coming to him”. Indeed, much of the violence in today’s society, Osher believes, stems from children no longer being physically disciplined at school: “Children don’t know what physical hurt means, so they do it to others when they leave.” And “the Torah,” Osher argues, “doesn’t say it is wrong to hit a child”.

I was longing, however, to get to the two matters of most interest to me: Osher’s attitudes towards Israel/Zionism, and to his celebrity rent-a-Jew cousin David Baddiel (who, on telly, always seemed oddly willing to play the role of a Jewish Uncle Tom).

I started by quizzing Osher about the truth of a comment to melchett mike, that he had asked a pupil who attended school on Yom Ha’Atzmaut in a blue and white striped shirt why he was “wearing an Auschwitz uniform”. “Not me,” replied Osher, “I would never have said that.” What Osher did, however, volunteer was his recollection – following a talk with Sixth Formers on some aspect of (what he considered to be) “chilul shabbes in Eretz Yisroel” – of the scrawling on a classroom wall: “Osher, Hitler would have loved you!”

Osher’s views on Israel – to a Sheinkin dweller at least – do seem rather extreme: “If you don’t keep Torah mitzvos, you have no right to it.” Osher further decries the arrogance of chiloni Israelis, who “think they can defend themselves without Avinu She’bashomayim.” And he is certain that Israel only continues to exist because of God’s help, much of which has been “undeserved” and given “on credit”.

Far from being totally detached from the State, however, Osher’s mother and son live here, and he certainly has a finger on Israel’s pulse, commenting on the evils of certain “parades” (he didn’t need to specify which) and that so-called human rights groups, B’tselem and Shalom Achshav, are “terrible enemies of the Jewish people”.

When I asked Osher whether he had any sympathy for Neturei Karta and the individuals who met with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Tehran, he replied that he was “dead against them” and that they were so out of touch that “even the Arabs don’t use them for propaganda”.

In spite of having it on my to ask list, I decided not to bring up Osher’s alleged ‘assault’ on Norman Kahler, as witnessed by various commenters to melchett mike. If I can be forgiven for the Khaled Mashaal impression, it sounded very much like Norman – with his endless “Zionist provocations” – had it coming to him!

I did, however, ask Osher whether he had really washed boys’ mouths out with soap. No denials there: “It was no more treif than what had come out of them. And they never swore again.” In front of him, at any rate.

Osher's cuz, Dave

My curiosity as to Osher’s relationship with his author/TV presenter (he is no more a comedian than Osher) relative, David Baddiel (right), stems from my recollection of the latter – in a desperate, failed attempt to draw Osher into a 2004 episode of the BBC genealogy series Who Do You Think You Are? – making some cringeworthy reference to his ultra-Orthodox cousin whilst standing outside a Golders Green bagel bakery. Osher recalled how the documentary’s producer had spent two and a half hours in his Stamford Hill home, over tea, trying to persuade him to participate. Even the very little Osher knew about David – including the “goyishe girlfriend” – was sufficient to persuade him that it could only come to no good. And David’s boasting of his partiality for seafood confirmed to Osher that he had made the correct decision. As he put it, in true Osher style: “Even goyim don’t eat oysters!” Anyhow, it seems that a wider Baddiel family Rosh Hashanah reunion may not be on the cards.

Towards the end of our first conversation, Osher enquired as to my marital status. On hearing of my singularity, he proceeded to impart similar advice to that which I receive daily from my dear mother. Following his “parades” reference, I was longing to reassure Osher – though why I don’t know – that I am not gay.  But I couldn’t quite summon up the courage or the appropriate wording (I mean, would I have gone for “gay”, “homosexual” . . . or something rather more “feigele”-like?)

Osher then enquired as to my level of religious observance. I gulped (even though I knew it was coming). “Are you sure you want me to tell you?” He did. And I told him. “Of course you believe in the Ribono Shel Olom,” Osher assured me, “you are just estranged from him. It is just that you have seen things in your life that you didn’t like.” (At the risk of reinforcing your views on modern Israel, Osher, what I forgot to tell you is that I was the first person in my company – of over nine hundred employees – to challenge the big boss and put a mezuzah on my office door. My deference to the Big Boss, even if born of superstition, perhaps means that I am not such an apikores after all.)

My “joker” for Osher was the thorny issue of charedi service – or, rather, the lack of it – in the IDF. But I might as well not have played it. “The Shulchan Oruch and the Rambam,” he assured me, allow for “Torah learners to be left alone.”

“Anyway,” said Osher, “frum Jews have never got a good press, because we’re outlandish and strange.”

I couldn’t argue with that. I had, however, enjoyed talking – or, rather, for the most part, listening– to Osher. And I must have asked him about five times whether I could have “just one more question”. In spite of Osher repeatedly saying that he “would like to keep up the contact” (I would too), I had the strong feeling that I had to make the most of this audience because he might not speak to me so freely again.

Defending his position on corporal punishment, Osher had commented: “Fashions change. Values don’t. Because they come from Hashem . . . and He doesn’t change.”

Pithy and brilliant.

What a shame, I thought, that this man – who most definitely has something to say (even if I might not always agree with it) – didn’t teach me at Hasmo, instead of the various muppets . . . who had nothing to.

[I took contemporaneous handwritten notes of my telephone conversations with Osher Baddiel with his express knowledge and consent, and on the clear understanding that I would be using them to accurately document them. I did not amend the above post in the light of the following.]

…..

Osher: The Postscript (featuring melchett mike‘s Osher Poll)

During my drive home from work, on Monday, I had two “missed calls” from a UK telephone number. I called back. It was Osher Baddiel. He asked me to remove his post from melchett mike. I listened to the reasons for his request – essentially, the nature of the comments it had engendered – whilst remaining purposely non-committal.

The following day, after receiving a message from Osher on my answer machine – seeking confirmation that I had removed the post as requested – I sent him the following by e-mail:

Dear Mr. Baddiel,

I just heard your voice message.

After spending the evening thinking it over, I have decided not to remove your post from the blog. You expressly agreed that I post it, and – with the greatest respect – I will not remove it because you don’t like the resulting discussion. I will, however, consider removing or editing specific comments.

I had already (i.e., before your telephone call of yesterday) written a further post about our conversations, which I told you I would and which I intend to post. If you would like me to send it to you first, I will be happy to and to take into consideration your response. Anyway, I think you will find it to be – in the main – flattering and positive.

As I have mentioned to you, many, many ex-Hasmos have found the Hasmo Legends series to be extremely beneficial, and not just mere entertainment.

I am not e-mailing because I wish to avoid talking to you, but because I fear it would end in an argument. And I don’t wish to get into that situation with you. Our world views are very different. I will talk about the law and rights. And you will talk about Torah.

Even though I didn’t really get to know you during my Hasmo days, I respect you and your forthrightness. And I would still like to meet you some day soon, even though I understand that I might now be jeopardizing that . . . or that I am likely, at the very least, to get a “putch” for my disobedience!

Yours respectfully,

Mike

I addressed Osher’s reply of that same afternoon, written between paragraphs of the above, on a similarly piecemeal basis (my explanations of the context, where necessary, in square brackets):

• I listened carefully [to your request] and very intentionally did not make any “promises” of the kind [that I would remove the post].
• You are of course “entitled to ask for it back”, but – in terms of the general law – I don’t believe that I am obliged to remove it. This is made even clearer by the terms and conditions of my blog (see https://melchettmike.wordpress.com/about-this-blog/).
• Your post has had 3,145 ‘hits’ to date. Since November of last year, my blog has had 128,378. These statistics hardly support your contention [that the post has “breathed life into” melchett mike and that I “wish to exploit” it “to engender more interest”] (though you are of course free to think as you please).
• I have no desire to get into a personal war of words, but your post makes it abundantly clear that you are not afraid of hurting people’s “feelings”. [re Osher, once again, accusing contributors to melchett mike of this]
• The e-mail at the bottom of this page [seeking, and obtaining, your confirmation I could post the draft] makes it quite clear that there were no such “false pretences” involved. [re Osher’s claim that his post was obtained under such]

Just as you have no wish do get into a public “scrum”, I have no wish to get into a private one. You sent me a post. I posted it. I do not believe that I am under any obligation, moral, legal, or otherwise (we are not at school anymore), to unpost it.

If you wish to appeal via the blog, feel free to do so. They are not all “foulmouthed cretins”.

Still respectfully,

Mike

It may sound a little harsh, but the bottom line is this . . . melchett mike is a blog (see the link above). It is not the Hasmonean School Magazine Online. If it were, none of you would be reading it. I am an ex-journalist, and (believe it or not) take my blog reasonably seriously. And, whilst it didn’t “make” melchett mike as Osher seems to think, receiving a post from him was (as I wrote in the first paragraph above) a “coup” for Hasmo Legends. Why would I remove it?

Early on that Tuesday evening, Osher sent me his pièce de résistance (of seven hundred words no less), to which, yesterday morning, I replied as follows:

Dear Mr. Baddiel,

In spite of the deeply insensitive things that you wrote about me in your post to the blog, I went out of my way to refrain from attacking you personally. But you fail to accord me the same courtesy. How ironic that you write about “hurting people, deliberately, gratuitously” . . . and call me a “bully boy”!

You have now crossed the line, and I certainly no longer feel the need to accord you special treatment. I won’t, however, get drawn into an unseemly e-mail ‘war’.  But neither will I “tell [my] bloggers” anything. If you are as “not afraid of the truth” and “not scared of [my] bloggers” as you claim, you will have no objection to their seeing the e-mails you have sent me. I have nothing to hide . . . do you?

In some sense, as a result of all their comments, my Hasmo Legends series has become theirs too. And perhaps they are the ones to decide whether your post to the blog should rightfully be removed.

Mike

By prompt reply, Osher refused me permission to publish his e-mails, which I will respect (even though, from a strictly legal standpoint, I don’t believe that I require any such permission). Perhaps he considers them copyrightable works of art. In subtlety, however, they owe rather less to the school of Michelangelo than to that of Rabbi Angel (and the plank for our backsides that he christened “wacko”).

"Osher who?"

Indeed, after what he wrote in those e-mails, I have little respect left for Osher Baddiel. They were hateful, viciously abusing both me – though I am mischievously proud of my new “Rotter-in-Chief” title – and contributors to melchett mike. Osher was particularly scathing and unpleasant about my relationship with his seeming bêtes noires, Stuey (above right) and Dexxy. The great defender of former Hasmo teachers’ and Rebbes’ (suddenly) delicate sensibilities appears to have no problem assaulting those of their former pupils, too many of whom are singing from the same hymnsheet for his liking. (If Osher wishes to challenge any of this, I will gladly publish his e-mails . . . and let you be the judges.)

So, what do I take out of this whole Osher episode (apart, that is, from marvel at the man’s astonishing ability to psychically reproduce dogs)?

(Trite and banal, perhaps, but . . .) That religious extremism is bad, whatever the religion. No less than the fundamentalist imams around the corner from him, in Finsbury Park, Osher dexterously manipulates the Scriptures to suit his own arguments and ends. His post to melchett mike, e-mails, and even telephone utterances, clearly illustrate that Osher does not apply the laws of loshon hora (for example) as rigorously to himself as to others. And I have no doubt that Osher would have a most eloquent and persuasive justification for that. (It is just fortunate that Jewish texts are rather less open to pernicious interpretation than those of our Islamic cousins [though 72 virgins could always be nice].)

And there was I, wondering how many buses I would have to catch for the honour of tea with a Legend in N16 during my next visit to the “green and pleasant land” (though Stamford Hill is probably not quite what William Blake had in mind).

