Page 8 - Kol Bogrei Habonim - October 19
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bought it when it was still in the thousands. I have One of them, in Hebrew was Ma’an Lo Yadua
a successor, a girl who worked in the office for Ma’an Lo Yadua is a play. I translated the book
some time and learnt the way things worked and and someone adapted it as a play. A company set
she became the Director and changed it to Global up under the Kibbutz Theatre has given 300
JCC. That is one of my achievements. I’m very performances and has visited North America four
proud of having founded that office and times, performing in Hebrew. The play is called
organization. I retired in 1984, persuaded by my Address Unknown.
boss in New York that I needed to retire at a
regular date as he had someone in mind to become
the director of the office. Although I retired in
1984, I was called back to the round-the-world
confederation again and I stayed another sixteen
years.
In Israel or in the United States?
Here! I’ve only been away on shlichut. When I
was running the world confederation, I was
visiting JCCs in various countries and holding Kathrine Taylor, the author of Address Unknown
meetings and conferences there. Essentially, that’s lived in San Francisco and she wrote the book
it. I finished sixteen more years of running the after she saw how students coming back from
world confederation and I won’t bother you with Germany treated Jews in the street. The book
all the details of creation and problems of became a play and was produced in various
administration. It’s even bigger today. There are countries, Turkey, Britain, France and here in
even connections with all the ex-Russian and Israel it was produced in Hebrew. It was shown
Asian countries, which have Jewish Community here and Shimon Peres was very much for it; he
Centres. loved the story. They took the Hebrew play with
surtitles in English in Hebrew for tours in
When I finished working in Jerusalem I began America. I did the translation in the last days of
doing translation. I translated about a dozen my work in Jerusalem.
books, either from Hebrew to English or English
to Hebrew. When you were very young, you had a Hebrew
education, which meant that you were
bilingual from quite a young age. Perhaps you
would like to tell us a bit about that
I went every day to school in the morning, and at
five o’clock I went to a very pro-Zionist, pro-
Hebrew cheder of six hundred children in east
London for ten years, so I knew Hebrew…
You lived in east London
In Whitechapel. I was born in east London.
You had no academic education
The only academic education I had was at
Seminar HaKibbutzim. I’m a graduate of Seminar
HaKibbutzim. I did courses at Wayne University
in Detroit relating to methods of instruction of a
foreign language.
I want to finish off with why I mentioned Edith’s
name. Being a British Jewish soldier entitled me
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