Rosa Levy memory of Cheder

I remember one class at Brunswick Street. Mr. Davison was teaching us, and, being a very frum man, he used to tie up his trousers with a handkerchief on Shabbat. One lesson he was getting very bad tempered and irate because we didn’t know our translation. He started waving his arms about, and the hand-kerchief came out and his trousers fell down. Well, the class went berserk – absolutely, and he went hysterical too, though in a different way. He didn’t have a sense of humour. 

There was another occasion one Shabbat when he found he’d got a penny in his pocket, and he actually asked for volunteers to come, and take the penny out. In those days of course it was a terrible thing to have money in your pocket, and no-one moved. I was waiting with bated breath for us all to be struck, dead, because it was such a terrible sin.

The earliest memory I have of going to Cheder is of being taken to Paradise Square. I must have been very young because all I remember is a lot of stairs and a rather musty dark smell. It wasn’t a bright building.

(Source: ‘The Best Days of Our Lives’, Interviews by Judy Simons, in Sheffield Jewish Journal, No. 105, April 1972, p. 10)