 

Next on Hasmo Legends, Part XV: “Polly” Sue Schneider

Hasmo Legends XIII: A Legend (Osher) Strikes Back

[Followed by Hasmo Legends XIII: The Background]

Someone has told me about the Hasmo blog.  I haven’t seen it for myself and, considering what it is supposed to be like, I don’t think I want to, either.

After all, as far as I can ascertain, the fellows who are obsessed with this hatred of Hasmo have more or less wasted the last 20 or 30 years doing nothing much for themselves and even less for the world.  The owner of the blog, who calls himself Mike Something-or-other, as far as is known, lives alone, unmarried, in a flat in Tel Aviv, together with his four dogs.  Most of these people who say that Hasmo did nothing for them spiritually, etc., etc., moan, groan, moan, groan, are now grown men but are unfortunately the drinking companions of ingrates and malcontents and suchlike others who are pretty much the dregs of society.

This site is a shame on all of us normal people who have a great deal to be thankful for to Hasmo.  If Mike and Co. won’t close it down themselves, or at least remove the offensive comments about teachers and Rebbes and start to be more positive and grateful, then the rest of us should not give it any support by contributing any comments to this site.  It is a disgrace to all of us ex-Hasmos!  Let’s silent this scab!  After all, most of us ex-Hasmos know full well that wherever we go in the world, Hasmo is known and its ex-pupils are looked up to – and with good reason!  But these malcontents want to spoil all that.  For why?  Of course we all know that there were/are areas that could have been better.  OK, so what?  Does that cancel all the good that is Hasmo?

Let’s have a bit more pride in our school and gratefulness to those teachers and Rebbes that have given us so much opportunity and advantage.  Malcontents and failures should not be allowed to define what is a true Hasmo product nor besmirch our name and reputation!  Hasmos of the world – unite!

As a Limmudei Kodesh Rebbe at Hasmonean for well over thirty years and also a teacher (I also taught bookbinding and for a time I taught also woodwork and even calligraphy) I am saddened to hear about this website about the Hasmonean.  It is so unfair.

But you know, it’s rather sad to see grown men (some of them must be about fifty years old by now, if not older) who are so absorbed with themselves and so vindictive that they have to try to besmirch, denigrate and ridicule people, sometimes using language and expressions which are shamefully foul and dirty and not at all fitting for Jewish people to use, just because – more than thirty years ago! — these people were their teachers and, according to their childish perspective, they treated them unfairly.  These overgrown babies think that they can now take their revenge against their teachers (but like the cowards that they are, of course hiding behind the cloak of anonymity) for what they perceive to be “unfair treatment” – referring to things which happened twenty or even over thirty years ago!

A number of points to remember:

1.   After all is said and done, people become teachers because they are idealistic.  They are generally more intelligent than your average person and could probably do quite well out there in the world of money and material gain.  But no.  They have chosen to dedicate their lives to helping youngsters make their way in the world, to give them the equipment they will need to do well.  Nobody, but nobody, has ever decided to become a teacher so as to make life for children a misery.  All teachers start out with the best intentions.  Sadly, the treatment that they receive from their pupils can sometimes make them regret deeply their chosen vocation, but if they have become embittered it is because the children, who can be clever, manipulative, nasty, cruel and quite vicious, have made them so.

2.   The self-pitying, vindictive, spiteful, foul-mouthed, overgrown babies who contribute their spiteful remarks about their teachers were in all probability pretty rotten kids who quite deliberately intended to play-up and ruin, both, the best efforts of their teachers and also the learning opportunities of their classmates.  If their teachers were nasty to them, they probably brought it upon themselves by trying to make their teachers’ lives a misery.

3.   And even if they were completely innocent, so alright!  The teacher made a mistake!  Because the real culprit was clever, the teacher mistakenly picked on you and punished you!  And you, of course, protested your innocence but would not snitch on the real offender.  So the teacher made a mistake!  Is that a valid reason for insulting him so foully thirty years later, publicly and mercilessly?

4.   These 50-year-old overgrown babies, some of whom have managed to make their way in the world and, by the sound of it, have managed to feather their nests quite nicely, thank-you-very-much, should consider that these teachers whom they vilify so pitilessly are in fact the ones who gave them the wherewithal to make their fortunes, and they should show a modicum of gratefulness.

5.   They might also consider that their memories of things that happened so long ago might be more than a little distorted by time and bias and imagination (and possibly drink).  Nevertheless, they are willing to vilify people and spread their own malevolence to others, just so that they can glorify themselves in the hurt and insult of another.  Maybe this is what it takes to be popular in the crowd of mean and nasty people that make up this social circle.  As I recall, there used to be a place with people like that not far from where the Dead Sea is today.

Osher Baddiel in familiar mode, Ohalei Yaakov Yeshiva, Moscow (March 2009)

6.   As I used to say to my young pupils many years ago, “Your being disrespectful to your teachers says more about you than it says about your teachers!” (I also used to point out that when children behave nicely they fulfil the Mitzvah of honouring their parents because people say how well they have brought up their children but that they do their parents a dishonour by being disrespectful because their parents are ultimately responsible for how their children behave and interact with others.)  And that is said to pupils who are, after all, children.  So, I ask you, what does this ungratefulness to a school that provided a pretty good education, and vindictiveness towards teachers, say about a supposedly mature 50-year-old?

7.   If this is their attitude towards their teachers even now, as grown men, twenty or even thirty years later, one shudders to think how they have allowed their nastiness to fester and grow in their minds and how they have infected their own children to feel and relate to their teachers.  And the viciousness doesn’t stop there, either, because now their children have probably got the same jaundiced view of teachers.  (And of Rebbes, of course, and of authority generally, no?)  It is very much the same as the cruel damage done to children and grandchildren and even beyond, when parents divorce (or split up) amidst rancour and bitterness.  If you have to, divorce.  But do it respectfully and if at all possible, amicably, for the sake of the children.  Just because you two misled each other or made a bad choice of partner, is that a reason for ruining your children’s and grandchildren’s view of marriage and family life and spoiling their own married lives?  Or that they will not marry at all?  How selfish!  So, just because this person has had a bad experience with one or two teachers (probably brought on by himself, as said) is that a reason to blight the school experience of his children?

8.   Let these people realize that it’s high time they grew up.  They should stop wallowing in self-pity, looking for scapegoats to blame for having such a rotten character.  They should remember that they are big boys now and how they choose to develop their character is up to them.  They can’t go on forever blaming others for their own failures (but of course patting themselves on the back if some things pan out alright).  Whether to be gracious or nasty, thankful or ungrateful, forgiving or vengeful, respectful or insolent, kind or cruel, scoffing or admiring, all these are their own making.  As I have said: What they choose to be says much more about them than it does about the ones that they denigrate.

9.   Any decent person understands that it is unfair that a thug should beat someone from behind a bush, without giving him any chance of self-defence.  Yet these people hide behind the cloak of anonymity to attack their victims, who can never defend themselves, who can only hope and pray fervently that their close families and friends do not get to read these vicious lies and childish rantings of warped memories and biased imaginations.  The person who runs this website should close it down immediately.  There is no excuse for it.  He should remember that there is no such thing as innocent fun at someone else’s expense.  It’s a shame and disgrace to him, not something to laugh about.  I insist that there are enough good people who went to the Hasmonean who know that such a website offends against all the noble and good teachings of the Torah and Chazal who could exert pressure to have this maverick close down this site as it is at present.  It’s a great pity that this website could be such a Kiddush HaShem, showing that Jewish people are truly grateful, Makkir Tovah, and repay good with good.  Instead, it’s made a laughing stock of a venerable institution and a fair number of good, hard-working, dedicated, well-intentioned people, Jewish and non-Jewish, and shown a nasty side to Jewish people.  In short, is this website something to be proud about or does it make you wince with embarrassment?  (After the initial guffaw of laughter, of course.)  To what purpose, please?  To what benefit?

10.   And I haven’t even mentioned yet the Torah, the Halochoh and the Mussar aspect of this shameful website.  But I don’t suppose the person responsible for this enterprise is interested in what the Torah’s attitude is towards his obsession to defame his teachers and his school.  He can’t be particularly religious, anyhow.  Oh, I don’t mean that he doesn’t keep Shabbos or wear Tefillin.  He probably does.  Which just makes him a pious hypocrite.  And not only is he a hypocrite but he’s a cowardly hypocrite, too, who hides behind the anonymity of a website.  I say that he’s not a genuinely religious person.  He knows that in the Torah it says, “You shall love your friend like yourself,” and he wouldn’t want these things said about him, even as “a bit of a laugh.”

Well, I’ve gone on for long enough.  Perhaps I shouldn’t have come down so heavily but I know that some of the comments about some of the people are most unkind and really have hurt the feelings of the people concerned, Jew and non-Jew alike.  Every human being has feelings, and if he hasn’t, then he’s not human.  Which makes one wonder about the person who runs this site, does it not?

Please feel free to make known what I have said in this email.  But please, all of it, not selections from it.  I say that the site as it is now should be closed down, with sincere apologies to all those who have been hurt or harmed by it.  Start again.

And, in future, be thankful and grateful for what the Hasmonean gave you all.  It’s a mighty good school and all its pupils should all be grateful for all that it has given them, the rough with the smooth.

Osher Y. Baddiel, Stamford Hill, 17 August 2009.

[Photographs by “Benjamin”, picasaweb.google.com]

…..

Hasmo Legends XIII: The Background

To satisfy the steady flow of enquiries . . .

In the early hours of Monday morning, on checking for rogue comments to melchett mike from sly ex-Hasmos trying to catch me off my guard (i.e., asleep!), I was mildly amused to discover a comment – to Hasmo Legends I: An Introduction to an Institution – consisting of the first few paragraphs of the above post (though shorn of their more incendiary elements) from an “Osher Baddiel”. It was prefaced:

This was received from Osher Baddiel and he seems to have a point.

The Israeli e-mail address began “RAVI59” and an IP search located the e-mail’s source as Hod HaSharon, a fairly mixed – but predominantly non-religious – city south of Raanana and Kfar Saba, and most definitely not a place that one would associate in any way with a certain Hasmo Legend of said name.

So, I deleted the comment and the one response thereto, from the ever on-the-ball Dan Gins:

There’s simply no way that the last comment emanated from Reb Osher Yitzchok, someone for whom I, for one, have substantial respect and affection. He is a man of sufficient culture and substance, to use the word “gratitude”, not some kindergarten pidgin dialect substitute such as “gratefulness”.

Before nodding off, I sent “RAVI59” a curt e-mail, reminding him that Hasmo Legend ‘rules’ prohibit anonymous comments. On waking up some hours later, and fearing that I had perhaps been a little too brusque, I sent him a further, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, e-mail:

Pursuant to my earlier message, I would also be happy for you to post your own views – which I take it these are – even if they are not those of Mr. Baddiel . . . but, again, with an authentic name. If Mr. Baddiel wishes to post in his own name, I would love to have him on melchett mike . . . as would, no doubt, hundreds of other readers.

Shortly thereafter, I received the following response from Ravi Shahar (whose name, which now appeared in full, I vaguely recalled from his previous comments to melchett mike):

Rabbi Baddiel sent me the message and told me to post on the blog, they were HIS words not mine. He said I could do so in his name. They were not my views, but his. He does not wish to associate with melchett mike because he claims that the views posted are evil gossip, slander etc. He does have a point. Many but not all, are slander and badmouthing.

I asked Ravi for Mr. (that’s how I remember him) Baddiel’s telephone number, so that I could “call him to verify”. By early Monday evening, I had received that number and the ‘green light’:

He is willing to talk to you by phone.

