My dear friend, Bella Ansell, died recently in Manchester. This is my tribute to her:
I first met Bella in 1999 when she was only the third female President of the Manchester Jewish Representative Council.
We worked together on a number of projects including the first Manchester Limmud Day, held in 2000 at Manchester University, outreach to the non-Jewish communities in the Greater Manchester area and fund-raising for Emunah, of which she was also President.
At first Bella was sceptical of Manchester hosting a Limmud Day at all, let alone actively involving the Rep Council in advertising it. But when she asked me to address the Council on the subject for no more than two minutes, I did so, thus gaining her respect!
The day after this historic event (which had nearly been cancelled by Manchester University due to the normal Jewish characteristic of people wanting to interfere in other people's business), Bella invited me to address her Emunah Group in Prestwich, North Manchester, of which she was Chair. The subject was the History of the Talmud and its function in Jewish society.
Most of the women there were Orthodox, if not Haredi, and many were Holocaust survivors. It was obvious that in a different era many of them would have gone on to become first-class students and embarked on careers of their own.
I also accompanied Bella to a number of Holocaust Memorial Day Celebrations, at which we represented the Manchester Jewish community. I particularly remember the one in Rochdale, whose MP (now CEO of Bicom) Lorna Fitzsimons, for some unfathomable and incomprehensible reason, insisted we avoid any mention of the Holocaust at all, in case it offended her Muslim constituents. This was odd, as the event was the brain child of the Rochdale Local Authority and had nothing to do with the Jewish community at all.
Odder still that Ms Fitzsimon's concerns for the Muslim community on this day of Jewish remembrance did not prevent her from later being accused of being Jewish herself and being ousted as MP by some of those very Muslim constituents she so much admired. Like the Queen, Bella refrained from saying what she really thought about this strange attitude until well out of earshot and driving back in her car. Then she really told me what she thought!
Bella also audited my Jewish history courses at Manchester University and contributed a great deal to the seminar groups which grew out of these courses.
I remember accompanying Bella to a Womens Institute meeting in Oldham, where she gave her audience a potted history of Judaism, which included Israel of course, accompanied by handiwork which she had prepared herself, including reproductions of the Temple and the Succah. I was full of admiration for her ability to understand and empathize with her audience on this occasion. And some said they would even visit Israel as a result.
IN 2002, Bella asked me to accompany her to the Christian Aid Roadshow which was taking place at the Methodist Chaplaincy, Manchester University. We agreed that this had been the most frightening event either of us had ever experienced in Britain. For Bella this included having lived through WW II. We were booed and hissed at and made to run the gauntlet as soon as we entered the premises.
We sat through the disgraceful defamation of Israel given on video by a female vicar from St. Paul Cathedral and the very partial experiences of a so-called Palestinian refugee, whose worst accusation was that a coach-load of tourists had been stopped on the way to Bethlehem at Christmas and their coach searched. That's happened to me many times in the year I've been in Israel and I'm jolly glad that Israeli security knows no colour, race, religion or ethnicity in its desire to safeguard ALL its citizens.
The reason Bella had asked me to accompany her to the Christian Aid meeting was that the President of the Manchester Jewish community had wept earlier in the day after having been subject to a litany of accusations regarding Israel by the Christian Aid leadership visiting Manchester at the invitation of the Council of Christians and Jews and so felt unable to attend.
I'm pleased to say that the Chair of the evening event, having seen how Bella and I had been treated, told me that he would never have anything to do with Christian Aid again.
Finally, a couple of years ago I was invited by the Manchester Jewish Rep Council to represent them in their annual Bury Town Hall interfaith meeting of representatives of Britain's six major religions. Bella was in mourning for a close relative, but turned up to do her duty as Chair for the evening. She and I had to sit through a rant against England by the Muslim representative, a secular Turk, who told me that he would never attend Holocaust Memorial Day again as a result of the negative reception he had received from the very mixed audience, made up of ALL the religions in Greater Mancheer.
I admired Bella for her leadership skills, tact and diplomacy, but also loved her for her intellectual and spiritual sides, her understanding of people and her sheer determination to overcome the growing prejudices against the Jewish community of Britain in general and of Manchester in particular, some of which we had witnessed for ourselves, as outlined above.
Bella was a wonderful friend who will be sorely missed. The last time I saw her was at Pesach, when she lent us all we needed for this festival, as recent aliyah meant that we did not have Pesach utensils left in Manchester.
Bella was a real ‘woman of valour’ and has three children and five grandchildren of whom she can be very proud. Her daughter, Gillian, son-in-law, Paul and two grandsons in Jerusalem have done more than anyone to make me feel at home here in Israel. And before that, during the Intifada of 2002, Bella immediately rang Gillian in Jerusalem and asked her to look after my own daughter, who was studying at the Hebrew University when a bomb exploded, causing death and destruction.
In many ways Bella reminded me of my own mother and I know that they would have got on famously. She is a huge loss to the Manchester Jewish community and to Anglo-Jewry in general.
As a coda to the above, I would just like to say that I think Bella would be tickled pink that I met with Christian Aid heads in Jerusalem less than a month ago. She would agree with me that some of our efforts to tell the truth about Judaism and Israel are now paying dividends and if she had been here in Israel at the time, I'm sure she would have wanted to be in on the meeting.
She did come with me to address members of the Church of England Synod in Manchester in the wake of the Synod February 2006 vote to divest from Caterpillar bulldozers in Israel. I did most of the talking on the theological and historical reasons for the wrongness of this action and the then President of the Manchester Jewish Community, Louis Rappaport, told the clerics that members of the Jewish community were being beaten up in the Manchester streets and cemetries defiled. Bella just said
'We expect better from the Church of England'.
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