When Chaim Neslen chaired the Friends of Yiddish he always made a point of including my mother, who was developing dementia. She sang her childhood repertoire of Yiddish songs – eventually just two of them – to Chaim’s accompaniment on the guitar. He put an enormous amount of effort into producing folders of different songs for each meeting, in order to pass on the rich tradition of Yiddish song and literature that the Holocaust had failed to obliterate.
When the east London group closed in 2011, after more than 70 years, Chaim tried valiantly to establish a similar one in north-west London, but that too suffered from falling rolls.
A person of unfaltering principle, he stood firm by his criticism of the state of Israel and how it treated Palestinians, maintaining that if he had been called to serve in the Suez crisis he would have fought against the Israelis. He supported many causes of the vulnerable and wronged in society.