I was rather apprehensive, however, about making the call. Mr. Baddiel didn’t teach me for all that long, but I clearly recall him as a rather daunting figure and – even though 24 years have passed since I left Hasmonean – found it strangely difficult to get that picture out of my mind. But, after failing to persuade (in true Hasmo style) Dan Gins to make the call instead – the soft lad “bottled” it! – I gingerly dialled the number provided at 9:20 that same evening. A woman I presumed to be Mrs. Baddiel picked up the telephone.

“Is Rabbi Baddiel there, please?”  [I thought I’d go with “Rabbi” this time . . . just to be on the safe side!]

“He’s at mincha.”

I had a 20 minute stay of execution.

The 45 minute telephone conversation that followed, however, was extremely interesting, oddly uplifting spiritually (not a word that you will hear me use often in reference to my personal experience), and somehow took me back a quarter of a century to the classroom in which I always picture Osher Baddiel . . . the one on the other side of the narrow staircase (leading up to the Staff Room) next to the Computer Room (that of the brilliantly original name).

Mr. Baddiel confirmed his authorship of the comment posted to melchett mike by Ravi Shahar (who lives in Jerusalem, and not Hod HaSharon, after all). As for the details of the remainder of the conversation, I leave those for another time. I took detailed notes, and Mr. Baddiel agreed that I could use them to provide an accurate account of the conversation, though not to ridicule (and, of course, I will respect that).

The above post – received from Mr. Baddiel, by e-mail, yesterday (Tuesday) morning – took me, however, by complete surprise. It was almost six times the length of the comment which I had deleted, and far more outspoken. In a further telephone conversation, Mr. Baddiel – who couldn’t explain the discrepancy (perhaps his former sheliach, Ravi, can) – informed me that he had written it the previous morning and then sent it to Ravi for posting to melchett mike.

As is fairly obvious from a reading of the post, Mr. Baddiel, somewhat surprisingly, didn’t amend it to reflect the very cordial nature of our Monday evening conversation, one in which we each expressed our very contrasting opinions about melchett mike . . . but during, and after, which he understood (I hope) that I am not – as I suspect he might have imagined – The Dybbuk of Melchett.

melchett mike, Tel Aviv, 19 August 2009.

Next on Hasmo Legends, Part XIV: Conversations with Osher [followed by Osher: The Postscript (featuring melchett mike’s Osher Poll)]

Hasmo Legends XII: Flops, Greater and Lesser

It is something of a truism that Hasmo boys fared far better in maths and sciences than in the arts and humanities.

This owed rather more, however, to factors extrinsic to Hasmonean – such as the greater emphasis placed on the former in most (especially more traditional) Jewish households – than to the pedagogical skills and talents of the school’s maths and science teachers.

In fact, Hasmonean should have churned out ambitious would-be physicians, scientists and mathematicians “for fun”. But, for all the geniuses that we all knew from our Hasmo days – the four and five As maths and science A-Level students – how many went onto careers (never mind distinguished ones) in those fields? With the raw talent at their disposal, Jack, DJ, Steve, Flop and crew should have produced numerous top academics and professionals, but these ‘educators’ did not foster love of their subjects, merely high levels of competence in them.

In spite of my late father having been a brilliant mathematician and physician, I was hopeless at both maths and the sciences. Indeed, Hasmo’s science labs were as uninviting to me as its gym was for some of the more pasty NW11 and N16 frummers (the sensitively-named, by Chich, “spastics”). I hated the places (my only enjoyment being to poke a sharpened pencil through the inviting – what other purpose did it serve? – slit  in my neighbour’s high stool).

So, if you have been eagerly anticipating a warm melchett mike reminiscence about Hasmo’s maths and science teachers, stop reading now – revisit, instead, my posts on Cyril, Chich, Sid, and Big Al – because, with the exception of DJ, I was utterly indifferent to nearly all of them. (As always on melchett mike, however, if you have warmer recollections of these individuals – or tales of those I have failed to mention in detail, or at all – please post them as comments below.)

As well as the absence of truly unforgettable characters (such as the aforementioned), my indifference was also due to the attitude and/or incompetence of Hasmo’s teaching staff in those, my weaker, subjects. Like the advice on how to make a million dollars in Israel – make Aliyah with ten – it is oft said about Hasmonean (correctly in my view) that, if you came with ability, you did well; if not, they would let you rot.

I have received more “When are you going to do Flop?” queries, since my first Hasmo Legends post, than I can recall. I have been rather reticent to write about Lionel Finkelstein (middle row, extreme right [ignoring the little fella], in the staff photograph in Hasmo Legends I), not out of any sense of loyalty to him, but because he is still apparently squawking and spluttering his way through the physics syllabus on Holders Hill Road. I was even contacted by someone senior at today’s Hasmonean, specifically requesting that I let him off the hook for that very reason. And the truth is that I originally agreed . . . though I am no longer quite sure “Whyyyyy”.

No Nobel Prizes in Physics for guessing how Dr Flop earned his nickname. I vividly recall even the (what should be) perfectly straightforward Ticker Tape Timer experiment – for measuring velocity – going horribly and repeatedly wrong. And it was often Hasmo’s poor, meek lab assistants, Mrs. Kadoo, though more usually the hapless Michael (I don’t think he had a surname) – neither of whom were ever heard to utter a word – who would have to shoulder the blame for this incompetence. Indeed the oft-heard bellow, from the physics laboratory, of “Miiii-ccchael” usually bore all the reasonableness of Stalin’s scolding of his mistress, Getya Keksov, for the relative failure of his Second (1933-1937) Five-Year Plan.

Flop, in appearance a kind of Semitic Brian Blessed, was a strange bloke to say the least. His behaviour could vacillate between the genial and the almost cruel (sideburn yanking being his punishment of choice), and his fondness for Bissli snacks (barbecue flavour) usually resulted in more finding their way into his unkempt beard – nestling there for the remainder of the school day – than into his not insubstantial stomach. And those squawking noises – “Urrrggh, Isaacson . . .” – have not been heard outside the Star Wars movies or Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds.

Inadvertent followers of Reb Nachum of Golders

Hasmo’s other physics teacher was the unassuming Nachum Ordman (middle row, seventh from left, in the aforementioned staff photograph), the younger, more reserved sibling of Jack, head of maths. It is a little known fact that the ubiquitous Na Nach mantra and stickers, visible all over Israel, relate to Nachum’s slight stutter rather than – as believed by those loony, pogoing Chassidim – Rabbi Nachman of Breslov. Nachum always seemed the most gentle of men, so it would be a shame to waste any more melchett mike inches on him.

Another oddity of Flop-like proportions was Hasmo’s biology teacher, Steve Posen (middle row, third from left). Apparently, Steve can still be seen belting along Bell Lane (Hendon), destination unknown (even to him), sporting his bright red shirt on Rosh Chodesh. Steve’s behaviour also spanned the full gamut, one minute warm and approachable, the next wielding his favourite slipper as if he had shares in Dunlop. Even his attitude towards the biology lab’s living creatures – and I don’t mean Hasmo boys – could suddenly swing, with no apparent warning, from the gentle to the brutal.

Steve’s straight-man sidekick in Hasmo’s biology department, Liam Joughin (back row, fourth from right), would observe his colleague’s oddball performances with a deadpan expression, never betraying the absolute incredulity he must have experienced on a near daily basis. A man neither loved nor loathed, Joughin was best known for his dry sense of humour and expressions such as “leave it a-lone” (despairing at Hasmo boys’ insistence on fiddling with apparatus before experiments had even begun) and “minkerisation” (Joughin for mincha, the afternoon prayer).

In fact, so remarkably normal, by Hasmo standards, was Joughin – and a good teacher to boot – that one had to wonder what he was doing at the nuthouse, when he could so easily have been enjoying a position amongst “his own” at a decent English grammar school.

At one stage, Joughin shared the role of Deputy Headmaster of Hasmonean with chemistry teacher, David Jacobson (front row, third from left), known to all merely as DJ. My opinion of this man is well known to readers of melchett mike, and I don’t intend to darken my summer mood by expanding on it here (though, again, readers’ comments and stories will be gratefully received).

Whilst Hasmo’s other chemistry teacher, Kevin O’Connor, seemed a genuinely nice bloke, even the Dalai Lama could not have tempted me to spend a second more in DJ’s classroom than I absolutely had to, and I “dropped” the subject as soon as I could.

For five long, unforgiving years, I sat in the maths B group of Simon Lesser (back row, fifth from left). If he had explained his algebra and geometry in some obscure dialect of Urdu, I would have had no less idea of what he was on about. And, for half a decade, my end of year maths results always hovered around 30 to 35 percent.

Less than six months before the O-Level examination, one of my mother’s bridge four, Wendy Lederman, who taught maths at Hasmonean Girls’, offered to “have a go”. I got an A. What that says about Mr. Lesser’s teaching (as well as Mrs. Lederman’s) I leave to you, the reader.

At some point, we stopped being deterred by the lines Lesser would dish out like an overzealous Nigerian traffic warden slapping out parking tickets in Central London,  and – unsentimental teenagers that we were (how sentimental could we be about a man who would make us write “Homework must be done and submitted on time” two hundred times and more?) – started taking advantage of his failing eyesight and hearing. Our class even formed an instrument-less jazz rhythm section, employing mouths, hands, heels and desks to perform improvised compositions, as Lesser – in an attempt to decipher figures – pressed his nose against textbook or whiteboard.

In cricketing terms, Jack Ordman (front row, second from left) was Hasmonean’s Geoffrey Boycott or Graeme Hick: one of the finest maths teachers of his generation, but – like Boycott and Hick, batsmen who didn’t quite fancy it against the very toughest of bowlers – Ordman only took on the ‘challenge’ of the A group. This was the kind of perverse arrangement typical of Hasmonean, allowing Ordman to preserve a very fine, but somewhat misleading, average.

“Uncle” Jack did, however, teach Gemara to our delinquent Yeshiva Stream group after school, displaying that very same caution and/or fear that prevents him from going down as a true great: for the last fifteen minutes of every class – in an attempt to wake us up with some actual interaction before our journeys home – he would conduct a question and answer session on halacha; but, whenever we would pose even the most slightly problematic of questions, he would proclaim “Boys, I am not a rabbi. The school has got a very good one. Ask Rabbi Cooper.”

This seemed to defeat the very purpose of the session . . . though, couldn’t that be said of nearly everything that went on at Hasmonean Grammar School for Boys?!

[REMINDER: In keeping with Hasmo Legends ‘rules’, comments must be truthful, with true identity of commenter provided.]

Next on Hasmo Legends, Part XIII: A Legend (Osher) Strikes Back [followed by The Background]

Hasmo Legends XI: “Big Al(an)” Walters

A simple exercise: Google “alan walters teacher”.

If you were at Hasmonean Boys’ in the early to mid eighties, you will be, at once, amused and disconcerted by the contents of the very first Result:

“Alan Walters was an inspiring teacher . . . He was especially interested in applying theoretical ideas to practical problems.”

“I first met Alan at LSE . . . I was delighted by his clear, amusing and succinct exposition . . . straight to the jugular of the argument, no pomposity, absolute clarity . . . His style of bureaucracy was an education; memos of crystal clarity and brevity.”

Amused, because the history/politics teacher Alan Walters known to us Hasmo boys was rarely “clear”, never “succinct” – his painful dictation methods representing the very antithesis of “brevity” – and “inspir[ed]” only hilarity. Moreover, the word “education” was never one associated with him.

Disconcerted, because Walters’ idea of solving “practical problems” was to punch out a glass window with his bare fist, to yank the wires out of a plug and reconnect them directly to the mains, and to lower a sash window onto a first former, leaving the hapless wretch trapped helplessly underneath.

