Jewish Journeys from Zionism (8) Charlotte Prager Williams

JVL Introduction

This is the eighth in the series “Jewish Journeys from Zionism” and another fascinating story. Again, Kitty Warnock’s skilful interviewing and editing and the time given by Charlotte has resulted in this story; collectively these stories are also showing the diversity of Jewish experience.  The impact of Nazism is a strong thread in Charlotte’s life, which is eloquently explored here.

Charlotte Williams – Lewes, East Sussex

My name is Charlotte Prager Williams. I’ve only recently put the Prager back into my name.  It’s my maiden name, and I put it back in because it’s only in the last few years that I’ve re-entered any kind of Jewish life, and I wanted to be recognised as Jewish by other Jewish people. I use it in certain circles.

Index of all the personal stories

I was born in 1950. I think that is significant, because it was so near the end of the war. Although the war had ended five years before, it hadn’t for our family. In the late 1940s there were still people being found; my parents were tracing people. We had an aunt who was in a displaced persons camp in Germany, and she wasn’t allowed to leave until she had somebody to ‘claim’ her. It took some time for my father to find out where she was and go through the bureaucracy that allowed her to come to England. That was not long before I was born.

My mother was a refugee from Germany; she had come here in 1938, when she was 20.  She hadn’t known she was Jewish until Hitler came to power.  She was Jewish by birth, according to Hitler’s Nuremburg laws, but her father was a baptised Jew and he brought his family up as strict Lutheran Christians. The whole idea of being Jewish was foreign to her – you could tell, even when I knew her. I think she lived her life in a bit of a daze after that, some of it from trauma and some from not really knowing where she belonged. She met my father, who was much more consciously Jewish, though he wasn’t religious. He was quite forceful, and he got her to do a conversion so that she would be properly Jewish. But she only paid lip service to it. I’m not sure she cared all that much about her Lutheran childhood either, but it was what she knew.

I’ve discovered through letters that she’d written to a sister that even after the war, some members of my mother’s family disapproved of her marrying a Jew. Her mother, my grandmother, had been through Theresienstadt and came out alive, and she came to live with us in England. She continued to go to church, and even in this Jewish family who had been through the Holocaust there was some denial of what had happened.

My father’s parents left Latvia in 1911, when my father was three. They lived for five years in Switzerland and then came to England, where he grew up. He was an only child. His parents went back to Latvia in 1924 I think, and he went to and fro a bit, for long holidays, that kind of thing. He had a very strong desire to connect with his wider family, it was really important to him. I suspect that he felt guilty about surviving. His mother was murdered by the Nazis, in Latvia, and his father had died earlier. Living in London after the war, he put a huge amount of effort into tracing as many relatives as possible, wherever they had ended up. Some had gone into hiding, some were killed, some had left and moved to places like London or Paris. He knew where some of them were, but others – he didn’t know whether they were alive or dead. He spent a lot of energy finding out. Some had been deported to Siberia (by the Russians), and were very poor, and he and other relatives made parcels to send them.  All through the 1950s he was collecting things, and buying clothes and all kinds of things to send them. So I feel as if I very much grew up in the shadow of the Holocaust.

My father wasn’t very religious; his Jewishness was a sort of nationalist, ethnic Jewishness. I remember him telling me, “It doesn’t matter whether God created us or we created God, the important thing is that the Bible is full of stories which help us to know what’s right and wrong.” We did belong to an Orthodox synagogue, and we celebrated some festivals – Hanukkah, Pesach, Rosh Hashanah, and occasionally went to Shul on Friday nights.  We children went to Cheder on Sunday mornings at the synagogue in Streatham Common, to be taught how to read Hebrew, bible stories, preparation for Bar Mitzvah and Bat Mitzvah, and about the festivals. I hated it, I hated going there. We were living in south London, we didn’t mix much with Jewish people, except for the refugee community, and it wasn’t a big part of my life except at home. I was in a tiny minority of Jews in both the schools I went to, and I didn’t have Jewish friends until I was a teenager and went to Habonim.

