Feedback & Comments

Leave your feedback

    By opting in to our mailing list, you agree to PASCAL THEATRE COMPANY using your personal data to send you emails regarding PASCAL THEATRE COMPANY. You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of of our email. Please read our privacy policy.

    We are delighted to have received positive and enthusiastic feedback from many people who have engaged with the website. We reproduce below a range of comments,  listed in alphabetical order of commenters’ names. Most of feedback received to date is relatively short, but a few individuals have written longer statements or reviews

    I listened carefully to the project, music, talks etc.. You have done a marvellous and huge job, very interested and probably unprecedented. Bravo and thank you.

    Nadia Cavaliero Arditti [one of our interviewees]

    Utterly gorgeous idea and production! bravo! keeping the memories alive in ways that preserve such somatic and aesthetic sensibility.

    Professor Emerita Glenna Batson, USA

    Some years ago, when I was working on my PhD research into the theological implications of the music of the UK Reform Jewish world, I encountered the Sephardi liturgical music which was the first musical soundscape of the first Reform synagogue in the UK, that of West London Synagogue. I attended a couple of Sephardi services, including an otherworldly experience at Selichot one year at Bevis Marks Synagogue, when chazanim from the wide reaches of the Sephardi, and Mizrachi, worlds shared their glorious musical selections with us. It was sublime, unlike anything I had ever heard before. 

    As I studied this music, I discovered that a congregant of mine, at a synagogue I then worked for, had been a choir member at Bevis Marks, and regaled me with stories of his times in the choir, of what it was like being one of the less wealthy members of the congregation, and the sometimes hilarious misunderstandings he encountered when he contracted a ‘mixed’ marriage, to an Ashkenazi woman. This all wetted my curiosity about this world.

    I’m an Ashkenazi Jew, and an immigrant myself. Most of what I learned about Jewish history in the UK revolved around the stories of the German Jewish refugees, so important in the development of the progressive movements here. As a Yiddishist, and a performer of Yiddish song, I am also uncovering the stories of that other Ashkenazi world, the Eastern European one from which my family stems. In the UK, it too is a bit of a hidden story. 

    But preceding all of that, is that history, of Bevis Marks, of the first community, the Spanish-Portuguese immigrants. I have read some of their historical documents appertaining to worship, and something of their congregational rules. I have encountered them in various novels, and I recently purchased a copy of an Egalitarian Masorti Sephardi siddur. EAJL, through which I am completing my cantorial studies, now offers sessions on Sephardi musical traditions and Mizrachi and Sephardic music and language can be heard through the JMI and at online sessions from the USA and Israel. Working from the present, I found I knew little about the past. 

    And then I found Pascal Theatre Company’s incredible website, produced by Julia Pascal and directed by Thomas Kampe, www.lostJews.org. It is simply wonderful, on a variety of levels. First of all, it documents the history of the Iberian Jews in this country, which inserts this community into its proper place within British society and the British Jewish world. Secondly, it is beautifully constructed, drawing you in with its colourful aesthetic. Thirdly, it is professionally presented. And fourthly, and most importantly, it is full of important and interesting information which includes personal reminiscence as well as archival material. 

    Because of this work, I now have somewhere to go, to dip into the history of our first Jewish immigrants, and I look forward to learning more both now as more is uncovered about this lost heritage .It is, in fact, no longer ‘lost.’

    Rabbi Barbara Borts

    I particularly like the way it is structured. I started at a point in history I know a little bit about around what the site refers to, correctly, as the Protestant Republic, and then kept clicking on more links, which I guess is how it is intended to work. I love the fact that a Quaker helped fund the first Sephardic synagogue and I had no idea of the antagonism between the Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews so there is lots to learn and this is a good way to learn it.  

    Andrew Cowie, Lecturer, Bath Spa University

    This is fabulous. Tell Anne [Sassoon] that her art is marvellous! What a treasure this website is… I’ve sent this around; people are stunned with admiration.

