I went home last week.  Or at least, I went to the place that used to be home.

Newcastle in early light. Streets that remember me more clearly than I remember them. A turn taken without thinking, a corner that arrives a second before the memory does.

This time, I returned not as I once was — a child moving between house, school and synagogue — but as an author, launching a book that carries parts of that earlier life within it.

There is something quietly disorienting about bringing your present self into your past geography.

The two do not quite align.

I went to Jesmond.  The synagogue is no longer there — at least, not as it once was.

The building remains. The frontage is still recognisable. There is a plaque marking what it was.

But it is now flats. Windows where there were once prayers. Private spaces where there was once a community.

And yet — not entirely erased. A trace remains. A marker. A quiet insistence that something happened here.  I stood there longer than I expected to.

Not because I thought I would recognise it —but because I almost did.

I remember a visit to our cheder in Newcastle. It must have been 1979.

Lord Jakobovits came to see us — the Chief Rabbi, in a small northern classroom. I don’t remember everything he said. I don’t think I understood most of it at the time.

But I remember the feeling of it.  That something important had come to us.That Jewish life — our Jewish life — was not small, or peripheral, or separate........

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