Bernard Lewis

A NOTE ABOUT BERNARD'S NAME

Bernard's birth (1913) was registered in the name Morris Barnet Gersholowitz. His marriage certificate (1936) records him as Morris Bernard Gersholowitz otherwise Morris Bernard Lewis.

On 20 June 1940 Bernard executed a Change of Name Deed whereby "I absolutely and entirely renounce relinquish and abandon the use of my said former surname of GERSHOLOWITZ and of my former Christian [sic] names of MORRIS BARNET and assume adopt and determine to take and use from the date hereof the surname of LEWIS and the Christian name of BERNARD in substitution for my former suname of GERSHOLOWITZ and my former Christian names of MORRIS BARNET."

EULOGIES WRITTEN AND DELIVERED BY DAVID AND VICTOR LEWIS AND THE FUNERAL AND STONESETTING OF BERNARD LEWIS IN 2004

DAVID LEWIS (JANUARY 2004)

Bernard Lewis was born in London in 1913, to Lewis and Kate Gersholowitz, immigrants from Lithuania. He was the seventh of their eleven children. During his childhood the family lived in a series of homes in the East End and Lambeth.

Bernard left school in 1929, when jobs were very scarce. But he applied for a position in the Libraries Department of Stepney Borough Council, and such was his intelligence and education that he was appointed in the face of competition from several hundred fellow-school leavers.

Despite the upheavals of the Depression and the Second World War, this was an era of “jobs for life”, and Bernard remained in the employ of the Libraries Department until his retirement in 1973.

When Bernard Gersholwitz was in his early twenties he met Rachel Wansofsky, a fellow East-Ender, and they married on February the 4th, 1936.

This marriage, which lasted sixty-six years until Rachel’s death on January the 18th, 2003, was the cornerstone of Bernard’s life.

The couple began their married life in a flat in Hackney. But during the war they moved to Westcliff, where they lived for some forty-five years.

It was the prospect of army life that prompted Bernard and his adult brothers in 1940 to change their surname from Gersholowitz to the more pronounceable Lewis, after their father’s first name.

In that year Bernard Lewis was conscripted into the armed forces. He joined initially the Tank Regiment, and later the Pioneer Corps.

On June the 7th, 1944, D-Day plus one, Bernard was disembarked at Normandy with units of the Pioneer Corps. He served in France and Belgium during this final year of the war, being mainly involved in the administration of prisoner-of-war camps. In 1946 he was demobilised, and resumed normal family life and his career as a librarian and local historian.

As the end of the war approached, Bernard and Rachel started their own family. In 1944 their elder son David was born, and in 1947 their younger son Victor.

For several years, in his forties, Bernard Lewis served the community as leader of the Jewish Youth Club in Southend: a position to which his natural abilities as a leader and an administrator made him eminently suited, and where he won the respect, affection and friendship of a generation of Jewish youth in that town.

In 1973, at the age of 60, Bernard and Rachel began what was to be a long, happy and eventful retirement period, which saw the marriage of their son Victor to Anne, the birth of their grandsons, Daniel and Oliver, the marriage of their son David to Rosemary, and their golden and diamond wedding anniversaries.

A significant event of the couple’s later years was their move from Westcliff to Golders Green, in 1989. Though it was hard for them to leave their many friends in the Southend area, the move did enable them to live near their immediate family, and this proved very successful for all concerned.

Bernard was an able writer, whose written works include fascinating and amusing accounts of his life and times.

Bernard will be remembered as a fluent and entertaining speaker at numerous weddings, barmitzvahs and other simchas. He gave many talks on one of his favourite subjects, the local history of Stepney and the East End of London.

Among the pleasures in Bernard’s life were bridge and scrabble, in both of which he excelled.

During much of his life, and especially the middle years of his retirement, Bernard involved himself - with Rachel - in charitable work, mainly for elderly Jewish people.

Bernard Lewis was a man of intelligence and judgment, competent and successful in all he attempted, combining a natural gravitas and authority with a friendly and open approach. He valued honesty, courage and fairness, and was a person whom others sought instinctively to emulate.

