SCoJeC was delighted to join the Friends of the Maclaurin Gallery to make new links between the Cultural Connections festival of Jewish arts and culture that has been running all summer at the Gallery, and our own Klezmer, Baroque, and Tartan musical tour of Scotland.
The Friends of the Gallery provided a beautiful kosher lunch to celebrate the end of the immensely popular exhibition that opened in July, with art by Jewish artists Benno Schotz, Josef Herman, Hannah Frank, and Jankel Adler, and that, for the first month, also included Judah Passow's new photographic essay on Scots Jews.
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Over lunch, we were very interested to hear from one of the participants that his father had played the organ at Garnethill Synagogue in the 1950s. Deborah Haase from the Scottish Jewish Archives Centre also told us about her fascinating discovery that Rozelle House had an earlier Jewish connection: the Hamilton family who lived there during the Second World War had fostered two Jewish children who escaped from Nazi Germany on the Kindertransport shortly before the outbreak of war. The widower of one of these children attended the opening of the exhibition, and after we appealed in the local press for anyone who knew either of the children to come forward, we were contacted by a lady who had been a childhood friend, and she came to this closing event.
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After lunch, we enjoyed an open air concert in the blazing September sunshine, complete with lyrical baroque, emotional Scottish traditional tunes and searing klezmer melodies. The courtyard at Rozelle House, the home of the Maclaurin Gallery, made a perfect setting for dancing!
