THE old rabbi jogging down a Liverpool street has to accept that his family’s noble tradition is about to end after more than 500 years. David Charters reports

How proud they would have been of their boy, if they could have seen him, those men, bearded like the ancient prophets, whose voices called to God, when the wind was high and keen, full of snow and menace, along Poland’s Russian border.

Sometimes they called in gratitude, sometimes in sorrow. That spirit and acceptance of fate stayed with the family, even when they had to flee persecution to make more prosperous tomorrows in strange lands.

So more than 500 years of faith bolstered the knees of the tiny rabbi, as he stood before Mr Universe and summoned all his strength like Samson of old.

Heave-ho!

And then his legs, arms and trunk straightened until he held the dumbells aloft and sweat rinsed his hair.

This was a triumph for Rabbi Norman Zalud, known affectionately as the Mighty Atom, who had begun his weight-training as a podgy boy hoping to look tougher.

And standing before him with admiration in his eyes was Arnold Dyson, the former Mr Universe, who presented Norman with his certificate and trophy for lifting 260 pounds, then a regional record.

That was a moment in a Liverpool gymnasium almost 50 years ago, but even today you can see Rabbi Norman out training in his swish vest and shorts, the last of a noble line.

He is 75 now, but time has smiled graciously on this wee sprite of a man in a perfectly tailored dove-grey suit, his neat black shoes shining in the pale sun of early winter.

For 16 generations his family have been rabbis, using their full Polish surname of Zaludkowski before coming to Britain, where we are notoriously weak at pronouncing long foreign words. However, Harvey and David the only sons of Norman and his wife Barbara, have no plans to follow the rabbinical tradition, which will, therefore, end.

After 31 years, Norman has retired as the salaried rabbi at the Liverpool Progressive Synagogue on Church Road North, Wavertree, though he will remain in an emeritus capacity. He will also continue as the rabbi at the Sha’rei Shalom North Manchester Reform Synagogue and with his visits to 11 prisons across the north west, including Liverpool Prison, Walton, and Altcourse Prison, Fazakerley.

And then there is his reputation as a humourist, lacing his sermons with funny stories, which led to him being billed, along with a Hindu, a Sikh and a Christian for a televised night of clerical stand-up at the Liverpool Rawhide Club, as part of the city’s Festival of Comedy in 2004.

But today Norman is standing in front of the Ark at his synagogue, examining the sacred scrolls of the Torah, the five books of Moses, copied by a scribe on to rolled sheets of cured lambskin.

This is suburban Liverpool, opposite the old Abbey Cinema and near the Bluecoats School, but he is a scholar in the same Judaic tradition, which held his family together, under God, in the village of Shishlovitz on the Polish/Russian border, where the terrible pogroms were part of a Jewish experience, not dissimilar to that portrayed in the musical, Fiddler on the Roof.

But Norman was born in the comparative safety of Britain, the son of Jacob ( who had shortened the family name to Zalud) and his wife, Enia Ansevitch.

Jacob, the son of Noah, had been born in the late 19th century. Like his father he was a cantor, whose magnificent singing voice enabled him to go on concert tours in Poland and Russia, where he knew Rasputin in the dying days of the Tsardom. He then moved to Germany, singing in operas in Berlin.

“He had a wonderful life, though he didn’t have a lot of money, he was a young fellow,” says Norman. “In the 1920s, just before the rise of Hitler, he went to Belgium. After that he came to Britain. At first he was a cantor in the Gorbals area of Glasgow, where there was a big Jewish population. He was a minister by then. He didn’t have the rabbinic qualification, but he was like a reverend gentleman. As an ordained minister, he was able to conduct the services, being a rabbi is a further accolade.

“He came to Liverpool in the late 1920s and met my mother. They married in 1930 at the Southport Hebrew Congregation synagogue.”

Two years later Norman was born in Liverpool, followed by his sister Ethel (Eve), who became a concert pianist and married a doctor. She now teaches at Merchant Taylors’ School, Crosby.

Norman went to Quarry Bank School, Allerton, Liverpool, before training for seven years as a rabbi at the Jews’ College, London, doing his practical course with the small Jewish congregation in Birkenhead.