Moreover, had Walters – perish the thought – been allowed to “apply” his “theoretical ideas” to Hasmonean, the school would have been run on strict Marxist principles, with DJ and Jerry Gerber having to take their turns at picking Israeli Bazooka Joes out of the urinals (every cloud has a silver lining).

Alan Walters was, however, unfailingly “amusing”.

When the second of the excerpts, above, continued that “It was no wonder Margaret Thatcher relied so greatly on him for economic issues”, it dawned on us that we had the wrong Alan Walters – Sir Alan (right), Chief Economic Adviser to the Iron Lady . . . as opposed to “Big Al”, whose sympathies lay rather closer to the Iron Curtain, and who would have had considerably more time for Mrs. B than Mrs. T.

The reign of ‘our’ Alan Walters, Hasmonean’s clown prince, was, alas, a short one. He joined the institution around 1982, probably still in his twenties, and hung around (we use the expression advisedly) until about 1987.

Big Al was an unabashed Marxist (not to say communist), sporting the Red Star on his jacket lapel. And one reader of melchett mike relates how, on the death of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, in 1982, he got his entire class (of thirty boys) to stand and observe two minutes’ silence. 

Communism with a human face: Leonid Brezhnev (centre) 'standing' and observing

Nonetheless, in spite of his political leanings, it would be utterly misleading to label Walters’ spell at Hasmonean a Five-Year Plan. Quite the contrary . . . there was no plan.

Indeed, alongside the erraticism of Big Al, the behaviour of Hasmo’s other great eccentrics – even of Cyril – often appeared utterly predictable. The only genuine competition it faced was from the madcap capers of the legendary Stamford Hill maverick, “King Joe” Paley.

Another commenter to melchett mike, who had the misfortune to miss out on being taught by Walters, relates his only experience of the Legend, when he was covering a “free period” (in another teacher’s absence). Big Al immediately walked to the front of the classroom, and drew his silhouette around himself on the whiteboard. He then grabbed a ruler, and walked from desk to desk, flipping each and every pupil’s books onto the floor. The pièce de résistance came with his head-butting of the lockers at the rear of the classroom, before he finally returned to his seat and buried himself in a book – reputedly My Fear of the Ice Pick, by Leon Trotsky – until the end of the period.

Wild eyes, staring out from beneath a forest of black hair – which looked like it hadn’t been trimmed since his bar mitzvah, when “Granny” Walters had a go at it with her garden shears – Big Al had much of the dishevelled, angular awkwardness (if rather less of the talent) of Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker (left).

In the rare weeks that he shaved – “Walters’ Weekly” – one imagines him having used a rusty razor, salvaged from some wartime dacha of Joseph Stalin, and picked up at a Brent Council bazaar raising funds for the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

Then there was the voice. Eighties Hasmo boys will undoubtedly recall the opening wail of Holly Johnson in Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s Two Tribes: “Ow Oww Owww . . .” Take it half an octave higher, and you are only just approaching the distressed, feline-mating pitch at which Big Al commenced his ‘lessons’. And the outlandish tone progressed only upwards from there.

Other characteristics of this Legend were over-salivation on talking, curious curved-arm gesturing (towards the board, for a boy to exit the classroom, etc), heroic attempts at authentic Russian pronunciation (greeted by inevitable hoots of derision), and orders to be quiet which came out as “Shullup!” And perched atop this unsteady, towering clown of a man was the tiniest of bright blue woven kippot, paying the most perfunctory homage to the Roberg regime.

This combination of lankiness and lunacy earned Walters perhaps the most apt nickname of all: Basil Fawlty.

One can only begin to imagine Rabbi Roberg’s inevitably regular damage limitation exercises, defending – in the face of irate parents – Big Al’s continuing presence on Hasmonean’s staff (it will be blatantly obvious to even the most casual reader of melchett mike that the school never sacked anyone). The rather sheepish (except with a slipper in hand) Rabbi will no doubt have employed terms such as “unconventional”, “a trifle impetuous”, and “artistic temperament”, to avoid doing what headmasters at most normal schools sometimes have to.

The wrath of these parents was incurred by startling lapses of judgment – if Big Al had any to begin with – such as, on one occasion, locking the best part of the third year in the gym changing rooms for half an hour. Unventilated and foul-smelling at the best of times, on a sweltering summer’s day it almost induced a riot. Rather unsurprisingly, King Joe was also assisting Chich at the time, forming perhaps the most irresponsible alliance since Adolf said to Benito and the Emperor: “Now, let’s see what we can do with a map of the world.”

Another reader of melchett mike has opined, perceptively in our view, that “Walters was the kind of teacher who, if you didn’t muck him up, would muck himself up.” He cites as evidence the history class which Big Al commenced with the announcement that he was setting a test, and would be distributing sheets of paper on which pupils should write their answers. He proceeded to tear a single sheet of A4 from his pad, rip it into thirty scraps, and place each one, no larger than a conservatively-sized postage stamp, on a desk.

As he began dictating detailed, essay-style questions, Walters was interrupted by shrill voices of protest. All such dissent was immediately silenced, Soviet-style, by swift ejection from the classroom. And, to Big Al’s warped way of thinking, these boys had disrupted his lesson.

For a man of his relatively tender years, Walters’ dictating methods were mind-numbingly “old school”. And their cruelty was exacerbated by his punishing any interruption, however small, by returning all the way to the beginning.

Big Al’s end of term reports could be startlingly forthright:

“Mr. & Mrs. Offenbach, your son Jacob requires psychiatric help. Please arrange.”

His remarks – “Intelligent, conscientious and competent” – in Dan Gins’ Form 3F report (dated July 1984) had been written over correction fluid. Never having believed, in the intervening quarter of a century, that this was Big Al’s true opinion, your co-author, for the purposes of this post, undertook a painstaking, Cyril-like “scraper” job. This revealed the somewhat conflicting: “Intelligent, but immature and irresponsible”. Walters’ whim, like that of his dictatorial role models, could well have had unbeknown life-changing consequences for so many.

More than one Hasmo Legend was defined, in some way or another, by his automobile:

• Cyril’s pale blue Ford Fiesta, with its TLC (“Tea, Elsssie?”) number plate;
• Dr Flop’s cavernous Peugeot estate, replete with HUR (“Hurrgggh!!”) plate;
• Chich’s Morris Marina, its purple hues dovetailing exquisitely with the Cypriot’s tasteful nylon Speech Day suit; and
• DJ’s rust heap of a Morris Minor, its dome-like roof nicely matching the scalp of its driver (Dan’s peirush)/the tit seated inside (melchett mike’s).

Big Al seemed to get through myriad old bangers during his time at Hasmonean, but one in particular, a bright red Citroën 2CV, will be forever etched in our memories. How expectantly we gazed, as the “deux chevaux” bounded and creaked over the potholes of the front playground, just waiting for all four wheels to drop off simultaneously, for a jet of water to shoot up from the bonnet, flowers to sprout through the roof, and for Big Al to be ejected by his seat springs, accompanied by a rude raspberry sound.

If one excludes (as one must) the stopgap efforts of Jonny Bokor and Mitch Taylor, the only other history/politics teacher at Hasmonean at the time was the thoroughly decent but (equally thoroughly) soporific Clive Johnson (seated furthest right in the staff photograph in Hasmo Legends I). So, for us boys, Alan Walters was also a breath of fresh (if somewhat intoxicating) air.

Another commenter to melchett mike has expressed the view that Walters was amongst the teachers at Hasmo who was not “either/both incompetent or nuts when [he] joined the school. As far as I recall he was a Cambridge graduate, and a PhD too I think, and at first took his job and disciplining seriously.”

This is a fascinating line of speculation: did Alan Walters perchance join Hasmonean’s teaching staff an earnest and talented young historian, keen to make his mark on academia, but – like Jack Torrance (left)  in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining – become inebriated by the sheer madness of the place?

Or is the explanation rather less sinister: that this boy trapped inside a man’s body joined Hasmo with the best of intentions, but – on realising that he couldn’t beat us – decided to join us instead? (Answers, please, on a postcard . . . or should that be postage stamp?!)

"Bring me Big Al!"

We can only speculate as to how this once promising young Oxbridge graduate went from punting on the Cam to clowning in Holders Hill Road, and, indeed, as to his whereabouts today.

Following the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, in the late eighties, could ‘our’ Alan Walters have followed the Red Star out to China? Or even perhaps to North Korea?!

Yes, that’s it! It is Big Al’s unsteadying influence in the corridors of power in Pyongyang that explains the current provocations of Kim Jong-il (above) . . .

Ohhh, SHULLUP!!

A Dan Gins/melchett mike production.

[For any ex-Hasmos wishing to contribute a post to melchett mike – on Legends, themes or eras as yet uncovered – please comment here (I will be sent your email address off-blog). Minimum requirement: B grade in English Language O Level!]

Next on Hasmo Legends, Part XII: Flops, Greater and Lesser

Hasmo Legends X: Mad Dogs and English Teachers

Just as the very presence of Jews in the Middle East is anathema to fundamentalist Islam, so was the teaching of non-Limmudei Kodesh (religious studies), mathematics or science subjects repugnant to the extremist regime at Hasmonean Grammar School for Boys (maths and science were tolerated, due to their immunity from the ‘corrupting’ influences of liberalism and moral relativism).

Indeed, in the seventies and eighties, a PR position at the Zionist Federation in Damascus would have been considerably more alluring than teaching the arts at Hasmonean, and the poor bastards tasked with doing so should be more pitied than mocked.

The most to suffer from Hasmo’s philistinism were its English teachers, consisting – during my period at the school (1978-1985) – of fixtures, Ivan Marks and Jeff Soester, and fittings, Tony Pearce and Tim Messom. (There was another English teacher, Jonathan Benjamin, who joined Hasmonean a year or so before I left, but other than considering that – as a very dark-skinned Indian Jew – he didn’t really look the part, I recall little else about him.)

Asking these gentlemen to impart their love of the English language, and literature, to Hasmo boys – who felt justified in being even more chutzpadik than they already were by what they knew to be the contemptuous attitude of the school’s Judeofascist regime towards the subjects – was, in cricketing terms, tantamount to asking Derek Pringle to bowl at Vivian Richards with his shoelaces tied together.

The closest competitor to Jonny Bokor (“the Bonnie Joker”) for the title of Hasmo’s Most Cordial Teacher – though, it has to be said, the competition was not all that fierce – must surely have been Tony Pearce, who taught us first year English. He left the school shortly afterwards, to become involved in Christian ministry. (See Hasmo Legends VIII, Parts I and II)

Perhaps the most persuasive argument for the existence of the Jewish Deity, and of the miracles that He will perform for His people, is that – in spite of Hasmonean’s Jewish ‘role models’ – Tony didn’t succeed, in his four years at Holders Hill Road, in converting any of us to “the Big J”.

The irony, of course, is that, as Jewish youngsters, we were continually being warned of the dangers of Christian missionaries . . . none of whom did any of us nearly as much damage as the assorted misfits and misanthropes charged with providing our spiritual education at Hasmonean.

The tall, bearded Tim Messom, who replaced Tony – and who didn’t last much longer at the school – was a fundamentally decent man, though one prone to absolutely losing it on occasion (once again, usually with Elbaz . . . though he was not alone in that!)

In our first ever lesson with Mr. Messom, in the exotically named Mobile Unit (at the bottom of the playground), our new, imposing, and ever-so English, master – he was more that than “teacher” – spelt out his name:

“M – E – S – S . . . that is double S, of course . . . O – M.”

Naturally, in every subsequent lesson, some bright spark would again ask him how he spelt it . . . and Mr. Messom, in precisely the same fashion, and to our great amusement, would repeat:

“M – E – S – S . . . that is double S, of course . . . O – M.”

