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A New Head for Anglo-Jewry
Eric Silver
 FIRST LADY: Jo Wagerman, from Sephardi eminence to Ashkenazi poverty |
Jo Wagerman, slated to be elected on July 16 as the first woman president in the 240-year history of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, traces her roots to the Mayflower generation of the shrinking, divided 285,000-member community. She is descended on her father�s side from Don Isaac Abrabanel, the 15th-century Biblical commentator and treasurer to kings of Portugal, Spain and Naples. A later ancestor, David Abrabanel, was one of the Sephardi merchants who successfully petitioned Oliver Cromwell to readmit Jews to England in 1656, four centuries after Edward I expelled them.
Yet Wagerman, a 67-year-old retired principal of London�s oldest Jewish high school, grew up far from the old money and fox-hunting squires of Britain�s Sephardi aristocracy. By the time she was born, she says with the relish of a victim who has come through, the family had "sunk from Sephardi eminence to Ashkenazi poverty." Her father was an East End tailor, her mother the daughter of Jewish immigrant glass merchants from Sweden. The oldest of three children, Wagerman endured the least typical of Jewish childhoods.
"I had a mother," she recounts, "who was anti-Semitic, abusive, neglectful and everything a Jewish mother shouldn�t be. She gave me away when I was nine months old. But she was such a violent woman that she quarreled with whoever was looking after me, and I went back to her. We were dirty, we were often very hungry, and we were badly knocked about."
Her mother had what Wagerman pillories as "a deep-seated English working-class antipathy to education." She fought to stop her two daughters finishing their schooling. But young Josephine fought back and graduated from John Howard School, a London girls� high she celebrates as "a model of multi-ethnic education long before it had been invented." Half the pupils were Jewish, half Christian. Wagerman fell under the lasting spell of its inspirational principal, Dr. U.D. Hunt.
"It was a school of mutual respect and absolute opportunity for girls," she says. "My headmistress�s favorite phrase was, �My girls are not going to become tuppence-ha�penny shorthand typists.� So, we were pushed hard. I learned important things, like to wash your neck and pronounce your aitches. But also to be very proud of being Jewish and to have respect for others, and that work could get you anywhere. I went into the adult world with a passion for education."
Because her mother stopped her going to regular college, Wagerman began her career as an unqualified teacher while taking a night-school BA in history at Birkbeck, a London University college for part-time students. From there, she taught in local state schools and in Singapore, where her husband, Peter, was posted as an air force dentist for his compulsory military service.
She joined the Jews� Free School (founded in 1732) in 1973, working her way up 12 years later to be appointed the first woman head. By then it was a comprehensive school of 1,500 boys and girls from all streams of Jewish and academic inclination. She raised its standards, profile and reputation. She made the Jewish studies program more relevant to her pupils. In the school, as later in communal institutions, she asked people what they wanted, rather than imposing solutions.
One former pupil remembers her as "a formidable woman." Another confesses that they were "petrified" of her. The school�s official historian, Gerry Black, anoints her as "an expansive, outgoing, colorful, articulate, ebullient, driving, emotional, ambitious figure, a person of ideas, an enthusiast bursting and bustling with energy." The 330 members of the Board of Dep-uties, a representative body elected from the entire range of communal organiza-tions except the ultra-Orthodox 10 percent, can�t say they�ve not been warned.
We talked for an hour, lounging beside the pool at the Dan Caesarea Hotel, where she was relaxing after working in educational projects with young British volunteers in Israel�s beleaguered northern border communities. She had briefed me to look for "a large, dark, elderly lady." But in her shapeless green robe and windswept hair-do, she was anything but a senior citizen.
Jo Wagerman lives up to the school historian�s billing. Seven years after retiring, she has lost none of her buoyancy. She answered questions in well-wrought sentences. She laughs a lot. Like a good teacher, she cements her arguments with vivid anecdotes.
Explaining why she is determined to foster new ways of bringing the "missing generation" of unaffiliated 18- to 35-year-olds back into the fold, she tells of a young woman she invited to a Board of Dep-uties seminar (Wagerman has been a vice president of the Board for the past six years): "She had a job in one of the big finance houses. She probably handled every day more than most synagogue boards will ever see in their lives. She went to a synagogue and said she�d just moved into the neighborhood and would like to join. What could she do to help? The answer was join the ladies� guild and make the tea."
Wagerman says that young people have told her that, when attending a Jewish event, they want to feel welcome. "They want to hear, "Hello, what�s your name? I�m so and so. I�m glad to see you. Where do you live? Can I help you? I hope to see you again." Missionary groups, she warns, know exactly how to handle it.
Explaining why she abandoned quiet diplomacy and began to campaign against the Orthodox rabbinical courts� discrimination against women, Wagerman tells the story of a battered wife who refused to accept a get (bill of divorce) from her husband. She had already divorced him in a civil court, but in Britain�s predominantly Orthodox community if he wanted to take another Jewish wife, he needed an Orthodox get.
"She did not want to give him a get because she did not want any other woman ever to suffer what she had suffered. So, the man went off and married a non-Jewish woman, whom he also abused. And she divorced him. Then he wanted to marry a Jewish woman. He went to the beit din and complained that his first wife would not give him a get. The beit din gave him a get on the grounds that anyway a Jewish man can have more than one wife, so it doesn�t really matter. That was the point at which I went public. The court�s decision was a distortion of rabbinical authority. I had to stand up and be counted. I joined a vigil outside the offices of the Board of Deputies, to a great many people�s anger."
Wagerman is orthodox, in the easygoing, modern terms to which two thirds of Britain�s synagogue-going Jews subscribe. She eats kosher, she keeps Shabbat. "My religion is the core and center of my life," she insists, "my family life, my public life, my professional life."
Where she draws a line is over the narrow social agenda she says "is all too frequently incorporated into Orthodox teaching." Pressed to be specific, she replies: "An agenda that attempts to put women back into a 19th-century framework; that shows no respect to Jews who are different from themselves; that believes it is not the job of a man with four or five children to work."
The Wagermans have two children and five grandchildren. Their daughter, Katie, lives in Beit Shemesh, west of Jerusalem. Their son, Anthony, is the media director of Anglo-Jewry�s central fundraising body, the United Jewish Israel Appeal.
Jo Wagerman dipped her toe in communal politics two years before retiring from the Jews� Free School. As a rapidly rising new member, she joined a movement fighting to reform the Board of Deputies from within. "It was stuck in an outdated committee system," she recalls. "There were far too many elderly people, not enough women." It has since been reorganized on functional lines and 40 percent of the deputies are women.
As president, Wagerman will be the lay leader of Anglo-Jewry, a community which has declined by one third in three decades and is moving only slowly and grudgingly toward the kind of internal tolerance she champions. Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sachs, who came from the academic world, has disappointed those who hoped he would open doors to the growing non-Orthodox minority (75 Reform, Liberal and Masorti congregations out of a total of 365).
Wagerman recognizes that her new job has more influence than power. She is resolved to push that influence to its limits - to promote dialogue, to reach out to the young, to win justice for women - with all the persuasion, exhortation and argument at her command. "We had better learn to work together," she says, "because the alternative is that we are just dead."
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