“When I left Jews’ College, I came to Liverpool,” he says. “Like my father and grandfather, I am a trained singer, a lyric baritone.”

He breaks off to practise the scales, showing that his voice still has a splendid range. “I am a bit unusual,” he muses with gentle understatement, before furthering his point. “You see, there are not many rabbis who are cantors.”

There aren’t many rabbis who are cantors, weight-lifters, keep-fit experts and comedians either.

But at school life wasn’t so promising for the boy who stopped growing at 5ft 3½ins. As you can imagine, Norman places a strong emphasis on that half-inch, lest it be lost. But losing inches was once his ambition.

“I was very fat and I was bullied at school,” Norman recalls, but after he left, he decided that he wouldn’t allow that to happen to him again.

“That is why I got into the weight training,” he says. “I was determined because I had heard of Arnold (nicknamed Fred) Dyson and I had read these magazines about very strong men. I went to the place where his studio was (Oxford Street, Liverpool) and I walked past it for months. Then one day I rang the bell and this colossus comes to the door and said, ‘yes lad’. I said I wanted to train, NOW. If he wouldn’t take me NOW, I wouldn’t do it. I was a little fat tub and I was sick of it. Arnold Dyson transformed me.

“I am a great advocate of physical fitness and health.”

His father late Jacob had also been a fit and strong man, able to do exercises into his 90s.

But darkening the lives of all European Jews are memories of the Holocaust, the stain of evil that will never disappear. Norman’s immediate family were safe in England, but other relatives were not. He has never visited his ancestral homeland, but thinks that one day he should see the death camps, as a duty of blood.

“I lost a lot of family to the Nazis,” he says. “There is a most remarkable story. Two years after the end of the war my father and Uncle Joseph wanted to see if they could find out where the remnants of the family were and they went to Blankenberg (a holiday resort in Belgium, the country where some of the family had lived before the war). My cousin, Emil, and I went with them. We were only kids.”

They organised a game of cricket on the beach with some other people. “I was fielding on the boundary and a middle-aged woman came up to me and said ‘Zaludkowski’, then she asked me in Yiddish where my father was. This woman and her sister, who was very beautiful like Ingrid Bergman, had been the playthings of the Nazi officers. You know what I mean. My father and my uncle walked up and down for 10 days listening to the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis against them. I could see my father was growing grey and old and I said, ‘Dad this is not for you. You must stop this’. But he said ‘no’.”

Arrangements began for a great family reunion.

“It turned out that his uncle and aunt were living in Brussels,” says Norman. “For four years Righteous Gentiles had shielded them from the Nazis in the fourth floor of a house. My dad told me that were were going to see them and I shall never forget it. He got a couple of bottles of Champagne and we went to Brussels. I can always remember it, see I’ve got a frog in my throat thinking about it.”

Norman’s blue eyes clouded with emotion.

“My grandfather’s brother and his wife were sitting at the end of the table, very old people,” he recalls. “My uncle and my father walked in with us. My great uncle looked at us and lifted his arms and said, ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one’ and he wept. We all wept. It was the most amazing thing. But I noticed that the two women (who had been abused by the Nazis) and didn’t believe in God any more because they had suffered so much, suddenly believed again.”

Well, Norman has always believed. Faith has held his people together. Perhaps sometimes in the morning, he smiles into the shaving mirror at the faces of ancestors from another time and another place.

Plenty of bouquets

Rabbi Norman married Barbara Rose, a Manchester beauty queen of 5ft 2ins, in 1965. Both their sons, Harvey, 41, and David, 36, are unmarried and work in the media. Neither has any intention of becoming a rabbi, so a family tradition dating back to the Poland of 500 years ago will end.

Is Norman disappointed that they haven’t followed him? “It’s a very hard job,” he says. “You get a lot of bouquets, but you also get a lot of brickbats. You have got to have shoulders like a barn-door. You can get aggravation and you can get praise. It is a very hard thing, but my whole life has been in it.”

Maybe there is a little left unsaid in that answer. But a swift glance at Norman tells us that there will be a Rabbi Zalud around for many years to come.