A few days ago, I phoned a friend and colleague to wish him mazal tov on his grandson’s bar mitzvah. Like me, he has been a mohel for decades and has performed thousands of circumcisions.
“I can’t speak long,” he said. “I’m just about to do a brit.”
There was nothing unusual in that. Until he added:
“He’s 76.”
The brit was for a man named Michael (not his real name).
Seventy-six years old. A retired teacher and zoologist. An honors graduate. An amateur astronomer who has published many papers. A man who spent fourteen years teaching in Zimbabwe and Botswana, who worked in Oman, the Emirates, and Saudi Arabia, who lived for two years in Bangladesh. A man who had traveled widely, thought deeply, and built a rich, full life.
And earlier this week, at the age of 76, he entered the covenant of Abraham.
I asked Michael if he would be willing to tell me why.
His answer began not in a synagogue, but amidst a vile antisemitic protest in Manchester, UK – and with two words shouted from a crowd:
Sieg Heil. Hail, victory. The “Nazi salute.”
Michael was born in the UK. His mother was Jewish; his father was not. But he did not know this – not until he was nine years old, when his brother, five years his senior, told him, almost casually, that he was Jewish.
It made little impression on him. He grew up, studied, built a career, explored the world.
Judaism was a biographical detail, not an identity. A fact, not a calling.
That changed shortly after October 7, 2023.
Michael lives in Altrincham, near Manchester. One day, shortly after the Hamas massacre in southern Israel, he took the tram into the city center to repair his camera. As he passed by Manchester’s Central Library, he encountered a large pro-Palestinian demonstration. He thought little of it. Britain is a country of protests.
Then he heard it.
“Sieg Heil. Sieg Heil.”
He told me that something inside him stirred in a way he had never experienced before. He described it as a scene from George Orwell’s Animal Farm – the final sequence, when the animals look through the window and see pigs and farmers dining together, indistinguishable from one another. “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig… but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
Language of Nazi Germany resurfaces
For Michael, the extreme Left and the extreme Right had folded into each other. The chant of Sieg Heil at a modern political rally in Manchester felt like history coming full circle.
The language of Nazi Germany was echoing in modern Manchester.
He was in shock.
His mother had escaped Germany in 1939. She survived; her parents did not. His maternal grandfather died in Theresienstadt. His maternal grandmother was murdered in Auschwitz.
And now, in the country that had given his mother refuge, he was hearing the salute of her persecutors.
“It felt,” he told me, as though it was starting all over again.”
Something stirred – not fear, but recognition.
In the days that followed, he spoke to someone locally who put him in touch with Bowdon Synagogue in south Manchester. There he met Rabbi Dovid Lewis. He began attending services. The rabbi and the community welcomed him gently, without pressure, without drama.
After some time, Rabbi Lewis pointed out something simple but profound: according to Jewish law, Michael was Jewish. His mother was Jewish. He did not need conversion: He needed connection.
And, of course, he needed a brit milah.
Lewis put him in touch with my colleague and, earlier this week, in a quiet room in Manchester, a 76-year-old man entered the covenant first given to Abraham nearly four thousand years ago.
I have performed britot on babies only eight days old. I have been part of conversions for adults in their 20s and 30s. But there is something indescribably powerful about a man of 76 entering the covenant of Abraham.
But the story does not end there.
Michael told me that the cry of Sieg Heil did more than shock him. It propelled him.
He began researching his mother’s side of the family. He discovered relatives in Bolivia and Argentina. He reached out. They responded. Connections were restored.
He uncovered another remarkable link. His great aunt had married Rabbi Aaron Tanzer, an eminent rabbi in Württemberg, whose synagogue was destroyed on Kristallnacht. In a twisted irony, Tanzer had served as a Feldrabbiner (Jewish chaplain) in the German army in the First World War.
Michael has since connected, via Zoom, with Rabbi Tanzer’s descendants.
A family once scattered to the four corners of the earth – Germany, Britain, South America – has begun to find its way back to one another.
All because of a Nazi chant from the mouths of modern antisemites, meant to intimidate.
Michael told me that he feels he is honoring his mother and her parents. He feels he is carrying their memory forward not as victims, but as ancestors.
He has made close friends at the synagogue. He has found rhythm in the prayers, warmth in the community, meaning in the rituals.
“It feels,” he said simply, “like coming home.”
There is a profound irony here. Sieg Heil was meant to erase Jews, to dehumanize them, to finish what the camps had begun. Yet in this case, it awakened the Jew inside.
I hesitate to frame this as “Hitler’s gift,” because there is no gift in evil. The Holocaust was an abyss. October 7 was an abyss.
And yet, Jewish history has always contained this paradox: attempts to crush us often remind us of who we are.
Pharaoh enslaved us; we became a nation.
Haman plotted annihilation; we reaffirmed our covenant.
The Soviet regime tried to silence Jewish identity; refuseniks lit Shabbat candles in defiance.
Antisemitism is not a gift: It is a moral sickness. October 7 was not a blessing in disguise. The surge of hatred we are witnessing today is not redemptive.
And yet, the Jewish soul has a stubborn quality. Attempts to intimidate it sometimes strengthen it. Attempts to erase it sometimes clarify it.
Michael could have walked past that demonstration and shaken his head. He could have dismissed the chants as the noise of extremists. He could have retreated into his private life.
Instead, he asked himself a question: If they hate me as a Jew, what does it mean to live as one?
At 76, he answered that question with a serious commitment to the covenant.
In a quiet room in Manchester this week, without headlines or fanfare, a man chose to bind himself to a chain that stretches back to Abraham and forward to generations he will never meet.
Michael became Aharon, named after his illustrious uncle.
After the brit, Rabbi Lewis asked him to cover his eyes and he recited the “Shema.”
That courageous man decided that Jewish history would not end with silence.
Some will read this story and focus on the hatred that triggered it. I prefer to focus on the spirit it revealed.
They shouted Sieg Heil.
He chose to be a Jew.
You can shout Sieg Heil. But you can’t kill the Jew inside.
The writer is a rabbi and physician. He writes and teaches on Jewish ethics, leadership, and resilience.