    So Gittelman, retired Provost of Tufts University, Boston

    Just wanted to drop a note to say I’ve been exploring the site this morning. It’s so beautifully put together, I love it, and will definitely recommend it to others (also fabulous that you got Heritage Lottery funding, congratulations, and well deserved). Your site is such a great project (marvellous research and great links) and must be keeping you busy now with promoting it.  Hopefully it will get lots of traction, and certainly it should be a resource for schools – when that is possible again.

    Christine Foster

    I am so inspired by your project finding the Sephardim! What a beautiful website!

    Emma Goldman-Sherman

    I am writing to thank you very much for the fascinating talk you gave last week on on Discovering and Documenting England’s Lost Jews.  As you could see it kept us all engaged and interested throughout the session and made connections for many of the members who enjoyed it with their knowledge from the past.   I very much appreciated the thought and preparation that you put into it and hope that we can get more engaged in the project in the future, reviving work that you did in the past.  Thank you for answering our questions!

    Rabbi Mark Goldstmith, Edgware & Hendon Reform Synagogue

    When you think of Jews in Britain, what are the first thoughts that come to mind? Perhaps the food, such as chicken soup, smoked salmon, and salt beef bagels? Or maybe it’s the countless number of Jews in the public eye? Entertainers like David Baddiel, Simon Amstell and Rachel Riley, not to mention political figures like Ed Miliband and Luciana Berger. However, what is it that all of these have in common? Yes, they are all Jewish, but more specifically, they all belong to the family of Ashkenazi Jews. I also belong to this family. Ashkenazi Jews are Jews whose lineage stems from Eastern Europe, predominantly Poland and Russia, and in Britain they make up at least ninety percent of the Jewish population. So, who are the remaining five to ten percent?

    Sephardi Jews, or Sephardim, originate from Spain and Portugal. After Ashkenazi Jews, they are the second largest Jewish ethnic group, followed by the Mizrahim (Jews from the Middle East and North Africa) and other, smaller groups. Unfortunately, Sephardim are often overlooked in this country. Why? Simply put, England has an unpleasant tendency to whitewash history and Jews aren’t excluded. If we don’t acknowledge people’s stories and contributions, we end up ignoring them, or even misidentifying them. Julia Pascal, Artistic Director of Pascal Theatre Company, documents this cultural ignorance in her most recent project, Discovering and Documenting England’s Lost Jews.

    I enter the project’s website and I’m taken straight to a seventeen-minute long documentary. It opens with Julia standing in East London’s Novo Cemetery, the oldest, accessible burial site for Sephardi Jews. She tells us how she came across the cemetery, and how it made her question the absent narrative of England’s Jews. This setting is significant because, as Julia explains, until you have land to calls yours and somewhere to bury your dead, you may be living in a country but you’re not really ‘there’. You’re not a citizen. The cemetery represents that sense of acceptance into England, a privilege that Jews (at that time almost exclusively Sephardi) were only afforded in the late seventeenth century. 

    The documentary takes us through interviews, poetry readings, and drama workshops. They’re very engaging. They may not the traditional methods of learning Jewish history, but they’re effective. I have a flashback to my Jewish Studies GCSE class, the teacher reading from a whiteboard and me dozing off. I return to the present day and resume Julia’s documentary. It explores the Jews’ expulsion and readmission into England, and specifically, the history of Sephardi migration to England during the sixteenth century. However, it is the project’s interactive digital media portal One Lost Stone that I find most compelling. One Lost Stone is an historical travel guide taking us through the journey of England’s Jews, each enlightening chapter tucked away behind its own beautiful painting from Sephardi artist Anne Sassoon. I click on a panel entitled Conversos & Crypto-Jews, two terms I am unfamiliar with, and I’m transported to an ensemble of text, video and soundbites. 

