While studying at one of London’s most prestigious Church of England schools, Barbara Hines’s teenage son Trevor decided to convert to Judaism.
His German-born, Australia-raised mother had no inkling of her own Jewish ancestry, having been raised a Christian in Sydney and later embarking on a spiritual journey through Hinduism, Sufism and Buddhism.
Her son called his elderly German-born grandmother back in Australia to inform her of the decision, to which she casually replied: "Oh, that’s interesting. My mother and grandmother were both Jewish."
“It was a spark from within,” Barbara Hines told JNS in an interview in her Jerusalem home last week.
Unexpected life twist
Her son’s decision and the fateful phone call changed her life.
Decades earlier, Hines left Germany with her parents after World War II as a five-year-old girl bound for Australia. As the ship pulled away from the port, she remembers calling out to her relatives, “Don’t worry, I will be back.”
Hines’s parents never told their two daughters that they were Jews.
She would only find out after her son’s decision that her father, who had been dismissed from the Luftwaffe before the Holocaust because he was Jewish, had moved to Australia because he didn’t want to look at Germans and think about what they did during the war.
The young girl grew up in Sydney surrounded by beaches and books, unaware she was Jewish, with fond memories celebrating Christmas and Easter.
“I didn’t know what Judaism was until I was at the University of Sydney and found myself surrounded by Jewish friends,” she recalled.
One of the Jewish students at the university wanted to date her, but his family would not allow it because she was German, Hines said.
After university, she taught French and English in Germany for two years and made her first trip to Israel with a group of German teachers and students.
She met her American husband, Gerald, a real estate developer while on a trip to Monte Carlo. After studying at the New York School of Interior Design in Manhattan and the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, the couple married and moved around the world with homes in the U.S., London and the south of France.
Roots discovery
When Hines’s son was 14 years old and at Westminster School in London, he began to be drawn to Judaism. He then surprised his parents by announcing he wanted to convert. Almost accidentally, his mother then discovered her own family history.
Hines and her daughter began studying Judaism in his wake.
“I had a slow awakening which made me realize that this is my heritage and that we had been disconnected from it because of Adolf Hitler,” she said. “I thought, are we going to let other people determine my heritage?”
Artwork shift to Jerusalem
As she immersed herself in Jewish education with the help of local Chabad centers, Hines, an artist who was used to painting portraits, landscapes and florals under the bougainvilleas in her studio in the south of France and then in Florida, shifted her focus to biblical stories and the landscape of Israel, with an emphasis on Jerusalem.
She connected her canvases to the Holy Land by mixing her paints with soil and sand shipped from Israel.
After her husband died in 2020, she realized she did not have to stay in the U.S. even though her children and grandchildren were in New York and California, and decided to come to Jerusalem.
‘I felt I’ve come home’
Last year, Hines hosted an evening at her house in Jerusalem’s German Colony neighborhood. During the event, she met Rabbi Natan Ophir, a Philadelphia native and father of five with 24 grandchildren, who previously served as rabbi of the Hebrew University for 16 years.
They went on their first date at the Moshe Castel Museum of Art in Ma’ale Adumim, and tied the knot this spring.
Hines’s first solo exhibition opened last week at the museum, east of Jerusalem, where it will be on display for the next two months.
“I always felt like a stranger abroad,” she said. “I feel I’ve come home.”