For his two sons, in particular, he provided in large measure the moral and practical foundations on which they built their own lives, and his influence also had a beneficial effect on many other young and not-so-young people whose paths crossed with his.

Bernard Lewis led a full and fulfilled life, blessed by a long and successful marriage, and having enjoyed many years of happy retirement with Rachel. He will be for ever remembered with great love and affection by his sons David and Victor, his daughters-in-law Anne and Rosemary, his surviving brothers Steve and Ralph, and his many relatives and friends.

VICTOR LEWIS (SEPTEMBER 2004)

Bernard Lewis lived his long life around three fixed points; his family, the community and his country.

He was born in 1913 and named Morris Gersholowitz, the 7th child in a family of 12.

As a boy, Bernard showed an aptitude for religious studies and at one time his father had ambitions for him to become a Rabbi. Whilst his father’s ambition was never realised, Bernard always had a deep respect for Jewish tradition and a great love of Israel, which he and Rachel visited many times.

His father, Lewis Gersholowitz, worked as a Shochet, and would often wake young Bernard in the early hours of the morning to rewrite, from Yiddish into English, Lewis’s daily reports for the Board of Shechita.

Bernard was one of a remarkable generation. They were poor, spoke Yiddish with their parents at home and were often subjected to anti-Semitism outside of the East End.

So it might have been expected that like the children of some of today’s immigrants, there would be some sort of identity crisis.

Not a bit of it. This generation were British and proud to be so.

Bernard would never be moved from an idealised view of his country. He loved cricket, had complete faith in British justice, believed wholly in the principles of fair play and held the conviction that our electoral system was, without doubt, the finest in the world.

As a local government Officer for many years he managed a Polling Station at General Elections and he partly did this because it gave him pride to be part of the democratic process.

Bernard’s ambitions were sensible and modest and he achieved them all. A happy marriage to Rachel and a devoted family, to own his own home, the respect of the community and a fulfilling job as Chief Librarian of Whitechapel Library where he started the renowned collection of Yiddish books which served the older immigrant Jewish population so well.

He served his country for five years as a soldier and was part of the great invasion force that liberated Europe.

Bernard had many anecdotes about his army service. He was an excellent raconteur, and what his wartime stories lacked in bullets and blood they made up for in a gentle and humorous understanding of the frailties of human nature.

For many years he marched in the annual Association of Jewish Ex Servicemen’s parade and he did so because he wanted to vigorously reinforce the fact that British Jews had played their full part in the defeat of fascism.

Bernard enjoyed competing. He played table tennis to a high standard, was a keen and able Bridge player and the winner of a Cup in the UK National Scrabble Championship. He would recount his various victories in these competitions with great relish.

In the Southend and Westcliff community where he and Ray had many good friends, Bernard was a leading light in the town’s social life and as leader of the Jewish Youth Club he is remembered there with affection by a generation of men and women

He and Ray were still delivering meals-on-wheels in their 70s. He also chaired a regular discussion group for older members of the community, and frequently gave talks, mainly about the old East End where he had once been the Stepney Local Historian.

It’s been said that old age is the most unexpected of all things that happen to a man. It certainly caught Bernard on the hop.

He and Ray had lived happily in Golders Green for over a decade but as Ray’s mental and physical health slowly deteriorated, Bernard found himself having to cope with the routine domestic matters that had largely been his wife’s province.

He did his best during this difficult time but they were finally unable to cope and went together into a Retirement Home. But even there, Bernard’s overwhelming sense of responsibility would not rest and he found it difficult to relinquish his familiar role as Ray’s carer.

Bernard’s greatest pleasure in life was his family and he was never happier than when he and Ray were surrounded by their sons, daughters-in-law and grandsons.

Ray passed away on January 18th 2003, two days short of her 90th birthday. They had been married for nearly 67 years and were indivisible.

Exactly one year later and with his old sharpness diminished, Bernard decided to join her. And like the old soldier of legend he faded away during the third week of January.

But always, from its earliest beginnings as a hopeful young boy in the East End to the last long days it was a life guided by devotion to his family, duty fulfilled to his colleagues and the community and a love of his country.