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The Life of Judith Gilbert in England

Judy and her siblings
Judy as a kid
My grandmother's name is Judy Gilbert, she was born in 1949

Judith Gilbert

Judith Goldstein, who goes by the name Judy was born on March 12, 1949, in London, in the same room she still sleeps in today. Judy was born four years after the Holocaust ended. Judy has three siblings, an older sister, Miri (Miriam), and two younger brothers, Michael and Johnny (Jonathan). Judy would get along with them very well. Her parents were Ruth and Arpad, who came to London from Slovakia sold fur coats, and her mother was his model. She would walk in the street, and people would buy them from her.

תמונה 1

Judy's father, Arpad

תמונה 2

Judy and her siblings

 

Judy liked to do a lot of sport. She was in a sports team devoted to different kinds of ball games, and she also did gymnastics and the long jump. She was also very good at piano, she won a piano contest first place twice in a row! Judy did not go to a Jewish school, because there was only one in London and her sister went to it and didn’t like it, so every Friday she would have to go home early before all of the other kids. She would also have to bring her own special kosher food.

Judy didn’t feel very different from the other kids in the primary school because a third of the kids where Jewish, but in her secondary school there was a quota and only 24 Jews were allowed in. Judy did very well in school, she especially did well in math and science. Judy liked her school a lot, unlike most kids who do not. Judy never got in trouble in primary school, whereas in her secondary school she got detention a lot for being late. At the age of thirteen Judy started sharing a room with her mom’s mom. Her grandmother started living with them since her husband died, because she was not a very well woman and she sometimes got heart attacks, so she would have no one to help her or alert someone else if she had a heart attack.

Judy’s parents decided on the arrangement so that if her grandmother had a heart attack in the night, Judy might realize and be able to alert her parents. Judy was not a very good sleeper. On December 11, 1964, when Judy was fifteen, her grandmother died at the age of 79. It was a Friday night, and, after as usual Judy had gone out with her friends after dinner. When she came back, her sister opened the door in tears. Miri told Judy that their grandmother had died of a heart attack. They were all very sad.

Four years later, soon after Miri had gotten married, Arpad, Judy’s father, died of leukemia. It was December 11, 1968. Arpad died at the age of 56, Judy was only nineteen. At the time, Judy was attending University College London dental school, where she enrolled straight after high school. Her degree program was four years plus one term long. Judy liked college because of all of the interesting things that they did. She liked learning how the body works, and about all the different illnesses and medicines. But she didn’t like having to cut up a body to learn about muscles, bones, blood vessels, and nerves.

In 1970, before she was qualified as a dentist, Judy got married to a man named Geoffrey Gilbert. Geoffrey was also learning dentistry in college. They met at a society for all Jewish dental and medical students in London. They started to go out a few weeks after the meeting, when Geoffrey asked her to a picnic. Judy’s father had died only a few months before, so they could not go out to movies, parties, or shows. They went out for about seven months before they got engaged on December 25, 1969. Nine months later, on September 6, 1970, they got married. Two months after their wedding, Ruth remarried. By then Geoffrey was studying to be an orthodontist and Judy was working on securing her qualification as a dentist.

As soon as she qualified, she began working as a school dentist in four different schools. She stopped working a week before she had her first baby. That baby,Dalia, was born on December 15, 1972, she turned out to be the eldest of six! Thirteen months later, on January 27, 1974, Judy and Geoffrey had their second child, Avrom. On July 11, 1976, in the middle of a heatwave, Arieh was born, and on December 17, 1978, during a snowy spell, Ilana, was born. On June 3, 1981, Sarah was born, and on January 22, 1984, Benjy, their sixth and final child was born. One month after Dalia’s birth, Geoffrey opened an orthodontic practice in their house. Judy worked as Geoffrey’s nurse and receptionist. Judy went back to working part time as a dentist only when Avrom was six months old. In 1984 they started up a new, bigger surgery out of the house and Judy started to work with him as an Orthodontist.

תמונה 3

הזוית האישית

היה לי מאוד כייף ללמוד על סבתא שלי, אני מאוד שמחה שאני קיבלתי את הזכות ללמוד עליה ולכתוב סיפור עליה. אני למדתי הרבה וזאת היתה חוויה כייפית ומעניינת.

מילון

quota
quotas in employment and education are numerical requirements for hiring, promoting, admitting and/or graduating members of a particular racial group. Racial quotas are often established as means of diminishing racial

ציטוטים

”She was also very good at piano, she won a piano contest first place“

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