My father was a Zionist, utterly pro Israel. He saw it as a safe place for Jews, a homeland. Zionism was talked about at home, but I’d say it was assumed. The word that comes to mind is that he rather preached at us about it. For example, we had the blue JNF box sitting on top of our piano, and when we got our pocket money each week we had to put a certain percentage of it in the JNF box. If I had two bob, I had to lose seven pence, quite a high rate. My father was in a scheme for buying trees for Israel on behalf of your children. Perhaps the money from the box went towards it. I’ve still got the certificates we used to get. But now I know the true meaning of the planting of trees for Israel – it was a thoroughly colonialist project.

But we didn’t go to Israel for holidays. We had some family there, but not many, and we didn’t fly so we didn’t go there. One brother and I went as part of Habonim, but our father didn’t go there at all until he was about sixty. My parents rented out rooms in their big south London house, and in the 1970s they found a new source of tenants  – people working for the Israeli Embassy. A few young men at a time – they were usually men – would be living in our house. My parents got to know them and their families. I think that made my father feel more connected with Israel. By then, he wanted to take us all to live there, and in 1976 he and my mother went there for three months to see if they could. But by that time my two brothers and I were very much opposed to Israel, and we didn’t want to go. My mother wasn’t particularly keen either; she knew a few people there but she had quite a good life in London – friends, her children, lots of things she was involved with. She just went to keep my father happy. In fact he died there, during that three months. He had a heart attack and dropped dead on the Mount of Olives. He wouldn’t have wished for a better end!

I suspect that going to Israel was more a question of principle for him, rather than something he felt at home with. He had his doubts: he didn’t know if he could manage the heat, or if he could learn a new language at his age. He was very much a Londoner at heart, and liked all kinds of things about life in a cosmopolitan city. He mixed with lots of people, about half Jewish and half not; he had been to a public school and was utterly at home with all kinds of English friends. He was a great conversationalist, and he did not seem to be in the slightest bit uncomfortable here. Personally, I think maybe it’s just as well that he never got to find out whether he could live in Israel, because he wouldn’t have liked to have to say, “No, actually I can’t do it.”

Back to my own story: When I was a teenager, I got involved in Habonim, the youth organisation.  Living in south London, my brothers and I weren’t likely to make Jewish friends, but our father was very keen for us to have a Jewish identity. One of the reasons I got involved with Habonim was so that my father would approve of my social life. He wouldn’t put so many restrictions as he did on the social life I was dabbling with in south London. I would be able to come home at 2 in the morning and not have too many questions asked. The first introduction to Habonim was going on camps in the summer, my brothers one after the other then me. Then when I was about fourteen I started going to the organisation’s clubhouse in Finchley Road. It was a long journey, an hour on two buses, which seemed like a lot in those days. But I had a whale of a time there, such a good time. It’s like a scouting organisation really, but with a political edge. At the time I felt completely comfortable with that political edge. I’ve seen the phrase “plucky little Israel” recently, and that is so apt, that’s how we thought of Israel at that time. It had done so well, it had made fertile land out of the swamps, and there were these wonderful kibbutzim where people lived as socialists, equally. It was a new country, pulling itself up by the bootstraps.

I went on one trip to Israel with Habonim. It was a sort of rite of passage – when you left school, your cohort went together to spend six weeks in Israel. We went everywhere, up and down the country and spent a few weeks on a kibbutz. It was only a year after the six-day war, and we were very gung-ho about having captured these new territories. We went into the West Bank – I think we still thought of it as part of Jordan. We went to Bethlehem, and Nazareth. We called the Palestinians “Arabs” and we saw how “the Arabs” lived, we saw the poverty, which was very different from what you saw on the other side…  and it was all very fascinating. Making Aliyah was definitely a possibility, and some people did it. I can’t quite tell you why I didn’t. But my middle brother was on a Habonim farm project in Sussex[i]. They were learning agriculture, and how to live together, it was kind of kibbutz training. Soon after the start of the six-day war he went to a kibbutz, to help with the agricultural effort when reservists were called up – it was part of the war effort. He stayed there a few months and we were so proud of him, my father was unbelievably proud of him. We didn’t question it, not at all. He questions it a good deal these days.