    I read about the Jews living in the Iberian Peninsula, and how they were forced to convert to Catholicism while secretly practising their Judaism. After the 1390’s, life became so dangerous for Jewish people that they had one simple choice; convert to Christianity or die. These Jews were referred to as conversos. Despite the forced conversion, Jews were not seen as legitimate Christians, and were still the victims of targeted attacks. I read on. I learn that the Jews living here fled the Catholic Inquisition to avoid torture and death, and while most of them went to Holland, a small portion came to England during the sixteenth and early seventeenth century. 

    I exit that session, feeling more sombre than before, but I know this important. I enter another session entitled Return of the Jews to England. This one explains how the long since accepted account of Cromwell readmitting the Jews into England in 1656 is not entirely true. While Cromwell undoubtedly played a large part, what often goes unmentioned is his meetings with the Portuguese-Dutch Rabbi Menasseh ben Israel, and how the rabbi implored Cromwell to readmit the Jews. The rabbi even dedicated his book, Spes Israelis (The Hope of Israel), to him. Menassah ben Israel had fled Portugal due to the Inquisition, and he knew all too well about his people’s suffering. He asked for Jews to be allowed the basic rights we so often take for granted today, such as Jewish education, a cemetery, and a place of worship. Cromwell, favourable to ben Israel, held the Whitehall Conference to discuss the proposition. While it ultimately failed to reach a conclusion, it paved the way for the following year when a court ruling allowed the Jews’ resettlement. 

    Initially, I felt saddened upon learning this information, as well as embarrassed for not already knowing it. I consider myself a well-informed individual regarding the state of British Jewry, so how could I have sustained such a blind spot? Is it my lack of interest surrounding English history? Or perhaps my Ashkenazi-centric view of Judaism is to blame? Do I only focus on Anglo-Jewry’s narrative when it concerns my own Jewish denomination? These questions are uncomfortable, but important, and they show why an understanding of the history of England’s Sephardim is so vital. As the first Jews who returned to England since their expulsion over two hundred years earlier, they consequentially laid the foundation for future Jewish communities. The Sephardim fled their countries and risked their lives to continue practising Judaism in England and I feel an onus to keep that in mind. So many of us do not immediately think of the Sephardim when the issue of Jews in Britain arises, but after exploring Julia’s Lost Jews project, it becomes obvious that we should. 

    How can this country that expelled and then begrudgingly readmitted a group of people make amends? The Sephardi philosopher Maimonides said, “You must accept the truth from whatever source it comes.” It seems that England’s first step is to accept the truth about its past, and once it does, we can turn the narrative into one of triumph, rather than one of neglect. England must recognise the Sephardim. These are the lost Jews. The Jews who lived, loved, and practised their religion as we do today but they had so much more to lose. They are the ones who gave everything without anyone knowing, until now.

    Elie Kraft

    I have just watched your short film about the Sephardi and the Novo cemetery I don’t know how I feel about your project, my feelings are mixed, many of my ancestors were buried in the Novo cemetery, only one grave remains, the others were destroyed during WW2 or were removed, probably as part of the construction of the University I don’t know how I feel about people walking over the graves of my ancestors I do know that I am extremely happy that someone has recognised our existence and is interested in our experience, many studies of Jewish history in England undertaken by Jews forgets us and gives the impression that the first Jews in England were the Ashkenazi from Eastern Europe in the late 1880s Some of my ancestors were Ashkenazi who came to England from Germany from the late 1600s, these immigrants are also often overlooked My family eventually changed its family name to Langley, it was originally Ottolangue. Please let me know how your project develops.

    Robert Langley

    My own family’s connection to Britain is much more recent than that of the Jews rediscovered and documented by this project. Unquestionably Ashkenazi, my paternal great-grandfather came here from Russia/Byelorussia/ Ukraine in the early 1900s. Possibly stereotypically, legend has it that he arrived with just a handcart and a notebook into which he wrote every new word of English he learnt. He ended up a successful silversmith and property owner, a leading light in the Westcliff-on-Sea Orthodox community. My father’s father was born in Dublin of Lithuanian and Polish parents; he came to England in the 1920s.