Hasmo legend has it that Mr. Messom had been a circus ringmaster, and that his wife had run off with the resident (or should that be “travelling”?) lion tamer. As with so many of the stories that have emanated from Hasmonean Grammar School for Boys over the years, you just couldn’t make it up.

If Messrs Pearce and Messom played nice little cameos in the annals of Hasmonean English teaching, Marks and Soester were clearly the leading men. In fact, these two gentlemen were the closest to a double act that Hasmo has ever had, their names – in tales of the institution – usually running together.

Marks and Soester taught the same discipline (at least in one sense of the word), their tenures at Hasmonean – from the early seventies to mid-nineties – largely overlapped, and they spent much of this time in adjacent classrooms, in the dilapidated former barracks mischievously rebranded the Sixth Form Block (as one commenter to melchett mike has wryly observed, “by the same Roberg-ist propaganda machine that brought us the £3 school kuppel”).

Sixth Formers in front of the Sixth Form Block, circa 1972

This unedifying edifice – situated between the fiefdom of Chich’s gymnasium and the Mobile Unit (see also the photograph in Hasmo Legends V) – had apparently, in the mid-seventies, been condemned as unsafe and insanitary, boarded up, and earmarked for demolition. But, by the time I arrived at Holders Hill Road, in 1978, the boards had been removed, and the Block designated for the exclusive use of Marks and Soester . . . the lucky so-and-sos!

When Mr. Soester became an extra in the late eighties BBC sitcom Brush Strokes – injudiciously, in view of the extra ‘ammunition’ it provided the already well-armed boys (though one can perhaps forgive his longing to escape his daily reality) – pupils would hum its theme tune as he walked into class.

This insolence would then spread to the adjacent classroom of Mr. Marks, who, on one occasion, was complimented (by another commenter to melchett mike) for his wonderful performance the evening before. His wit was rewarded with “a savage attack to [the] head with a hardback book”.

Mr. Soester’s opting to be an extra was rather apt. If DJ was Bond baddie Blofeld and Rabbi Greenberg Batman’s The Penguin (his actual Hasmo nickname), the considerably more likeable, if somewhat unremarkable, Marks and Soester – with their seventies blazers, tank tops, and polyester slacks – were the unfashionable detective extras, in the background at their NYPD desks, on seventies US cop shows like Kojak and Starsky & Hutch.

Rather conveniently, seeing as his son Simon is a regular on melchett mike– and has made all kinds of veiled, though good humoured, threats in relation to what I write about his “old man” – Jeff Soester didn’t teach me much at Hasmonean (emphasis on “me”, Simon, not “much”!) His classroom, however, was clearly rather chaotic, and I recall him being a rather edgy gentleman (as if that is any surprise).

I have one particularly vivid recollection of “Jeff” walking up the playground from the Sixth Form Block, while my classmate Abie Cohen – seated in the middle of our Form 2AB photograph in a beige jumper – performed a Mizrachi (North African Jewish)-style dance around him. Abie was whirling the palms and backs of his hands extremely close to Jeff’s eyes and nose, no doubt intending the excitable teacher to spill his precariously piled books. This somewhat odd spectacle has stayed with me to this day, because it somehow inexplicably captured the unique brand of Hasmo chutzpah.

But Jeff, too, apparently had a mischievous side. A commenter to melchett mike has related how, as a young Israeli boy new to Hasmonean, Jeff told him: “Go to the staff room – you can use the middle staircase – knock on the door, and ask for ‘Freddy’.” The door was opened by History teacher, Mr. Lawrence, who handed over a silver tray with a white plimsoll placed neatly on top, which the rather naïve boy promptly delivered to his ‘executioner’.

It was Ivan Marks, however, who was responsible for the major part of my English education at Hasmonean.

I recall Mr. Marks fondly, not just because his was my favourite subject (it didn’t face much competition), but because he was one of the few teachers at Hasmonean who actually attempted to treat us like adults. This was especially true for those of us who took English Literature A Level, which presented the first opportunity for us, largely repressed, Jewish boys to explore sexual themes through literature . . . an opportunity we rarely missed.

Mr. Marks, unlike so many of his Hasmo colleagues, also had a sense of humour. Often, even post-frenzy, he would barely be able to conceal a smile, which he would further attempt to draw attention away from by characteristically poking his spectacles back up his ski-jump nose.

It was these mock frenzies, perhaps together with his mane of lank jet black hair, which earned Mr. Marks the rather undeserved nickname “Mad Dog”. His bark was far louder than his bite, and I don’t recall him ever administering anything more rabid than a firm prod on the neck with the spine of his textbook.

Mr. Marks was frustrated by the “study aid” mentality of Hasmo boys. Rather than appreciating the rich source texts, we would buy up Dillons’ stock of Pan Study Aids, and York and Brodie’s Notes. For English Literature O Level, my classmate, Grant Morgan, went so far as to purchase Macbeth in comic form. He memorised the text by rote, and would walk up to puzzled boys in the playground – some of whom didn’t even know him – proudly proclaiming “So foul and fair a day I have not seen.” He got an E.

Another Hasmo friend, Daniel Kelly, winds me up to this day about my predilection for study aids (ironic, I remind him, for a boy who had a respected Dayan as a grandfather, but who opted – during our time at Manchester University – to study Modern Hebrew, with non-Jewish undergraduates who knew not their zayin from their chet).

Mr. Marks was also continually frustrated by the idiotic machinations of Hasmonean’s religious elite – which would, inter alia, ban literature considered too sexually explicit from the syllabus and school library – and he would say so.

He would often – somewhat tongue-in-cheek, once again – take these frustrations out on the more religious boys. “It’s always the frum ones” was his oft-heard lament. And “Finn,” he would say, on one memorable occasion, “just because your father drives around Golders Green in a Volvo, it doesn’t mean you can do what you want in my class.”

Mr. Soester shared Mr. Marks’s irritation with frummers, handing back work with the line “I don’t want to hear everyone screaming, ‘Yitzi, Shmuli, I got half a mark more than you!’” (a request which, of course, had the opposite effect).

Ironically, two of Mr. Marks’s star English pupils, Simon Harris – who left the school a number of years before us, but with whom he kept in touch – and Jonathan Levene, from our year, both became significant frummers (the former becoming Chief Rabbi of Ireland). Mr. Marks must have been most disappointed.

I heard, some years ago, that Mr. Marks had not been well. I sincerely hope that he has made a full recovery and that, if he has dipped into melchett mike (as I understand Mr. Soester has), he has found at least something which he considers worthy of his considerable efforts . . . in an institution which didn’t deserve him.

Next on Hasmo Legends, Part XI: “Big Al(an)” Walters

Hasmo Legends VIII: A Pearcing Insight (Part II)

by Tony Pearce

I ended up teaching French, German, and a couple of English classes, at Hasmonean.

Certainly the boys were not all geniuses but there were some who were pretty close to it. One in particular was Benjy whom I taught for two years at both French and German, during which time he never made a single mistake (not that I found anyway!) On the other hand there were some quite dim boys and I soon realised that they had their struggles in a society which was geared towards academic success and/or accepting the demands of the Talmud and the Torah.

I remember Adrian, who was a subject of some scorn in the staff room for being badly behaved. He was not very religious and in the bottom set for everything, but I got on well with him and ended up giving him some extra help in basic English. Both he and his parents were incredibly grateful that I had taken a bit of interest in him. I met him many years later and was pleased to see that he had got on quite well in life, and better than some of the geniuses.

I recall giving a German oral test and asking one of the boys where he lived. “Stamford Hill,” came the reply. I asked him to describe this area. His answer owed more to Yiddish than any German I had taught him and would have got him “nul points” for political correctness: “Voll frummers und schwarzers.”

On another occasion I remember one of the very religious boys telling me he did not want to read the set book, Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy, because there was adultery in the story. I said I understood his concern, but novels reflect life and adultery happens. I agreed with him that adultery is wrong. I said Hardy did not actually glorify adultery, and his book’s main character, Bathsheba, had the same name as the woman in the Bible with whom King David committed adultery.

My argument was a bit thrown by his reply: “King David was a tzadik and he did not commit adultery.”

“How can you say that?”  I asked. “The Book of Kings describes that David committed adultery and had Bathsheba’s husband killed in the war. He was rebuked for this by Nathan the Prophet and then confessed his sin in Psalm 51.”

But he would not have it and insisted that David was a tzadik and gave me a very complicated reason why this was, which I have to say completely missed the point of the Biblical account of David and Bathsheba. But it meant that my argument about reading English literature was lost on him.

Another incident that sticks in my memory was being set up by a second year French class who asked me if I knew which Jewish festival was happening around then.

“Purim,” I said.

“Bet you don’t know the story of Purim.”

Naively I thought I would show them that I did, so I started telling the story. As soon as I mentioned Haman, they started banging the desks and stamping their feet and creating a terrible noise.

“Stop that,” I said.

“But we have to sir – it’s part of our religion.” That was the end of Purim and we went back to French.

After I had been at Hasmo for a couple of terms, I decided to arrange a day trip to Boulogne. This took a bit of negotiating with the rabbis as we had to find a date which was permitted for excursions. I think the reason was to do with Lag B’Omer or the destruction of the Temple. Anyway we set off with Rabbi Abrahams to keep the religious side going.

The first year we went we had to go to the synagogue to say afternoon prayers, but the next year when I organised the trip it was decided that this synagogue was not frum enough. So the boys ended up davening mincha by the wall of the old city of Boulogne, with rather bemused French passers-by heard muttering, “Qu’est-ce qui se passe? Le Mur des Lamentations est venu à Boulogne?” (“What is happening? Has the Wailing Wall come to Boulogne?”) For evening prayers the rabbi found that the bar of the Dover to London train was not being used, so the whole group piled in, but one rather rebellious boy escaped and told me “It’s like the black hole of Calcutta in there.” Then he was yanked back in by the rabbi to say his prayers.

I realised the rabbis had their work cut out trying to persuade the boys to be religious. I once gave a lift to a very secular Israeli who sounded positively anti-Semitic when he spoke about the rabbis and the Jewish aspects of the education he received at the school.

The rabbis also had to deal with alien influences and the temptations of the flesh. They went to great lengths on the only day that girls were allowed into the school, for the Chanukah service, to prevent any contact between boys and girls. Screens were erected to separate them and prevent them from even seeing each other. Then there was the time an Italian ice cream man parked his van outside the school at 4pm as the boys were coming out, only to be chased away by an indignant rabbi who then reprimanded the boys who had been tempted to buy some treif gelati.

I had some discussions with the teachers there about religious issues. I realised there was quite a wide spectrum of belief as can be found in Christian circles. Clearly Reform Judaism was a “big no-no” and I heard prominent Jewish institutions like The Jewish Chronicle and JFS (the Jewish Free School) being put down as “non-kosher”.

I also picked up divisions between Hassidic and non-Hassidic Jews. There were members of Lubavitch there and some of them did talk to me about their faith, which I found quite interesting. Joe Paley was one such. I understood that he, like me, had travelled down alternative roads before coming to his present faith and found him an interesting person. One thing which surprised me was that he accepted ideas like transmigration of the soul and reincarnation which are a “big no-no” in Biblical Christianity. Another person I spoke to was Shlomo Lewis who struck me as a gentle and mystical man. He told me that some people had called him fanatical. “Maybe you’re just more enthusiastic than most,” I said.

I remember one of the rabbis (can’t remember which one, might have been Shlomo) telling me that it was not that the Jews had kept the Sabbath, but the Sabbath had kept the Jews. I could see his point and that it was the observance of mitzvot – kosher food laws, Sabbath and festivals – that had kept the Jewish people maintaining their separate identity during the years of the dispersion. I was also made to understand that assimilation and Christianity were the main enemies to this identity, although it seemed to me that most of the Jewish people I had come across who did not keep these mitzvot had nothing to do with Christianity.