A couple of years after that I had my first doubts. I was going back and forth to Israel a bit, and I was starting to feel uneasy. A relative told me that it wasn’t true that the Arabs had willingly left their homes in 1948, that there had been massacres and they had been forced out. This was a terrible shock to me, and as I started to understand the truth of it I learnt that I certainly couldn’t talk about it at home. Once I made a big mistake.  My father asked at lunch where one of my brothers was and I said, “Oh, he’s at the demo.” It was some protest outside the Israeli embassy, and I knew about it. My father got up from the table, got into his car, drove to Bayswater, found my brother – holding a banner – and said, “Don’t come home again”.  He had moved away from home and then come back, the way you do at that age. He had to move out for good then.

I kept my feelings to myself, and slowly over the years I read more, talked more and accepted that I had to completely abandon the reality I had lived with and had felt to be mine for all those years. I couldn’t talk about it at home and realised that I couldn’t really be friends with my Habonim friends any more. That was difficult, and continues to be. Not that we can’t be friends, I have still got some friends from there, but we can’t talk about Israel. Particularly over the last ten years, probably since Corbyn, we haven’t been able to talk about it and it’s created distance.

It was only gradually that I separated myself off. There were people in Israel I was very fond of.  I could go months and years without really having to confront the question of what I thought. I read a certain amount, but I wasn’t politically active or very aware for years and years, not until I started to retire from my full-time work. It was when Corbyn became Labour Party leader that I started to get much more involved. I kept up with some aspects of Israel/Palestine politics, and I would shake my head and feel upset and angry when I heard about the gross injustices, but I never did anything about it. It was quite early on that I realised it was Zionism itself I was rejecting – from my mid-20s, really, but I don’t remember it being associated with any political events.  I discussed things with my brothers, and sometimes read things where I felt I was in connection with people of like mind. But my antizionism didn’t crystallise until I started involving myself more.

It was a very long time, between when I was 20 and when I was 60, that I didn’t do anything much. I never took any action apart from a few demonstrations, but just talked to people if they asked me. It was partly because I wasn’t moving in Jewish circles at all. Being Jewish was something I did with my family, but not in the rest of my life. We continued to come together on Friday nights as a family for a long time after my father died, and continued to celebrate Hanukkah and Pesach, and still do. I would always call myself Jewish, but it didn’t seem very relevant; it was part of me, but it wasn’t particularly significant.

Sometime between 2010 and 2015 I discovered the Jewish Socialists’ Group[ii]. Through my brother Simon, I’d reconnected with Julia Bard – I’d been in Habonim with her, and she was on the Jewish Socialist National Committee. It was only then I realised there was a movement for Jews like me. I joined the Group, and then I joined the Labour Party when Corbyn became leader. That was the first time I had joined any political party. I had always voted Labour and was a bit involved with the Anti-Apartheid movement and anti-racism campaigns, but otherwise I was involved in my work – for some of that period I was a therapist, working with homeless people and people who had psychiatric diagnoses, and for a long period I worked in the charity sector, so I always felt I was in some way working for human rights, in a broad sense. Corbyn’s arrival changed everything for me. Here was someone who had the same values as me, not only about Israel, but about all manner of things – justice and social values. I thought he was a good man, and I trusted his approach. I was very optimistic and hopeful that those values would be reflected in political life. But when Corbyn started being accused of antisemitism, which always seemed to me such terrible rubbish, and very harmful rubbish, that was when I joined JVL.

Since October 7^th, discussions about Israel and Zionism have become in-your-face difficult. It was difficult before, but I could get away with avoiding the subject with Jewish friends who I knew were not in agreement with me. Now it’s more difficult to ignore and also more difficult to make the choice to engage with the subject. I’m thinking of a particular couple I know, kind of soft left – they don’t like the Netanyahu government, but they wouldn’t question Israel’s right to be a nation state. They agree with the liberal rabbis’ recent statement which was for a ceasefire, but a bit spineless and confused. I used to be able to have some debates with them about it, always edgy and difficult and sometimes a bit fiery – but now their views have hardened. He said to me, “What’s Israel supposed to do, when they kidnap people and rape them and take their bodies through the streets of Gaza and laugh at them?” As if the world began on October 7^th, with no understanding of the context and no compassion.