    My mother and her parents arrived from Germany in September 1939, the day before World War 2 was declared. It is possible that this side of the family had Sephardi connections: my grandfather lived and worked in Spain and Portugal, was fluent in both languages (he taught Spanish to other prisoners while interned on the Isle of Man), and was very dark-skinned. And my Oma’s maiden name was Wolf-Gardè, which suggests French heritage.

    Whatever, Ashkenazi or Sephardi, my German family was a Nazi target. Many of my ancestors died in the camps and my mother’s traumatic childhood uprooting has shaped her entire life. And the distinction between Ashkenazim and Sephardim doesn’t bother the anti-Semites – they just hate us all. But an appreciation of the different traditions is instructive and has added richness and depth to my limited understanding of Judaism.

    My mother’s family was typically secular – culturally more German than Jewish – and my own parents were non-believers. So my scant experience of Judaism as a child came from very occasional synagogue visits for Bar Mitzvahs of second cousins on my father’s side or, more frequently, my mother’s moans about having to accommodate her in-laws’ Kosher food requirements or Shabbat restrictions, all very much in the Ashkenazi tradition.

    As a result of this irreligious upbringing, I don’t think I even knew about the existence of Sephardi Jews until quite recently –and, once I did, they seemed as exotic and different to my family as the Falasha of Ethiopia. If I had any feelings, I was slightly envious of the Sephardis’ sultry Ladino looks and delicious food. Ashkenazi lockshen and latkes have nothing on hummus, aubergines and skhrug…

    My overwhelming experience of being Jewish in Britain was refracted through the lens of being raised by a refugee. My mother could not have felt less welcomed by the British, Jews and non-Jews alike: she has never lost her German accent; she never liked or trusted ‘the English’; she identified as an outsider in myriad ways. As a result, my connection to any national or religious identity has never been clear or strong. After a childhood suffering persecution for her ethnicity, my mother has a deep-seated problem with Jews who are loud and proud in a way that would have been life-threatening in Nazi Germany, and it has taken a long time for me to get over that myself.

    I now regret my own lost Jewishness – all the Seders and Passovers we never celebrated, the Bat Mitzvah I never had, the Hebrew I never learnt – and so it is enlightening to discover that there are thousands of other lost British Jews, albeit lost in entirely different ways. As a rootless Jew, it is inspiring to learn that this overwhelmingly Christian country has had such a long-established Jewish citizenry. The fact that its existence has been fractured, suppressed, disguised, buried and built over is not surprising. But that all the evidence is still there, to be found and to reveal its truth to future generations, is amazing.

    I didn’t know that Sephardi immigration pre-dated Ashkenazi; nor was I aware of the countless anti-Jewish statutes enacted in Britain over the centuries (though this was less of a surprise). A friend once astounded me by saying she didn’t realise that there were poor, working-class Jews in the UK – she had completely swallowed the antisemitic tropes of the global conspiracy of Jewish bankers. This is what the suppression and denial of a culture does – it allows racist stereotypes to prevail amongst people with no direct connection to the community concerned. 

    It is ignorance like this that allows lies like Holocaust denial to persist and grow.

    And therein lies the importance of projects such as lostjews.org.uk. Uncovering and sharing the truth that Jews have lived in England and contributed to the culture for hundreds of years, enabling people to understand what that history means for us now – which is what immersive creative experiences can do – gives us the chance to make sure that past negations, expulsions and other atrocities are not repeated and multiplied into the future.

    Alix Lee

    This is so beautiful. Thank you and congratulations. You should be an example to us all of honouring another culture like this.  

    Rosemary Lee, choreographer

    Just listening to the recordings on your website. It’s so great, so in depth and so much work important work here and information illuminated. Thank you! The early polylingualism is really interesting in England as well the role of women and artists – fantastic.

