JEWISH
EAST END OF LONDON PHOTO GALLERY & COMMENTARY
London's East End Synagogues, cemeteries and more......
My personal journey through the Jewish East End of London
- the story of my website
Following
my talk on the Jewish East End of London to the Jewish Genealogical
Society GB conference in October 2006 I was asked to write an article
on thebackground to my Jewish East End website for the March 2007
issue of their magazine 'Shemoth'. Below is the article, warts
and all, all you ever wanted to know!
Its
1957 - I’m 7 years old and sitting in my mother’s Morris Minor driving
through a mysterious place called Whitechapel on an expedition to
romantically named Forest Gate. We arrive in a street of tiny
terraced houses, enter one of them, climb some stairs and go into my
grandfather’s one roomed flat. Grandad is nearly 80, has a wooden leg
and is surrounded by cats. My mother tells me her father is a
wonderful man who suffered so much to bring up his family. He invites
me to tap each of his legs in turn to see if I can work out which one
is made of wood. We all laugh. Mum gives her dad, my grandfather,
some money and soon we are on our way back to the leafy suburbs of
South London. Where had I just been, and what lay beneath the surface
of my experience? I was too young to see more than just an old man in
a dingy room and my mother’s emotion. Memories stay with you and
thoughts of them grow deeper with passing years.
It's 1961
and this time mother has graduated to a Wolseley 1500 – leather seats,
wooden dashboard and this little boy is very impressed! Same journey,
slightly different street, this time to visit my mother’s sister. On
the way we pass Blooms…the East London Mission to the Jews….a knot of
men hanging around in the ‘Waste’. This time I’m looking, this time
I’m sort of noticing. Blooms looks nice…I’m hungry! What’s a
‘Mission’? Why are all these men hanging about on the street? My
mother answers…yes we’ll go to Blooms… rudest waiters on the
planet. The Mission? Just some crazy people! Those men? They
are tailors, Jews, waiting to get hired for work…if they’re lucky…and
by the way I used to live near here…used to walk to school from Mile
End to save the bus fare….went to Central Foundation Girls School in
Spital Square…best school in London….wonder if its still there….must
show you. I listen, but I’m such a peasant. More memories
on which to ponder.
My
first school is a vast Primary with 60 kids to a class. The best
pupils help the teachers teach the less able to read and write. All
the kids are sons and daughters of Londoners evacuated from the bombed
ruins of the East End. No Jews though, except for me and my brother.
Odd how word gets around… I’d never said anything to anyone about my
background. This didn’t stop a gang of kids regularly following me
home from school calling me a dirty Jew while attempting to shove me
into the nearest hedge. Do you think they had picked up the habit
from their parents? Years later I’m at a dinner party with Jewish
friends and acquaintances. We are talking about anti-Semitism. One
guest relates his experiences…”I was turned down for such and such
public school because of my Jewish background”. Interesting, I say,
but I bet you weren’t followed home from your prep school by 10 year
old Jew baiters. That kind of put a damper on the conversation and
afterwards I felt bad about saying it. Jews have suffered enough
humiliation without us doing it to each other.
More
years go by and mum’s getting old…we visit Spital Square…she shows me
a collapsing building that is all that remains of her school…that
used to be where we had assembly…there’s the dinner hall…and so on.
Blooms? We go there lots of times. My grandfather with the wooden
leg? My mother tells me he lost his leg through gangrene…no
antibiotics in those days…he was a year in the London Hospital…what a
hard life, what a wonderful man. Rachel, his wife, my
grandmother, died in the 1918 flu epidemic when my mother was 5…Dad
did what he could, three children, no money, but we were rich in so
many ways. My mother shows me a matchbox filled with tiny
garnets. She’s kept it all these years. Grandad used to buy and sell
‘stones’ at Houndsditch market…nothing much, nothing valuable, just
enough to get by. He gave my mother these ‘stones’. One day she has
them made up into a ring – a ring beyond price.
Mother shows me a letter written to her on her 21st
birthday by Hyman, her Russian grandfather. It’s written in pencil,
written by a nurse who’d cared for him at the end of his life in the
Nightingale Home for Aged Jews. Mother told me he couldn’t read or
write English. I was shocked. Mother tells me that when he and his
wife Sarah, my great grandmother, lived in their little flat in Mile
End everything was Yiddish. Yiddish newspapers, Yiddish books, Yiddish
food, Kreplach, Kneidle. He’d worked for a shoe maker. Many years
later I visit his tomb in Marlow Road. On his headstone it is written
that he is loved and missed by his children, grandchildren, great
grandchildren. I’m one of his great grandchildren and I need to know
more. Mother tells me he’d left Russia to escape military service in
the Czar’s army. He’d crossed the Russian border into Germany
disguised as a woman, made his way to Paris and then to London, later
he sent money across to Russia to bring out the rest of his family.
Wow!
Who
am I? What am I? What do I owe my long dead relations? What would
they think of me? How I’d love to introduce them to my children, my
synagogue, my life. How I’d love to listen to what they’d have to
say.
In
the year 2000 my mother died. I could ask her no more questions. My
need to discover my own roots remained undiminished, and I started
exploring the area around Spitalfields, Whitechapel and Mile End where
she’d grown up. I went on Jewish walks, visited Jewish cemeteries,
poured over old maps & spoke to the characters I met along the way.
And then, being very brave, I plucked up the courage to attend a
Shabbat morning service at the East London Central Synagogue in Nelson
Street. Hidden in this humble and glorious synagogue was a visual
treasure trove of Jewish history. Visits to other East End synagogues
followed. My camera and a lucky knack of being able to remember
detail always accompanied me. When I got home I’d jot down what I’d
seen, and the more I saw, the more I wanted to see.
As it
is with having a favourite football team, so it is with having a
favourite synagogue. My favourite became Fieldgate Street Great
Synagogue. Here I met wonderful, welcoming people. My guess is that
they thought I was from Mars or North London – wrong on both counts
incidentally – but it made no difference to the friendship offered.
The interior of Fieldgate Street comes from the era before reality
game shows, ‘celebrity’ washing up competitions and worse. If you
have the eyes to see you will read the story of your East End
immigrant forefathers on the plaques on the walls, in the 19th
century prayer books under the pews and more.
The
custodians of the few remaining East End Synagogues are mostly elderly
and diminishing, and the wider Jewish community has largely forgotten
them. I urge you to rediscover them while there is still time. In
that way you will not only deepen your understanding of your own
roots, but you will have the privilege of being a living link in the
long chain of tradition that unites all Jewish people. What could be
more wonderful than that?
This
article was written as an attempt to explain the spirit, content and
purpose of my Jewish East End of London website. If you have had the
patience to read this far you will probably have worked out that my
website is my attempt to record a vanishing World and to pay my
personal tribute to all those who had the courage and fortitude to
start a new life in this country - amongst whom I am proud to count
members of my own family. Without these tough pioneers to show us the
way there would not have been a Jewish East End of London or, I
suggest, the dynamic and successful Jewish community that flourishes
in the UK today.
Philip Walker - December 2006