Even people who do think a bit about the history don’t go back to 1948, they only go back to 1967.  They say they don’t like what the government does, or they don’t like the occupation, but they don’t really take it back to what Israel is and has always wanted to be, a Jewish majority state. My feeling is, I don’t believe in the state of Israel, in its existence as a Jewish majority state.

I don’t understand how people in this country can have no understanding of what’s going on in Gaza. In Israel you can see – perhaps – that it’s because they are not exposed to the same media as we are, but in this country I just don’t understand it, and I’m stuck for words, there seems such a gulf between us. And it’s horrible, horrible… I feel silenced, because I don’t feel I can do much except yell at them and shake my fists. At the moment I’m watching a video, on a website called When they speak Israel, which is a course with some strategies for dealing with these conversations. I would like to be able to speak to Jewish people about this and find articulate ways of communicating with them.

I find it difficult to talk about Israel and Zionism and what’s going on with people who take the other side.  But when people come to me and say, can you explain what this is all about?  then I can engage with them because I feel they really want to hear and learn. I have lots of friends who are socialists and who understand what’s going on, and I debate with them quite happily. In JVL I feel as if I’m with my people. I’m in the Education group, being as useful as I can. I’m also in the Jewish Socialists’ group, on the editorial committee for the magazine. But I still find it difficult talking with people who don’t roughly speaking agree with me.

I spoke out at a Holocaust Memorial Day vigil in Lewes recently. I delivered a little speech about Gaza – though the atmosphere wasn’t at all conducive to it. If the audience had known enough to know about the IHRA definition, if you’d asked them, they would have been for it. That took a bit of courage. But I knew nobody was going to interrupt me because it was a vigil. If I can speak, that’s OK. It’s when people come back at you saying “But Israel’s just defending itself” that I get – speechless.

One of the things that’s important to me as a socialist Jew is to separate out Zionism from ethnicity or religion, being Jewish from identifying with Israel. So many people don’t understand it, they think if I’m Jewish I’ll be for Israel. It’s important to me to educate people about that, to make it clear that there are people like me who do not associate themselves at all with Israel.  Though in fact that’s not quite true because I do, as a Jewish person, feel that Israel is my responsibility. I know it isn’t, I know that racists use that as an argument for putting Jewishness and Zionism together, but I can’t quite separate myself from this place that I once had such a strong identity with and so many hopes for and that is associated with Jewishness the world over.

It’s a terrible disappointment, real pain, that it’s all going so badly. It could have grown into such a lovely union. Just this morning I saw a photo of Christmas at the Wailing Wall, I think it was, in the 1920s. There was a crowd of people, a number of clergymen – people lived side by side.  And I’ve read about Jews in Iraq and Yemen and other Arab countries, where they were very much part of society until Zionism came, which produced antisemitism because people were angry about what Israelis/Jews were doing in Palestine. They had such a rich society together. I feel a lot of real sorrow that we have messed it up so badly, so badly. I’ve never been so affected by anything political in my life. Particularly since it’s all blown up so badly now, so alarmingly.

I don’t see that Israel has any choice but to live alongside Palestinians, but it doesn’t seem possible at the moment, does it? I suppose I see a more extensive war, and I’m scared.

I’m getting the idea that more Jewish people are turning against Israel. There’s an awful lot of propaganda at the moment, and it’s hard to find out the truth, but I think more people are having doubts. I think there’s more transparency about Israel, and more of a movement against it. But the dust hasn’t settled yet.

[i] Eder Farm in Sussex in southern England was the Habonim training center (hachshara) for wannabe kibbutzniks from the 1930s until the late 1960s.

[ii] The Jewish Socialists’ Group began in 1974-7 in Manchester and Liverpool; a London branch began to meet in 1977. It stands within a tradition of Jewish socialism and a struggle for social and economic justice going back more than 100 years.

Index of all the personal stories