    Jessica Marlowe

    Thank you for a truly wonderful website – and I have only started exploring it.  I shall forward it to others.

    Nadine Meisner

    I was delighted to read that in spite of all the considerable problems you must have faced, you and your team have put together such a magnificent multi-layered, deeply researched, and imaginatively presented piece of work. I have only gone into the early historical bits so far but am looking forward to exploring much more.

    Kate Quartano Brown , Society for Theatre Research Website 

    I have just looked at your marvellous website One Lost Stone – it is absolutely tremendous. We know Anne Sassoon whose wonderful paintings illustrate the website. Her husband, the writer and journalist, Benjamin Pogrund is a good friend. Whenever we are in Jerusalem, a cup of coffee and a chat with Benjamin is mandatory. We went to an exhibition of Anne’s works last year in Jerusalem. 

    I was surprised to discover and delighted to hear my article about the Great Plague. It was wonderful to hear my words actually spoken – a new experience for me which really brought home the event. Wonderfully moving which the printed word does not convey. 

    I wonder if you have looked at any of the early Ashkenazi cemeteries. My own ancestor, Myer Jacob, was buried in the Alderney Road cemetery in August 1793. 

    Anyway congratulations on a wonderful project!

    Professor Colin Shindler, School of Oriental and African Studies

    I have only now got around to looking/reading/enjoying ‘Lost Jews’ – this treasure-trove of new learning. Thank you! I am finding it fascinating in itself, but so much more so because of Anne’s story and her remarkable, life-giving contribution.

    Bishop Peter Storey, former Head of the Methodist Church in South Africa

    I am a lover of stories, especially those that reveal worlds with which I am not familiar or know little about. I have been interested in the stories of the Sephardim for many years and have read numerous memoirs of Jews born in the Middle East, North Africa and the Balkans. Oddly I know rather less about the experience of the Sephardim in Britain. Or at least I did until I came across the Discovering and Documenting England’s Lost Jews project which researches, records and shares the stories of this fascinating community.

    I recently spent several hours exploring the project website, enthralled with the mixture of printed word, images and voice recordings used to bring lost or previously unheard stories to light. The website is a huge resource and offers many ways of exploring this little-known part of Britain’s history. As I live in the East End I was particularly drawn to and interested in the Novo Cemetery in Mile End. It is just a ten-minutes’ walk from my home but I have to admit I have never visited and previously knew little about it. Established in 1733, it has been the final resting place of champion boxer Daniel Mendoza, Benjamin Disraeli whose grandson shared his name and became Britain’s first Prime Minister of Jewish heritage and Diego Pereira who served as financier to the Austrian Empress Maria Theresa. 

    It is amazing to think that these illustrious characters were buried a short distance from where I now sit. Even more interesting for me are the lives of the less famous who were buried there. One of the many voice recordings on the website details some of the names and experiences of the quill pen cutters, rag merchants, tailors and feather makers who are buried in the Novo and who spent much of their lives in the surrounding area. I learned that their neighbours included hawkers, butchers, cigar makers, Indian servants and charwomen, many of them immigrants from Europe or beyond. This is not only the story of the Sephardim but also that of the East End  of London. 

    Hearing these stories, rather than reading them, somehow makes them more real and engaging. Whilst listening I could almost see these workers toiling late at night in East End sweatshops or leaving home early in the morning to sell goods from the street. The project has made extensive use of this story-telling technique including snippets of interviews with Jews who came to the UK from Egypt, Turkey, India, Syria and elsewhere. Through these voices I discovered that Manchester had a significant population of Syrian Jews and that the Baghdadi Jews of India felt themselves to be British. The many compelling stories expose class differences, varying levels of religious observance and the social attitudes of the speakers. I loved hearing about the different experiences of arrival in this country. One speaker says that she loves England and the English and that you are free to say whatever you want here, whilst another reports being taken under the wings of a group of Indian women work colleagues but felt that their white counterparts looked down on him.

