Jeremy and our son were making the customary visits to the cemeteries where our grandparents, great grandparents and Jeremy’s great great grandmother are buried, which we do just before the Jewish New Year.

This is the stone (in Plashet cemetery in East Ham) commemorating Jeremy’s great great grandmother who was born in 1839 in the village of Gombin fifty miles from Warsaw. Gombin was famous for its wooden synagogue, which was burnt to the ground by the Nazis, and the Magen Avraham was born there in the 17th Century and wrote a famous commentary on Jewish Law. Three thousand Jews who lived in Gombin in 1939 were murdered in the holocaust including many of Jeremy’ a mother’s cousins.