Games

Perry’s Story…

Seed Secures the Future of Jewish Families

Seed’s Associate National Director, Rabbi Herman with Perry Dowell

I was brought up with a strong Jewish identity but we didn’t really keep anything. I didn’t know how to read Hebrew let alone know my way around a siddur.

Just after 9/11 my wife and I went to Israel for a wedding. We didn’t keep anything at that point. It was Rosh Hashanah and I went for a night out with a friend, coming back to the hotel room at 5 o’clock in the morning to a very unhappy wife who was pregnant with our second child and holding our crying 18-month old. She said “I think you need to go to shul in the morning and seek forgiveness!”

So I went to the shul in the hotel that day. I didn’t understand anything that was going on with the service - I didn’t know if I was picking up a siddur or a machzor, if it was upside down or the right way up! I was a bit embarrassed that I didn’t know anything, and I felt that I really should.

After we flew back to London (on Shabbat Shuva – probably not the best time to get on an aeroplane!) I decided to go to the Edgware United Synagogue for the first time, and soon after that I was lucky enough to be introduced to Rabbi Malcolm Herman by a close friend. He mentioned that there was a Seed weekend a couple of weeks later, and my wife wanted to go. I agreed but said that I wouldn’t go to any shiurim or anything like that – I would just watch TV in the room.

Needless to say, the television wasn’t switched on once. All the rabbonim were so engaging and enthusiastic – I couldn’t help but be taken along for the ride. We spent Friday night dinner with Rabbi and Rebbetzen Silver, and when everyone else had gone to bed we were still sitting there talking. It was the most incredible experience.

For the next five years we went to every Seed seminar we could – they were great fun and the kids loved them. I found Seed created such a brilliant, non-judgemental environment and we both loved listening to the talks and asking questions to the educators.

Not long after I met Rabbi Herman, he invited my wife and I to eat in their small pop-up Succah. It was just the four of us and I was a bit worried at first– I had never been in a Succah in my life! I remember how welcome and comfortable he made us feel and that he sang zemirot and gave divrei Torah. That experience made everything else after that seem much less intimidating and more manageable.

Rabbi Herman really took me under his wing and he soon set me up with a One2One learning partner. Rabbi Gershon Weingarten and I then learned together for five years, starting with things like basic Chumash and the structure of the siddur. If someone had told me at the start of that five years that I would have ended up learning gemara with a great rabbi, I would have thought they were mad.

The past 20 years have been an incredible journey – one that we would never have embarked on without Seed. They opened up that opportunity for me to learn, allowing someone like me, coming from a non-frum background, to start to consume and understand Yiddishkeit in manageable bite-size pieces. They were amazing at knowing exactly where I was on that path and pitching opportunities to learn and to grow at the right level and at the right time.

Without Seed I would never have completed a number of masechtas of gemara, or completed a siyum ha’shas mishnayos. I daven from the amud on a regular basis and I’ve taught people who come to the Seed shul how to daven as well. I was the gabbai there for seven years and I’m now the chairman. My daughters have gone from being children participating in a Seed seminar to being madrichot at Seed seminars and going to sem, which makes us very proud - and I think makes the Seed rabbonim very proud as well.

If we hadn’t found Seed and gone down this path, I don’t think my family would be where they are today. Seed allows you to become the best person that you can be - I feel that I am an enhanced version of my previous self. I’m more tolerant and I have more patience with my family and others outside of my family. I have a thirst for learning that was ignited by Seed. It’s a journey that is never finished, and that’s what I love about it.

Perry’s is just one story amongst thousands. Thousands of Jewish people have journeyed with Seed to find the meaning and depth within Torah since the summer of 1979 when Rabbi Joey Grunfeld first gathered together a group of yeshiva students from Gateshead to teach professionals from the Birmingham Jewish community ‘one to one’ for two weeks.

Our alumni have children and even grandchildren of their own who continue to pass on the flame of Judaism that was first ignited by Seed, and every year more new faces come through our doors and take their place in the bigger Seed family.

Please, open your hearts to us on the 12th and 13th June for our match-fund campaign, and help us to educate thousands more Jewish families for generations to come.