    The graveyard itself has quite a story too and I was shocked to learn that in 1973 about 7000 bodies were disinterred and reburied in a communal grave in Essex. Among these were the boxer Daniel Mendoza. This was because the expanding Queen Mary College, now a University, required additional space and so an agreement was reached between the Sephardi community and the College to transfer part of the burial ground to College ownership. Today, about 2000 graves remain in the cemetery and hearing its many stories has inspired me to visit.  

    Throughout history, the voices and contributions of women have often been lost or suppressed. The Lost Jews project has undertaken work to address this and includes the stories of several Sephardi women. Whilst all of their stories are important, two particularly stand out for me – those of Emilia Bassano and Anne Sassoon. Bassano was born in 1569, the daughter of a musician who played at the court of Henry VIII. There is some agreement between academics that she was one of Shakespeare’s lovers and possibly occasional co-writer. A play about her was performed both at the Globe Theatre and in London’s West End in 2017. She was also a poet and published her work, Hail God King of The Jews, in 1611. It contains what could be considered an early feminist poem, Eve’s Apology, stating that Adam rather than Eve was the sinner. 

    Anne Sassoon is an accomplished artist whose work is used throughout the website. I found myself lingering over her poignant, sensitive images of Jews in Middle Eastern or North African environments. Many of them reminded me of photographs taken long ago and now fading along with the memories of the people in them and of the times they lived in, emphasising the importance of the Lost Jews project. Sassoon spent many years in South Africa where, as an anti-apartheid campaigner she used her art to record what was happening around her. She bravely sat in the courtroom during the Steve Biko trial (and also a separate trial of her husband) surreptitiously drawing the scene and characters.  

    Discovering and Documenting England’s Lost Jews is an important project, rediscovering and preserving this forgotten or ignored history. The combination of voice recordings, printed word and illustration makes the work inclusive and appropriately reflects the diversity and experience of England’s Sephardim. There is so much to learn and enjoy here and I plan to spend many more hours exploring these wonderful stories.

    Adrian Whittle

    An experience we could not have imagined: One Lost Stone, directed by Thomas Kampe for Pascal Theatre Company was coming together as Covid-19 struck. In the time of the virus we could not gather, the theatres closed, we retreated to lock down and online. What would have been a collaborative public performance in an old Jewish cemetery in London’s East End has metamorphosed to a website.

    One Lost Stone is part of Pascal Theatre Company’s Discovering and Documenting England’s Lost Jews project. Billed as ‘a digital travel guide’ into Sephardi Heritage in England, the website reveals an obscured history of Jewish people in this country exploring a reluctant heritage of welcome and antisemitism.

    The virus has forced imagination and inventiveness and this is an example. Much of the research is creatively re-purposed and powerfully presented, characters begin to emerge and elements of the performance infuse the presentation. This is part of the story of Jews in England, Jews whose forebears had made the long journey of exile from Spain, Syria, Egypt and Turkey. As we discover in this travel guide the Jewish diaspora is a complex and tangled story of vicious persecution, resistance and exile. One Lost Stone reveals the Sephardi story through a burial ground in London.

    We are reminded of England’s shameful heritage of conditional welcome, the Christian hegemony that, whilst providing a place to live, required Jews to conduct themselves in specific ways, to become bankers and money lenders and to wear the infamous yellow star later adopted by the Nazis in the C20th. Just like racism, antisemitism is a poisonous thread running through the history of England. Expelled by order of the King in 1290, Jews eventually returned but the law proscribing a form of dress for Jews in this country was only repealed in 1846.

    One Lost Stone enables the visitor to sample history and context of the Sephardi experience without proscribing a linear history or driving a particular narrative route. One can jump from background information to the story of a particular individual, discover a character in the narrative, hear a reading from an archive document or view a short video sequence, such as the powerful animation using the Alhambra Decree. Layers of history and experience coincide with present day reflection, often stimulated by sensitive soundscapes. 

