Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Jews in Scotland: Lockerbie, Edinburgh Writers


Jews in Scotland
Travelling from Gretna to Edinburgh I went to the Lockerbie memorial in the Christian church burial ground. I saw one Jewish memorial stone with a star of David and a couple of Jewish names on the list.
I had met David Ben Areah when I was a travel writer at a Murder weekend in England - David wore a kilt - he was a travel agent and travel writer and won an award from the Americans for his TV reports from Lockerbie which is near Edinburgh, as he was the first journalist on the scene. He devoted the rest of his life to Lockerbie.

The Writer's Museum at the top of the central Mound in Edinburgh has the words of David Daiches incribed on a paying stone outside in the courtyard: 'Bridge-building is my vocation.' David Daiches, son of Scotland's chief rabbi, wrote Two Worlds about his childhood in Edinburgh.

The National Portrait Gallery of Scotland had lots of exhibits of Protestants and Catholics and an exhibition of Pakistani Muslim immigrants.  Any Jews? In the library I found a bust of Felix Mendelssohn (who wrote the Hebrides Overture). I went to the information desk. But their computer could not find me WWI poet and author Siegfried Sassoon who met poet Wilfred Owen at a soldiers' recuperation centre in Scotland as shown in the film named Regeneration. The film Regeneration is based on a novel and is set in Craiglockhart War Hospital where Sassoon meets poet Wilfred Owen. Both men went back to fight and Owen died during WWI.

You can see a picture of David Daiches in Wikipedia in an article about him and his numerous books. Wikipedia also has a piece on Scottish Jews.  


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