Father, if I had to describe you in a few words, I would choose concepts such as "dedication", "principled" and "modesty".
My father's first test with dedication and being principled came at the end of his secondary school education in Cardiff (capital of Wales) in 1940 when he was 18, when he volunteered to join the Royal Air Force. Britain was suffering from continual waves of German bombers and only the steadfastness of the RAF prevented an even harder blow. Already in those days my father had heard about the suffering of the Jews in Germany and Poland, and his principles led him to devote his life to their memory.
In 1942, my father's older brother died in Malta while he was serving in the Navy on a mine-sweeper. At this moment, my father's life changed and he turned his dedication towards his grieving parents. This dedication continued until their deaths in 1964 [IIRC my paternal grand-mother died first, her grieving husband a mere three weeks later. My maternal grand-father died before I was born and my grand-mother died three months after I was born, so basically I grew up without grandparents]. We had moved a few years previous to Bristol in order to be closer to his parents, and after their deaths, my parents realised that despite their desire to return to Cardiff and a better Jewish community, they were prepared to sacrifice a few years so that I might be able to attend a high ranking secondary school (aka Bristol Grammar School).
For some reason, I don't remember my father being a dominant figure in my childhood, although there is one incident from the snowy winter of 1963 that is incised into my memory and points out how principled my father was. I had gone to visit a friend and my father had come to take me home. For some reason that I do not remember, we had to travel that day on the bus. As opposed to Israel, there are a fixed number of places on a British bus, and the conductors strictly enforced this number. The bus came, people piled on and on and on, and by the time that we alighted, there was only one spare place. I suggested that my father should sit and I would sit on his lap, but he refused as we would be exceeding the maximum number of passengers. So due the strong principles of my father, we were forced to wait for the next bus in the freezing cold.
I wasn't aware of this at the time, but my father translated his dedication, his being principled and his modesty to positive actions within the small Jewish community of Bristol: he worked for the Jewish burial society, and on Christian holidays would volunteer to work in the major hospital in the city so that Christian workers could be with their families.
After I left home, my father dedicated himself to my mother, following which that dedication grew and grew as my mother's health declined. This dedication grew to the extent that he would not allow anyone else to take care of her. After my mother's death, my wife and I were very apprehensive about how he would continue without his wife after 50 years of marriage.
My father's main hobby - if not his sole hobby - was gardening. Somehow this love of gardening passed over me but was transferred to my wife [this is a self-deprecatory joke]. We had a large garden in Bristol with a few trees and many well looked-after flowers. When my parents moved back from Bristol to Cardiff in the mid-70s, they lived in a bungalow, also with a large and well-looked after garden. Possibly my father's major contribution to Tzora was the large garden that he developed and tended next to his house, until his physical capabilities no longer supported this.
As opposed to my mother, who suffered from serious medical problems, and myself, when sometimes it seems that my best friend is the flu virus [another self-deprecatory joke], my father was never ill. Nine years ago we celebrated his 90th birthday with a party at the Tel Aviv port, and he was lucid and in complete control of his senses. I recently discovered that I had written the following on his birthday card
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