    ‘In fourteen hundred and ninety two’, goes the old school history rhyme, ‘Columbus sailed the ocean blue’, but the official history I learned at school did not add that this was the same year in which the Jew were expelled from Spain. The same King and Queen who Columbus was working for signed that Edict of Expulsion, the Alhambra Decree.

    The visual look and feel of the site is held together with Thomas Kampe’s graphics, and punctuated with his short digital assemblages. A core visual element of the site is a series of paintings by Anne Sassoon, a Sephardi artist. Sassoon’s work is informed by her own diasporic journey and observations from Cape Town, via London to Jerusalem. In the context of the ongoing academic and cultural boycott of Israel the use of work on this website by an Israeli artist is worth noting. Based in South Africa in the apartheid era she made drawings for publication of political trials and her husband, journalist Benjamin Pogrund, was a confidante of Nelson Mandela. Briefly imprisoned, and with many brushes with the law for his reporting on apartheid in South Africa, he has recently expressed concern that Israel’s further annexation of Palestinian land would mirror apartheid. 

    The website is filled with rediscovered stories and voices of Sephardi women previously silenced or lost. There is the account of Emilia Bassano, the first woman of Jewish identity to have published poetry in England in 1611, reputedly the Dark Woman of Shakespeare’s sonnets. A click on a file releases a dramatic reading of Bassano’s Eve’s Poem, ‘Apology in Defense of Women’. Presenting a feminist refusal to condemn Eve she declares that men’s knowledge has been stolen from women.

    Yet Men will boast of Knowledge, which he took

    From Eve’s fair hand, as from a learned Book

    We can listen to oral histories and inherited memories of places, family and exile. Foods and meals infused with the flavours of a multigenerational international journey from Spain to Baghdad, from Bulgaria to Manchester. Unlike the Jews who arrived in England after the Holocaust with fresh memories of horror and tragedy and only the clothes they stood up in, this is a different story of survival and resistance told by Jews who can take their family story back to 1492 and before.

    And in a click on another Sassoon image we arrive at the Mile End Cemeteries and discover a visual poem by Moses Ben Ezra riffing on names and broken gravestones. The stage perhaps is set, two graveyards the old, the Velho and a fragment of the new, the Novo, now enclosed and overlooked by new academic buildings. On the website, photographs and testimony held gently in a sonic embrace. A layered reading of names and epitaphs and the ghost of a character in Kampe’s drama emerges, no Smiths or Jones here, says the undead and watchful guardian of the graveyard, what do these Jews dream of, she wonders…Check, check, check…can’t seem to die, so many dead to watch over… She muses over the removal of remains to a field in Essex and their lost gravestones… where are the words that will give us their lives, she asks. Viewing the orderly grid of surviving gravestones thoughts of the mass graves of the Holocaust are never far away.

    This is genuinely a content rich website full of stories, poetry and philosophy, and resonant with Kozokaro’s haunting soundscapes.  There are, however, issues of register and audience here; in places the site is text heavy and audio full of promise often settles to old school Open University lecture style delivery. I yearned for more music and informal voices, more glimpses of the planned performance that the short documentary on the main site offers tantalising moments of work-in-progress. Kampe’s tremendous moving image sequences shouted to be projected huge on the modernist slabs overlooking the burial ground. Nevertheless, what a journey this travel guide takes us on; so many discoveries from Shakespeare’s collaborator to the origins of Fish and Chips with an antisemitic spin on The Great Plague to bring us back to the virus. 

    Covid has revealed much that is rotten in the state of this country but it has also and forced imagination to great things, this website is one of them. An intriguing resource on Sephardi heritage, beautifully made. But I still want to see the show!

    Richard White, Senior Lecturer in Media Practice, Bath Spa University

    This is awesome.

    Shara Zeiger