May 10, 2012

Another article on Vidal Sassoon

Quite the Man. From Tablet Magazine:
Vidal Sassoon, Streetfighter
Rabbi Israel Elia, head of the venerable Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue in London�s Maida Vale district, remembers the day when he met Vidal Sassoon, one of the congregation�s most celebrated sons. Elia had been quietly working in his office on a spring morning two years ago when an anxious colleague relayed the news that a film crew had gathered outside the building. The rabbi went to investigate.

�At the head of the crew, there was a smartly dressed man with delicate, graceful features,� Rabbi Elia recalled yesterday. �He walked over to me and introduced himself as Vidal Sassoon. He was making a film about his life and career.� Pointing to an annex at the side of the synagogue, Sassoon explained that the building had housed the orphanage where he spent his childhood.

�So I took him inside,� Elia said. �He told me, �I want to show you where my dormitory was.� We entered a room and he looked around. He was excited: �Yes, this was it, this was the dormitory.� I looked at him and said �Vidal, your dormitory is now my office.� He threw his arms around me and hugged me, telling me about the kindness of our community, how his accomplishments would not have been possible without that generosity.�
Early life:
Sassoon was still in diapers when his father walked out on his mother, Betty. Destitute and unable to cope, Sassoon�s mother learned that there was an orphanage at the Spanish and Portuguese synagogue, approximately two miles away. One day in 1933, she turned up with the young Vidal in tow and placed him in the care of the oldest Jewish community in England.
His streetfighting:
In the immediate post-war years, London�s Jews faced a new threat from the remnants of British Union of Fascists, a Hitlerite party led by Sir Oswald Mosely, whose black-shirted followers had regularly clashed with Jewish immigrants in the East End during the 1930s.

Sassoon recalled England�s hostile political atmosphere earlier this year: �Anti-semitism was absolutely rife,� he said in a podcast for the Holocaust Memorial Museum. �I mean, it was nothing for another kid to say to you, �Dirty Jew.� And although England was a good place to be, especially with Churchill and the fight against the Nazis, there was always that sense of the Jews being second-class citizens.�

In 1947, the fascists again began menacing London, this time under the tutelage of Jeffrey Hamm, head of an organization of thugs calling themselves the �Association of British Ex-Servicemen.� For Sassoon, this was not a fate to be accepted lying down.

As a response to Hamm�s provocations, a gathering of young Jews known as the 43 Group�named for the number of people in the room at their founding�announced that the fight back had begun. Among them was the slender, if wiry, Sassoon. As Hamm�s followers gathered on street corners bellowing that �not enough Jews were burned at Belsen,� Sassoon and his comrades, armed with knives, coshes, and knuckledusters, set about breaking up fascist meetings. In another interview, Sassoon remembered turning up for work one morning with a black eye. �I just tripped on a hairpin,� he explained to the worried customer who had just settled into a barber�s chair for a haircut.
Emphasis mine -- I love it! And he didn't stop on the streets of London:
In 1948, as the British Mandate was drawing to a close, Sassoon arrived in Palestine where he joined the Palmach in the fight for Israel�s independence. In the manner of the young men and women who had flocked to Spain in the previous decade to fight on the Republican side during the Civil War, Sassoon�s decision to participate in the Zionist struggle for independence, like that of the other volunteers who came from Europe and America, was rooted in a commitment to Jewish pride and honor.

�That was the best year of my life,� Sassoon later told a British newspaper. �When you think of 2,000 years of being put down and suddenly you are a nation rising, it was a wonderful feeling. There were only 600,000 people defending the country against five armies, so everyone had something to do.� Sassoon served in combat. �I wasn�t going over there to sit in an office,� he told the Jewish Chronicle. �I thought if we don�t fight for a piece of land and make it work, then the whole Holocaust thing was a terrible waste. But this way at least we got a country out of it.�
That is some serious stones... Posted by DaveH at May 10, 2012 10:41 PM