Most of the religious members of staff avoided talking about anything to do with God with me, but one or two did. One even asked me if I could find him a book written by a Jew about Jesus being the Messiah. I gave him Rays of Messiah’s Glory by David Baron, which he kept for several weeks before giving it back to me with the comment, “All the usual diatribes.” Clearly not impressed.

Once I was sitting in the staff room minding my own business and marking books when the only other person in the room, Osher Baddiel, who was extremely Orthodox, asked me, “What’s a Baptist Church?” I was not sure why he had asked me this and did not try to find out. I explained briefly that Catholic and Anglican churches baptise babies into the faith, but Baptists believe that you have to make a decision to repent and believe the Gospel in order to become a Christian and that you should be baptised after this. As a result they do not baptise babies, who cannot make such a decision, but only adults. I then said that when I became a Christian I was baptised.

“What were you before?” he asked. He looked a bit startled when he asked this and I wondered if he thought I might be Jewish.

“I was a Marxist, in the Communist Party,” I replied, telling him a bit about how I came to this decision.

He seemed quite puzzled by this and then said, “I don’t see what you mean. Communism is a Christian thing anyway.”

“How do you work that out?” I asked. “Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Mao were all atheists and Communist society has always persecuted Christians.” He broke off the conversation, but it dawned on me that as far as traditional Jews like Osher were concerned society was divided into Jews and Christians and everyone who was not a Jew, from Hitler to Billy Graham, was a Christian.

It turned out that Osher was also very anti-Zionist and was actually quite unpopular with some of the boys because of this. I found it quite interesting that the radical left-wing Jews I had known in the Communist Party and some of the ultra Orthodox Jews shared a common view of Israel as a calamity for the Jews. I had read Chaim Potok’s book The Chosen so I knew the reason why Ben Gurion declaring the state of Israel in 1948 without the aid of the Messiah was anathema to certain Orthodox Jews.

For my part I viewed the restoration of Israel as a fulfilment of Biblical prophecy and was interested to go along to lunchtime meetings of the school’s Israel Society from time to time. These showed Zionist films and were run by Danny Joseph, who told me I was the only teacher who ever came to these meetings. I was fascinated by the story of Israel coming into being as a modern nation in the aftermath of the Holocaust, and in the face of all the Arab opposition. And I was ashamed at the attempts to frustrate the rebirth of Israel by so many powers, including the failure of the British to honour their commitments to the Jewish people in the Balfour Declaration. I kept in touch with Danny for a while after we both left the school, when he became President of the Union of Jewish Students. The last I heard he had made aliyah to Israel (if you are reading this, Danny, I’d be pleased to hear from you).

Another lunchtime activity I attended occasionally was the “Gentiles’ Lunch Club” at The Mill, a pub at the end of Holders Hill Road. This was attended by Martin Lawrence, Liam Joughin and Clive Johnson, but also by Ivan Marks and Jeff Soester who were Jewish. Actually it was an opportunity for the less religious Jewish teachers and the Gentiles to get together and talk about the goings-on at the school, sometimes explained by Ivan or Jeff. On one occasion I remember Liam Joughin, an Irish Catholic, getting very excited about one of the wall posters he had read describing what happens on Purim. “It’s a wonderful religion this,” he said. “You’re supposed to get so drunk that you can’t tell the difference between ‘blessed be Mordechai’ and ‘cursed be Haman’, and ‘blessed be Haman’ and ‘cursed be Mordechai’.”

Contrary to some of the comments I have read on melchett mike, I don’t think anyone got drunk at these meetings – half a bitter was about the ration – and it was more of an opportunity to talk freely without worrying about what the more religious elements at the school would think. There was quite a bit of negativity towards those elements and, as a Christian, I was a bit more charitable towards them and actually did not go all the time as I sometimes found the negativity got me down.

The drink problem I actually found difficult at Hasmonean was the habit of having a l’chayim at break times when one of the staff had an addition to their family or marriage. I am quite a light drinker – not teetotal but I only have an occasional beer or glass of wine – and the thought of drinking sherry or whiskey at 11 o’clock in the morning and then having to teach 3C French was not really to my liking.

One time I was sitting in a classroom during the lunch hour on my own. I had gone there for a bit of peace and quiet and was actually reading the Bible. One of the religious boys came in and saw that I was reading Isaiah and was somewhat astonished. “What are you doing?” he asked. “You can’t just read the Bible like that.”

“But I do it every day,” I said.

“We would never sit down and read the Bible on its own. You have to read the Commentaries. It’s like drinking Ribena without water,” he said.

I asked one of the rabbis about this and he said that according to Judaism God gave the Oral Torah to interpret the Written Torah and this was passed on by word of mouth from Moses until it was written down in the Talmud. He said “Our religion is ninety percent Talmud and ten percent Tenach.” Later I mentioned this to another rabbi who said “Ninety percent is too low for the Talmud.” I had noticed the big books being carried around by the rabbis and read the Hebrew words “Talmud Bavli” and wondered if anything good could come out of Babylon. In my reading of the Bible I could not see any reference to an Oral Torah and realised that this was one of the areas of disagreement between our faiths.

One of the boys who I got to know at Hasmonean was Simon Harris, who came to me for extra French lessons as he had failed his O-Level. He was bright and wanted to be a rabbi, but with a more open approach to Jewish Orthodoxy than was practised by many in the school. Simon was involved in the Campaign for Soviet Jewry and was interested to find out about my activities on behalf of Soviet Christians.

On one occasion he said that his sister had attended a Soviet exhibition at Earls Court and been arrested for putting “Free Sharansky” stickers on the exhibits. She had been treated badly, in an anti-Semitic manner, and he wanted to go there dressed as an Orthodox Jew and see if there was any hostility from the Russians. He asked me to go along with him. I agreed, but drew the line at the stickers on the exhibits. I took along a few of our leaflets about Soviet Christians and some copies of the Gospel in Russian. Far from being arrested we had some opportunities to speak to Russians there and one of my really good memories is of Simon and me standing in the middle of Earls Court discussing the existence of God with a Russian atheist who was part of the exhibition. I felt it was a good bit of Christian-Jewish cooperation, and it might have helped Simon when he later became Chief Rabbi of Ireland. I went to meet him once on a visit to Dublin.

One day, in 1980, I was covering for an absent teacher, while the class got on with their work. One of the boys put his hand up and said, “Please sir, I want to ask you something. You’re a Christian. Why do you Christians say we killed Jesus?”

It was a bit of a shock but I decided I would answer this question as it is one of the issues I felt very strongly about and is the theme of talks I give in churches. The Christian teaching of contempt for the Jews and persecution of Jewish people because of the crucifixion is a gross distortion of the New Testament and a disgrace. I explained that the church may have taught this but Jesus did not. He said that he laid down his life of his own accord and the Apostles taught that all of us, Jews and Gentiles, were responsible for his death, because he died for our sins. A true understanding of the Scriptures should lead Christians to love Jewish people.

This resulted in a huge barrage of questions and I realised how much this issue was a cause of pain to Jewish people. I tried to answer the questions as best I could. In the process I guess I said more than was acceptable about Jesus. The son of one of the more “hard line” rabbis was in the class and the next day a rabbi came up to me and said, “Mr. Pearce, we know you are a Christian and we respect your faith, but while you are at this school you should not say any more about the founder of Christianity.”

I realised it was probably time to move on and decided to hand in my notice. Mr. Stanton was sorry to hear that I was going. When the time came to leave, I was amazed to receive a number of cards and good wishes from the boys and the staff. On my last day I went for a walk around the playground during break and was moved by how many boys came up to talk to me to wish me well. I still look back on my time at Hasmonean as my best time in teaching. I started off my time there well disposed towards Jewish people, and also left well disposed towards them. And, to set the record straight, I did not at any stage during my time there try to dissuade boys from Judaism.

A postscript to all of this. I did some supply teaching at Barnet schools for a couple of years afterwards, then taught at Hampstead School and Christ Church School in Finchley. During my period on supply, I was teaching French at Copthall Girls School. There I met an Orthodox Jewish lady who was also teaching French. We got talking about previous jobs we had had and I mentioned that I had taught at Hasmonean.

“When were you at Hasmonean?” she asked incredulously. When I gave her the time I was there, she said, “You got my job!”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

It turned out she had been appointed to the job of French teacher, but there had then been an objection that, as she was a young woman (although married and Orthodox), she might be a temptation to the boys. So they had told her that she could not teach at the school. That explained to me the great rush there had been to appoint me.

God moves in mysterious ways!

I left teaching permanently in 1988 and have been involved in Christian ministry ever since. Having a continuing interest in Israel and Jewish matters has led me to write and speak in Christian circles on these subjects. I have written three books, and produce a quarterly magazine which deals with contemporary issues in the light of Bible prophecy. We now produce this in several languages and have outlets in many countries in Europe, Africa and Asia. We also have a website which includes articles about Israel. We believe in the restoration of Israel as a fulfilment of Bible prophecy and make a stand against the anti-Zionism which seeks its destruction. I am also the pastor of The Bridge Christian Fellowship which meets in Bridge Lane, Golders Green, where I often see and talk to one of the rabbis from Hasmonean on his way to daven at the shul down the road. My wife, Nikki, and I enjoyed 27 years together until she became ill with cancer of the bone marrow, and died in 1998.

Next on Hasmo Legends, Part IX: Moishe Schimmel

Hasmo Legends IX: Moishe Schimmel

Allegedly . . .

https://www.filmibeat.com/music/international/2009/madonna-dumps-luz-moses-200409.html

Moishe Schimmel was a pupil at Hasmonean Grammar School for Boys between 1975 and 1982.Next on Hasmo Legends, Part X: Mad Dogs and English Teachers

Hasmo Legends VIII: A Pearcing Insight (Part I)

by Tony Pearce

My encounter with Hasmonean Grammar School for Boys began in the summer of 1976. I needed a teaching job and, as I was living in Golders Green at the time, the London Borough of Barnet was my first port of call. I rang up the Education Department and asked if they had anything going for the autumn term.

“They need a French teacher at Hasmonean,” said the voice on the other end of the line.

“But I’m not Jewish,” I replied.

“Doesn’t matter,” said the voice.

So I sent off an application form with letters of reference and waited to see what would happen.

In fact the very next day Mrs. Hepner, the school secretary, came round to our flat with a letter inviting me to an interview with Mr. Stanton, the headmaster. It was a bit of an embarrassment because it was one of the hottest days of the year and I was in the back garden sunbathing with only a swimming costume on. She had just come from a wedding. As we lived in the top floor flat there was no way for me to slip in the back door and put something else on. So there I stood, on the doorstep, in my bathing costume with this elegant Orthodox Jewish lady dressed up to the nines. My wife said I blushed from head to toe, but Mrs. Hepner seemed quite amused about it at all and as far as I know did not hold it against me.

I turned up at the interview with Mr. Stanton and Rabbi Roberg, who asked me various questions and seemed quite impressed with my academic qualifications (public school and Cambridge). “I see you went to Bedford School,” said Mr. Stanton. “Did you know a Mrs. Freyhan there?”

“Yes, she taught me music in the primary school,” I replied. Turned out she was a German Jewish refugee he helped come out of Germany in the thirties, so he seemed quite chuffed about the connection and I felt I was on to a good thing.

“We would like you to have the job,” he concluded, “but we have a rule that every teacher must be interviewed by Dr Schonfeld, the founder of the school. He was a great man in his time, but he is a bit elderly now.”

