BIG INTERVIEW 18—MARYLEBONE JOURNAL


his mother Anna with refugees.” Walter would make sure that his daughter finished her degree. At home, the family’s German


roots remained apparent. “There was a lot of German spoken,” says Julia. “They spoke it when they didn’t want me to understand. I learned a bit, though. My maternal grandmother, who lived in Wimbledon, never learned very good English and we saw a lot of her, went to Wimbledon for lunch with her nearly every Sunday and to the Schwab grandmother on a Friday night.” Did Julia’s family history shape her


future to some degree? “I think it must have done,” she concedes. “I certainly think that I have been more allied to refugee and asylum issues as a result of my childhood. We have a small family charity, The Schwab Trust, which helps young refugees and asylum seekers with education, which is what people did for my mum.” There were other more physical


manifestations of her mother’s erstwhile refugee status. “After my mother died aged 86, it took forever to clear their home. Being a refugee in some cases makes you cling on to your belongings. My mother never threw anything away between 1938 and 2001 – there were 1,200 works of art and 12,000 books, Schiller and Goethe in Gothic script that you couldn’t give away. The next owners had to replace the floor!” Family finances were tight when


Julia was a child, studying at South Hampstead High. “My father did about four jobs in order to pay for my education, which was part of his very considerable ambition,” she remembers. “Until 1960, there was very little money about, then compensation came from Germany and my father was promoted in the Civil Service, and things became noticeably easier. My father stopped worrying and doing the pools on Saturday night. I got new clothes, whereas when I was little, it was just hand-me-downs from the cousins. I was always wearing school uniform two patterns out of date. It still rankles.


FEATURES


I remember going to Dickins & Jones – I had to have a new blazer and it was a major, major expenditure.” Julia read Assyriology (Babylonian


and Hebrew) at Newnham College Cambridge (“I am a failed archaeologist,” she says with a grin), and it was here that she met her future husband, Anthony Neuberger. “I was 21, he must have been 20; we married at 23 and 21 and we have been married for 37 years,” she says proudly. The couple have two children – daughter Harriet, a psychiatric social worker and son Matthew, a civil servant like his grandfather. Becoming a rabbi was almost


entirely accidental. “I think that it was Nicholas de Lange who suggested


I think about becoming a rabbi. He asked me to come to Leo Baeck College, Europe’s largest Jewish Progressive University and Rabbinic College, one day a week for my last year at university. I came as a student and spent four years there.” She insists that she wasn’t actually


particularly religious – “It was much more an academic interest,” she says – and at first she was concerned about whether being a rabbi would prove sufficiently academically rigorous for her. At Leo Baeck, she found a mentor in Hugo Gryn, a familiar fixture on Radio 4’s Moral Maze who would himself serve for 32 years as senior rabbi of the West London Synagogue before his death in 1996. “I knew him well and he had


Images: Ben Coster


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