Son’s conversion led painter to her hidden roots

While studying at one of London’s most prestigious Church of England schools, Barbara Hines’ teenage son, Trevor, decided to convert to Judaism.

His German-born, Australia-raised mother had no inkling of her own Jewish ancestry. She had been raised a Christian in Sydney and later embarked on a spiritual journey through Hinduism, Sufism and Buddhism.

Her son called his elderly German-born grandmother in Australia to tell her of his decision. She casually replied: “Oh, that’s interesting. My mother and grandmother were both Jewish.”

“It was a spark from within,” Hines told JNS in an interview at her Jerusalem home.

Her son’s decision and that fateful phone call changed her life.

Decades earlier, after World War II, Hines left Germany with her parents as a 5-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’ parents never told their two daughters that they were Jews.

Only after her son’s decision did she learn that her father had been dismissed from the Luftwaffe before the Holocaust for being Jewish. He moved the family to Australia because he didn’t want to look at Germans and think about what they had done during the war.

The young girl grew up in Sydney surrounded by beaches and books, unaware she was Jewish, with fond memories of 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, on a trip to Monte Carlo. She went on to study at the New York School of Interior Design in Manhattan and the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, and the couple married and moved around the world, with homes in the US, London and the south of France.

Trevor was 14 and a student at Westminster School in London when he began to be drawn to Judaism. After his announcement — and his mother’s almost accidental discovery of her 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?”

As she immersed herself in Jewish learning with the help of local Chabad centers, Hines — an artist accustomed to painting portraits, landscapes and florals under the bougainvilleas of her studio in the south of France, and later 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 US, even though her children and grandchildren were in New York and California, and decided to move to Jerusalem.

Last year, Hines hosted an evening at her home in Jerusalem’s German Colony neighborhood. There she met Rabbi Natan Ophir, a Philadelphia native and father of five with 24 grandchildren, who served for 16 years as rabbi of the Hebrew University.

They went on their first date at the Moshe Castel Museum of Art in Ma’ale Adumim, east of Jerusalem, and married this spring.

Hines’ solo exhibition will be on display for the next two months.

“I always felt like a stranger abroad,” she said. “I feel I’ve come home.” —JNS