Without being critical of the great man, Mr. Stanton was clearly trying to convey to me that this would not be a normal interview. So the next day, with a mixture of curiosity and trepidation, I went to be interviewed by Dr Schonfeld, this time at Hasmonean Girls’ School. He was not there at the appointed time and I hung around wondering if I had lost the plot somewhere. About half an hour later he came in and said, “I’m late.”

“Never mind,” I said, trying to be conciliatory.

“‘Never mind!'” he snorted indignantly. “He says ‘Never mind’ to me!” This one was not going to be so easy. He then began asking me all kind of questions which had nothing to do with teaching, and writing things down on a scrap of paper. Finally he said, “I see you are a Christian. What kind of Christian are you?”

Funny thing happened then. At the very moment he asked this question, the door opened and a man came in whom he obviously had not seen for a long time. He stood up and began talking excitedly in Yiddish and the conversation went on for about ten minutes. Meanwhile I am sitting there wondering how to answer this question. Should I be theological, evangelical, talk about Christian-Jewish relations? I needn’t have bothered because the Yiddish-speaking man then went out, and Dr Schonfeld turned to me and said, “All right, you’ll do,” and walked out without ever finding out what kind of Christian I was.

So I became a member of the staff at Hasmonean Grammar School for Boys. I had the summer holidays to prepare for this unique cultural experience and, at the beginning of September, I found myself in the staff room looking out of the window on the boys arriving for school. The only other teacher there was Jeff Soester, who started chatting to me. “Look at them – the cream of North London Jewry,” he said. “They can be mischievous and play you up, and they’re by no means all geniuses, but they’re not violent.”

Nice to know, as one of my previous teaching assignments had been at Tulse Hill School, a monstrous eight-storey slab of a building between Brixton and Tulse Hill in South London (now mercifully demolished). There, 1,800 boys, mainly from Brixton, fought their way through the educational system, and the teachers needed to know more about urban guerrilla warfare than the subjects they were supposed to be teaching. National Union of Teachers meetings were dog fights between rival groups of Trotskyite communists, and Mitch Taylor’s NUT meetings at Hasmonean were quite tame in comparison.

As far as I know I don’t have any Jewish blood, but I already had an interest in Jewish issues and people, and in Israel, long before I came to Hasmonean. In the sixties, I had been a student lefty and political activist (and an agnostic), during which time I came to know a number of secular Marxist Jews. And my studies in German had taken me on frequent trips to Germany, including attending a German school for a term. While I was there one of the big questions which came to me was, “How was it possible that these people who seemed so ordinary and not so different from us could have followed someone as evil as Hitler?” This raised another question, “Why do people always pick on the Jews?” At school and at university I had Jewish friends and felt sympathy towards Jewish people.

In May 1967, I was revising for my second year exams when the news came through of the build up of Arab forces on the borders of Israel. The newspapers were predicting a war and I read of Nasser of Egypt threatening to drive the Jews into the sea. I felt deeply involved in the issue and for some reason, which I could not quite explain, I wanted to help Israel. One day I hitchhiked down to London, went to an Israeli agency and offered to go out to help Israel if there was a war. My parents were understandably horrified at this idea and as it turned out, when war did break out in June, Israel did very well in six days without any help from me. As the Israelis went into Jerusalem I knew that something very important had happened, although I did not know why. 

In 1970, I became a ‘born again’ Christian. This followed a series of incidents including, in my first teaching post, two boys who were committed Christians challenging me on the fact that I professed atheism but had not read the Bible. One of the boys, Alec, in a debate I challenged them to, in the school library, spoke of prophecies: “It says in the Bible that the Jews will go back to Israel and that there will be a lot of trouble over Jerusalem and then Jesus will come back.” Israel, Jerusalem, the Jews. My mind raced back two years to the 1967 Six Day War and I wondered if that was the reason I had felt that there was something so important about that event. I decided I ought to read the Bible to check this out for myself. 

I then met Nikki, who had also been in the Communist Party but then become a Christian, who was to become my wife. Through her I met a man called Richard Wurmbrand, who made a great impression on me. He was a Romanian Jew who had suffered under the fascists during the Second World War, then read the New Testament and become a believer in Jesus. After the War, he became pastor of a Baptist Church in Romania, now a Communist state in the Soviet bloc. When he refused to declare his loyalty to the state underneath a large picture of Stalin, but publicly proclaimed his loyalty to the Lord, he was arrested and spent 14 years in prison. He then came to the West to tell the story of what was happening to Christians under Communism. He spoke of the evils of the system but also preached that we should love the Communists as people. Under his influence, Nikki and I set up a Christian outreach to the radical left in London and also a support group for Christians persecuted under Communism.

This brought us into contact with Jewish people on two fronts. Firstly, there were many Jews in the Communist Party at that time and we often ended up having interesting discussions with left wing Jewish atheists, including members of Young Mapam. Secondly, our campaign for Christians in the Soviet Union brought us into contact with The 35s (Women’s Campaign for Soviet Jewry) who were incredibly active in pursuing visiting Soviet delegations to London and telling them to release Natan Sharansky and other Soviet Jews imprisoned for seeking to emigrate to Israel. We often joined them and they were pleased to have us alongside them. We even encountered Gorbachev before he became President.

We also ended up living in Golders Green, in a flat in The Drive, where most of our neighbours were Orthodox Jews. From time to time the family over the road would knock on our door on a Friday night to ask us to come and switch on an electrical appliance after the Sabbath had come in.

By this time I had read the whole of the Bible, learned a bit of biblical Hebrew and studied something of church history, finding out about the oppression of Jewish communities in Europe by the professing Christian church. I knew that for Jewish people in general Christianity was not good news and was horrified to read of pogroms and persecutions against the Jews led by church leaders. I was sickened by statements of contempt for the Jews by such leaders, who stood Jesus’ teaching on its head and left a terrible legacy of bitterness and hostility. I also learned about nineteenth century British Christians who were pro-Jewish and supported the idea of a restored Jewish state in Israel. I came to believe that the prophecies of the Bible point to the restoration of Israel as a significant event in the last days of this age.

So I did not arrive at Hasmonean as a complete ignoramus of Jewish issues and the Jewish community. Coming to the school was interesting because while I had met quite a wide spectrum of Jewish people, from Marxist atheists to ultra Orthodox, they had always been the minority. Now I was to experience what it would be like ‘on the inside’, as a minority Gentile.

I knew that most Jews had ‘issues’ with Jesus and that I would not be able to start a lunchtime Christian Union as I had at Tulse Hill, but I also decided that if anyone asked me questions about what I believed in I would answer them . . .

Next on Hasmo Legends, Part VIII: A Pearcing Insight (Part II)

Hasmo Legends VII: “Woody” Woodthorpe Harrison

Many Orthodox Jews entertain a genuinely held belief that all non-Jews – or “goyim”, as they usually refer to them – are anti-Semites, drunks, or both. It is not difficult to understand, therefore, how so many impressionable young Hasmo boys came to view their Gentile pedagogues as perpetually inebriated Oswald Mosleys. None of this nonsense, however, should cloud our judgment of Hasmonean’s former Economics and British Constitution teacher, Mr. Woodthorpe Harrison.

Mr. Harrison – or “Woody”, as he was affectionately known – most definitely did like a drink, but we never saw him drunk. And, while he may have made the odd comment about Jews, they were never nearly as offensive as those made by some of his Jewish colleagues. Commenters to melchett mike have already made reference to Albert Meyer, who would commence his first form classes with “You are all Jewish pigs!” Then there was “Noddy” Lever, who would rattle the coins in his pocket to demonstrate “Jewish music”. “What do you call a Jewish piano?” he would ask. “A cash register.”

With colleagues like Osher Baddiel, who would warn Hasmo boys to “Never trust a goy”, Mr. Harrison could have been forgiven for harbouring anti-Semitic views. He was too far too intelligent and educated a man, however, to let isolated bigotry cloud his judgement.

Woody did occasionally express his disappointment in us – “If I were to tell my friends in the City that you are the future Rothschilds, the Stock Exchange would collapse” – and, when especially disgusted, he would wonder out loud how boys encouraged by their religion to wash their hands before every meal could behave in such a fashion. These, however, were not intended as insults, but quite the opposite – Woody expected more of Jews than of his fellow Gentiles.

Woody's Oxford chums, Ted Heath & Harold Wilson

Mr. Harrison’s experiences at Oxford University and during the Second World War were the ones that shaped him. From the mid-sixties to mid-seventies, British politics was dominated by Prime Ministers Harold Wilson (Labour) and Edward Heath (Conservative). And Mr. Harrison saw them as his peers, having studied PPE (Philosophy, Politics and Economics) with them at Oxford, in the 1930s. Following his graduation, Mr. Harrison served in North Africa during the Second World War. He wore his officer tag proudly, and respected ex-Hasmo boys who subsequently enlisted in the IDF.

Mr. Harrison was married before the end of the War, and he related how he had been notified – whilst playing cards with fellow officers – of the birth of his first child. His new paternal responsibilities, he said, altered his perspective on life.

He was stationed in Greece by then, and involved in rebuilding its economy to prevent it falling to Communism. He related how a beautiful Greek woman had used her charms to try and obtain paper – which was in short supply at the time – from the money-printing press he was in charge of. And he was about to comply, until he recalled the words of Lord Acton: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

By 1953, Mr. Harrison was living back in London with his family. Never much of a monarchist, until that point, he confessed to having had “a tear in [his] eye” after hiring a room over a pub to watch the Queen’s coronation procession.

Woody joined Hasmonean’s teaching staff around 1960. And, every Monday to Friday morning, he would drive his Mini Minor through the gates of the school without a care in the world, blissfully unaware of the antics of the day ahead. On one such, a potato was shoved up his car exhaust. Just another day at Hasmonean Grammar School for Boys.

Sporting his trademark Harris Tweed jacket and brightly-coloured bow tie, Woody would stride proudly towards his class, the day’s Times under his arm (and memories of North Africa perhaps to the fore). His ruddy head was a daily reminder of the miracle of the splitting of the Red Sea, a bald central ridge between two leaping waves of Ben Gurion-style white hair.

Eagerly awaiting Woody’s arrival, we would prance and skip around outside the classroom, in an effeminate display probably inspired by Monty Python‘s Upper Class Twit of the Year sketch. And, as he emerged from the shadows of Hasmonean’s poorly lit corridors, we would also feign mild anxiety attacks. “Oh dear! Quick! Teacher is coming! Quick! Quick! Oh dear!”

All of this would really piss Woody off (which was, of course, why we did it). “Oh, do stop that prancing around!” he would bellow. Another likely legacy of Woody’s army service was his firm view that men should act like men, and display leadership qualities (“Now, when you go into your bank, demand to see their balance sheet. And, if they refuse, demand to see the manager.”)

"Woody" and entourage, in the playground

Woody was clearly more interested in being a raconteur than a teacher. It was obvious that he invested little or no time, thought, or preparation in or for any lesson, and he would certainly never allow a syllabus to get in the way of a good story. In fact, for Woody, a curriculum was an unnecessary encroachment into 45 minutes of fond reminiscence – especially on college and the War – and enjoyable “shooting the breeze”. On asking Woody, for revision purposes, to list the subjects that he had taught that year, David Miller received a slap for his impertinence.

Unshackled by a syllabus, every Woody lesson, Economics or British Constitution, without exception, would go back to banks’ balance sheets, the Gold Standard, the inflationary Greek Drachma, the Queen’s coronation, or his cat (“Finnegan” or “Flannigan”).

“Have I ever told you about the Gold Standard?” was how Woody would commence a typical lesson. This was, apparently, the main economic issue during his time at Oxford. By the seventies, of course, it was a dead one . . . though no one had thought to inform him.

