Cardiff

We were in Cardiff all day yesterday. It’s a really charming city filled with fabulous buildings and massive green spaces. It feels very manageable in terms of its size and, having driven all over the place yesterday, it turned out to be very easy to navigate. 

The day started with breakfast in a cafe on Cathedral Road. We had a meeting with a lovely chap who runs a TV production company and chatted a lot about the synagogue in Merthyr.

From Cathedral Road, we headed down to the docks, and the rather wonderful set of buildings around the Mermaid Quay, which include the spectacular Millennium Centre with its copper and slate walls.

We were in the area to visit the Senedd Building, where a fascinating exhibition was being staged about Jewish people in South Wales. We were meeting its organisers whom I’m sure were a little disappointed that more people weren’t buzzing around the building. The Senedd is where the Welsh Assembly do their debating, but they’re in recess at the moment, which meant the place was almost empty. It’s actually quite difficult to get into the space and we had to pass through all manner of security measures. I even had to remove my belt!

We went on a little Ferris wheel after the meeting, which has wonderful views over Cardiff Bay and all the amazing buildings down there. It was for children really, but what the heck! Michael is worse than me when it comes to heights and spent most of the ride with his eyes closed, telling me he’d never forgive me for forcing him onto it! 

From the docks, we went up to one of the Northern districts of the city to visit a pair of very colourful elderly Jewish chaps who’d lived in Merthyr in their youth, and were able to share with us their wonderful memories about the Jewish community in that particular town. There were some lovely stories about them as young men rushing down the high street of the town, looking for Jewish people to form a minyan in the synagogue, which is the ten Jewish men over the age of 13 required to do anything religious. As he told the story, he was receiving phone calls from people at the shul who were trying to get a minyan together for that night’s service!

Both men were ferociously patriotic in terms of their Welshness, which is not unusual for Welsh Jews, who will often quote Leo Abse saying that to be a Welsh Jew is taking non conformism to the nth degee. “You’re more Jewish than Abraham and more Welsh than Dai Bach!” Both men’s parents had also been born in Wales and many of their relatives were buried in the Jewish cemetery we’d visited the day before. One of their fathers even had memories of the early 20th Century Tredagor Riots, where Jewish houses and shops were attacked by antisemitic mobs.

Our day ended with a special visit to the Orthodox shul in Cardiff, which is a lovely modern building with stunning stained glass windows representing the Jewish months and the major festivals.

We drove home in very peculiar weather. It rained, then the early evening sun came out, then it rained again. Unsurprisingly, there was a rather impressive rainbow. It was fabulous really.