Santiago shul-goers meet a Beatle
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Santiago shul-goers meet a Beatle

(Courtesy Circulo Israelita de Santiago)
(Courtesy Circulo Israelita de Santiago)

You could say he said sorry — with a little help from his friends.

Paul McCartney, the former Beatle, attended Yom Kippur Yizkor services last Shabbat in Santiago, Chile, with his wife, Nancy Shevell, who is Jewish and from Edison. The couple were in town for McCartney’s solo concert the night before.

Ariela Agosin, president of Chile Jewish Community, said that McCartney had arranged to be at the Círculo Israelita Synagogue through a friend but that very few in the congregation knew about it before it happened.

Shevell’s father, Myron, died in 2022; her mother, Arlene, a cousin of Barbara Walters, died in 1991.

Photos taken in Santiago show McCartney and Shevell entering and leaving the modernist synagogue building, designed by Chilean Jewish architect Jaime Bendersky Smuclir, as well as McCartney wearing a white kippah when he was inside. McCartney left shortly after the service for Brazil, where he was due to play several concerts this week.

It is not the first time that McCartney has surprised Jewish worshippers by showing up at services with Shevell, a New York Jew whom he married in 2011. The day before their civil wedding, they attended Yom Kippur services at St John’s Wood’s Liberal Jewish Synagogue in London, the Jewish Chronicle reported at the time. McCartney also reportedly has been at Yom Kippur services at Manhattan’s Temple Emanu-El.

McCartney’s first wife, Linda Eastman, also was Jewish; the couple were married from 1969 until she died in 1998. In 2008, shortly after starting to date Shevell, a former member of New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority board, McCartney performed in Israel, saying while there that he supported a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. His current tour, called “Get Back,” has no planned stops in Israel, which banned the Beatles from performing in 1965 out of concern about the moral influence of the pioneering band.

Jewish Telegraphic Agency

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