Alternatively, he would start “If you had a bag full of Greek Drachma notes, the bag would be stolen and the money left behind . . .”

Mr. Harrison was a clever man, who effortlessly completed The Times crossword every day. It was only a shame – or stroke of luck (depending on your perspective) – that his passion for Economics didn’t stretch past the Bretton Woods Gold Standard or post-War Greek fiscal policy.

Woody’s tangential meanderings were, anyway, always interrupted. It was “Miller time”:

“Please, sir, Marks is being a cad.”

“Oh, do shut up, boy!”

“Okay, sir.”

“No, I have the last word. Now don’t say anything.”

“Okay, sir.”

“I just said ‘Don’t say anything.'”

“I didn’t, sir.”

“You just did. Again. Now shut up, or you will get it.”

“Oh gosh, sir!”

“No!!”

And, when Woody tried to regale us with tales of his intimacy with another Greek ‘goddess’, we went into Pythonesque mode:

“Can we open the window, sir?”

“Yes, sir, it is very stuffy in here.”

Mr. Harrison was a decent man. And, unlike so many of his Hasmonean colleagues, he was rarely vindictive or cruel. He was, however, prone to eruptions, having been pushed too far by chutzpadik boys hell-bent on seeing him “lose it”. Any prank, however complex, always seemed worth the planning. Soon after opining that, if we purchased The Times every day, we would be halfway towards passing our exam, Woody entered the classroom to find all of us hidden behind our broadsheets:

“Put those damned newspapers down!”

We brayed. (Woody particularly disdained our poor impersonations of a donkey.)

“Oh, do stop braying!”

Reinvigorated, we brayed again.

“Stop braying! And put those damned newspapers down!”

Lowering them revealed all of us to be wearing Halloween masks. Woody went berserk, hitting Miller.

As with most Hasmo Legends, we were enjoying Woody’s lessons for all the wrong reasons, and the daily challenge of wreaking new havoc jeopardised our examination prospects. As a result, Woody’s two-year Economics A-Level course was abandoned at its halfway point, as new teacher Mrs. Stern was forced to cram the syllabus into just one year.

But Mr. Harrison’s lasting impression on so many ex-Hasmo boys (as seen by comments to melchett mike) had nothing to do with his teaching, but everything to do with his being colourful and different. And, in an institution where a teacher’s individuality usually seemed to hinge on his chosen means of corporal punishment, Woody’s wonderful eccentricity was a breath of fresh air.

According to melchett mike, Woody was still at Hasmo in 1979 (at least). Seeing as his former Oxford peers, Wilson and Heath, were born in 1916, it is reasonable to assume that, if he were alive today, Woodthorpe Harrison would be in his early to mid nineties.

If he is still with us, let us hope that he is enjoying his ripe old age. If not, there are surely angels in Heaven, in maroon blazers, braying sweetly specially for him.

Original draft: Nick Kopaloff & Daniel Marks.

Revised & edited: melchett mike.

[If any ex-Hasmo boys are in possession of a photograph of “Woody” Harrison – or any other good Hasmo photos for that matter – my offer of a soya roll, or one half of a chocolate rice crispies, in exchange remains ‘on the table’.]

Next on Hasmo Legends, Part VIII: A Pearcing Insight (Part I)

Hasmo Legends VI: Rabbi “Sid” Cooper – the Pinching Preacher

Ex-Brampton Grove boy, "Our 'Enry"

When people talk about “Cooper, the greatest British fighter never to win a world title”, they are usually referring to Sir Henry (right), the former British, European and Commonwealth heavyweight boxing champion. There is, however, another “Cooper”, Rabbi Dovid – Emeritus minister at North Hendon Adass Yisroel Synagogue, and former Jewish Studies teacher at Hasmonean – whose supreme, if unorthodox, fighting skills also went sadly unrewarded on the world stage (coincidentally, for many years, the two Coopers lived in close proximity to one other, in Hendon).

The Punching Preacher

And while the two-time world heavyweight boxing champion, and ordained Christian minister, George Foreman (left) – “The Punching Preacher” – achieved international fame and riches, the pinching ability of Rabbi Cooper left its mark only on the cheeks and memories of ex-Hasmo boys . . . but what a mark!

Indeed, so ferocious was Rabbi Cooper’s pinching that he is thought to have earned his nickname, “Sid”, after the late Sex Pistol, Sid Vicious. On each and every rendition of the school song, Ner Le’Ragli (A Light unto my Feet), the word tzidkecha (Your righteousness) would, instead, be sung – with a hugely exaggerated first syllable – sidkecha, to the clear displeasure of Hasmo’s religious ‘elite’.

The Pinching Preacher

Rabbi Cooper (right) was as resourceful and versatile a pincher as the very best of punchers (who can switch between southpaw and orthodox stances, as circumstances and opponent dictate). He would employ the traditional “Yiddishe great-uncle” nuckle approach on cheeks, whilst reverting to thumb-and-index-finger tactics to extract maximum grip on upper arms (often protected by thick school blazers and jumpers). If only pinching were a recognised world sport, he surely “coulda been a contender”.

Rabbi Cooper enjoys a similar place to Cyril in the consciousness of ex-Hasmo boys fortunate enough to have sat ‘ringside’. And his classes were no less eagerly anticipated than the legendary Welshman’s. If the prevailing spirit in Cyril’s lessons, however, was one of the early stages of revolution, that in Rabbi Cooper’s was of all-out anarchy. Whenever a boy was on the receiving end of a pinch, the rest of the class would scream “De pinch! De pinch!” – Rabbi Cooper couldn’t pronounce his th‘s – as if the studio audience at North Hendon’s very own Jerry Springer Show. It was pure pandemonium.

At the point of terminating “de pinch” – which could last for as long as 12 seconds for serial and/or more serious offenders, and often with a final twist for good measure – Rabbi Cooper would let out a “humph”, reminiscent of the sound of exasperation Oliver Hardy would emit when Stan Laurel had landed him in “another fine mess”. And, in his intense concentration, to extract maximum remorse from his young victims, he would bite his lower lip.

We eventually devised an ingenious method of softening the effects of “de pinch”, blowing up our cheeks with air just before impact. But, as Rabbi Cooper always reminded us (and we never stopped to question why), “It’s got to hurt”. When we informed him how much it did hurt (usually exaggerated . . . though it did), he would retort “Yup, dat’s de idea!”

Rabbi Cooper’s corporal punishments – unlike those of so many of his (especially Jewish Studies) colleagues – were the product of an “old school” puritanism rather than a sadistic malevolence. A friend of mine, who used to attend North Hendon Adass, once quoted him as lamenting, in his Shabbos droshoh (sermon), that “We are not six miles from Soho; and I know, because I have measured it in my own car” (though I suspect the second part may have been the product of said friend’s overripe imagination). 

Indeed, so naive and unworldly was Rabbi Cooper, that he took it for granted that even young Hasmo upstarts would revere all things Holy in the same way that he did. At one stage, he held his lessons in his Synagogue, adjacent to the school – there was probably a shortage of classrooms and/or chairs in the latter – and, when our behaviour would get out of control (as it inevitably would), Rabbi Cooper would point up at the inscription above the Aron HaKodesh (Holy Ark, containing the Torah scrolls) and scream “Dah lifnei mi ata omed” (Know before Whom you stand).

When that didn’t work (as it never did), he would declare “Rrright [Rabbi Cooper also rolled his r‘s], I am now going to open the Aron HaKodesh.”  After all, how could that not fill us with the requisite awe? But after he had done so, and we had all started wildly cheering, Rabbi Cooper had reached the point of no return – he then had to remove a Sefer Torah from the Ark, and even open it on the Bimah (prayer desk). Needless to say, his noble efforts were in vain, and he was always left asking (rhetorically), “Is dare nothing sacred?”

As far as we were concerned, the rowed Synagogue seating was ideal, as it enabled us to stay out of reach of “de  pinch”. Chases up and down rows and aisles would often ensue, with only one winner.

In spite of his essential goodness, Rabbi Cooper was prone to the same small-minded intolerance – or, at least, lack of respect for private/family life – as his Jewish Studies colleagues. On overhearing Danny Reiss discuss with Henri Berest where they would be watching the following Saturday’s FA Cup Final – as so many, even relatively observant, households once did, “on the Shabbos clock” – he denounced Danny, in front of both headmaster Rabbi Roberg and his classmates, as “de roshoh [evil] Reiss” (it does alliterate nicely). Henri, on the other hand, avoided censure, no doubt because his family were members of the Adass rather than the United Synagogue.

My favourite Rabbi Cooper (and perhaps even Hasmo) story goes back to our first year at the school, and involves his – or, rather, the cheeks of his – legendary sparring partner, Max Gittelmon. We had just embarked on a new mesechta (tractate) of Mishna (the oral Talmud), in the form of those thin, crisp new paperbacks. Rabbi Cooper was extremely keen for us to preserve their spines, and instructed us, in no uncertain terms, not to fold back the covers. Gittelmon, however, having entered the classroom late, missed the instruction. Perfect! (Hasmonean was all about cruelty to classmates.)

After Gittelmon had taken his seat, Laurence Maslin and I – “Shekoyach [well done], Isaacson and Maslin, for ruining another shiur [lesson]!” – pretending to fold back the covers of our Mishnayes, informed him that Rabbi Cooper “wants  us to fold them back”. And, gullible to a fault, Gittelmon duly complied. When Rabbi Cooper spotted this, a few minutes later, Gittelmon’s cheeks received such a fearsome pummelling that he cried out a Golders Green version of “No más, no más” (no more, no more – the infamous words used by Roberto Duran, in 1980, to bring an end to his punishment at the hands of Sugar Ray Leonard).

Johnny Rotten & Sid Vicious

Perhaps playing along with the Sex Pistols (right) origins of his nickname (not!), Rabbi Cooper would regularly call us “rrrotters”, “a rrrotten lot”, and “rrrotten to the core”. He would continue the metaphor with his view that “there is always one rrrotten apple” (often yours truly). Another favoured reproach was “You are low.” He would simply despair at our chutzpah, commiserating with “de poor parents” (an expression that my father absolutely loved . . . and, no doubt, understood).

In spite of being extremely well-respected by his congregants – as a kind, learned, and God-fearing leader – Rabbi Cooper was simply not cut out to teach teenage delinquents. That he was allowed to do so is further proof (should any be required) of the complete lack of thought, not to say incompetence, so characteristic of Hasmonean (in those days, at least).

Rabbi Cooper was charged with invigilating our mathematics O-level examination and expected, quite ludicrously, to collect the papers of around a hundred examinees on his own. When he gave the order for “pens down”, seeing that he was unassisted, we took it as a ‘green light’ to steal extra time. When the head of maths, Jack Ordman, stormed into the examination hall some twenty minutes later, fuming, and claiming that he would be notifying the University of London Examination Board, we all knew that he was talking a lot of bollocks, as it would have reflected awfully both on the school and on him personally.

If Hasmonean’s decision makers had as much respect for a talmid chacham (learned man) as they expected us Hasmo boys to have, they would never have exposed Rabbi Cooper to such “rrrotters”. That said, our school days and memories would have been much the poorer for it.

De roshoh Isaacson . . . aka melchett mike

[To listen to a recording of the Hasmo School Choir from Speech Day 1983 – singing Baruch Habah, Ma Tovu, Ner Le’Ragli (featuring a just audible sidkecha), God Save the Queen, and HaTikvah (preceded by Mitch Taylor’s idiotic, and fluffed, request for a substitution of words) – click here. Thanks to Steve Graniewitz for supplying the recording, Eli Perl for uploading it . . . and Shimon Soester-Soreq for trying to! ;-)]

Next on Hasmo Legends, Part VII: “Woody” Woodthorpe Harrison