WE should all have been sitting in a small circle, gathered round Vicki Juditz as she told us the funny, sad and thoughtful true story about her conversion to Judaism. The tiny, new Jewish Community Centre in Robinson Road provided almost that kind of intimacy, although the fierce air-conditioner sometimes came between the audience and the actor. To talk - just to talk - for more than two hours, and keep the entire audience with her, was an extraordinary feat of story-telling. Juditz achieved it by creating word-pictures - of the small club in New York where she first met her Jewish musician boyfriend, of the old Jewish lady dressed all in pink whom she helped cross the road, of the deliciously comic tour she had on the Rhine, and of the small town in Germany where she met her aunt and uncle, and understood more about the complexity of what happened to people's sense of morality during World War II. She also did the voices - not so that they intruded on her own narrative, but so they brought to life some of the people who had helped her to decide to convert. Stephen, her boyfriend, had said he could not marry her because she was not Jewish, so, following her mother's simple guidelines for catching a husband ('R' for resourceful) she started going to classes. It was only later, after she had left Stephen and gone to California, that she started becoming genuinely interested in Judaism. Not only in the religion, but in the history of persecution of the Jews. How could people, ordinary people, have let the Holocaust happen? On a visit to her relatives in Germany she met some of those ordinary people, who had let these terrible things happen - because they wanted to be mayor, because they wanted to try to continue their ordinary lives, because they wanted to believe in the future of their country. And she wondered, as so many have since, whether she would have done anything different. This was a moving, thought-provoking piece. I regret only that there were not more non-Jewish people in the half-full auditorium; this was a piece of theatre for everyone. I look forward to the next five weeks of this Jewish Arts Festival. Teshuva, Return, Jewish Community Centre, One Robinson Place. November 1