Melancholy in Manchester

Urban development swallows 70-year-old UK synagogue 

                       

       All the Torah scrolls are removed from the ark during the deconsecration service

          Manchester is one of Britain’s largest cities after London, and its Jewish community is second in size only to that of the capital.  On Sunday November 28, 2022, Manchester’s only city centre synagogue closed its doors for the last time. A deconsecration service was attended by a distinguished gathering, including the Lord Mayor, Donna Ludford. In her address Ludford said she was proud to follow in the footsteps of her Jewish predecessor, Abraham Moss, Lord Mayor of Manchester in 1953-4, who had attended the synagogue’s opening service.  "For decades,” she said, “the Jewish community has been a massive part of Manchester."

The ceremony ended with the Torah scrolls being removed from the ark.  Participants formed a file, and the scrolls were carried in solemn procession out and around the building.  Before the main doors were finally locked, no-one could find the switch which operated the Ner Tamid (the eternal light).  So it was left burning, as it had been for the previous 70 years.

            The story of how the Jewish community began in Manchester, and its subsequent development, has been recounted in detail by Bill Williams in his “The Making of Manchester Jewry, 1740-1875”.   It began with a few Jewish traders starting businesses in what was then a small provincial town.  By the 1870s Manchester, at the heart of the Industrial Revolution, had expanded hugely and was the only provincial centre boasting three synagogues serving Ashkenazi, Sephardi and Reform communities.

            The old-established Jewish families in Manchester, just as their opposite numbers in London, had begun to respond to the allure of the Reform movement as it spread from Germany into Britain. In addition to its powerful appeal as a form of Jewish law and custom appropriate to the modern world, part of its attraction lay in its emphasis on Judaism as a religion rather than on the Jewish people as a clan.  Many of those who pioneered and supported the Reform movement in the UK had family roots in the country, were deeply patriotic, and chose to describe themselves as “British Jews”.

            This was why Britain’s first Reform synagogue called itself the “West London Synagogue of British Jews”.  The new congregation, supported by four of the leading Jewish families of the day, was founded in 1840, and their synagogue, in the heart of London’s West End, was consecrated in January 1842.  In 1857 those members of Manchester’s Jewish community committed to the Reform movement broke away from the Orthodox synagogue in Halliwell Street which they had been attending.  Taking their lead from London, they founded the “Manchester Congregation of British Jews”. Their original synagogue, located in a busy Jewish neighborhood, was consecrated in March 1858. 

            The “Blitz” – Hitler’s sustained campaign of aerial bombing of British towns and cities – began in September 1940.  On 1 June 1941 Manchester’s Reform synagogue received a direct hit.  The building was destroyed, together with most of its records and treasured possessions.  The only items to be retrieved were the Rimonim which sat on top of one of the Torah scrolls. Then-Rabbi Percy Goldberg ensured that services continued in a series of temporary homes until 1949, when compensation from the War Damage Commission, with additional assistance from donors and a building appeal, allowed the congregation to purchase a site and build a synagogue in Jackson’s Row. It held its first service in November 1953.

This is the building due to be demolished to make way for a 41-storey tower and five-star hotel in a development headed by former Manchester United football star, Gary Neville.  His property firm, significantly named Relentless, has pursued its dream of this major £200 million city centre development through thick and thin.  His long-awaited project was approved in 2018 after the original plans sparked a huge backlash.

Past President Danny Savage, Rabbi Robyn, President Jane Black and the Lord Mayor of Manchester, Donna Ludford

There was a period when the synagogue members were in favour of staying on the site and being incorporated into the development.  Later they decided to sell the building, and relocate.  A former synagogue president, Danny Savage, told the media that the £15m negotiated for the sale was double the building’s valuation. President of Manchester Reform, Jane Black, has said that the move from Jackson’s Row: "ensures that Manchester's Reform Community will have a guaranteed long-term future."

The community must now decide what comes next. A three-month community engagement project has begun, and every possibility will be examined, including merging with another reform synagogue in Whitefield, a town in the Greater Manchester conurbation.  Principal Rabbi Robyn Ashworth-Steen has said it is no secret that she would love to stay in the city centre. It’s for the community to say, she says, “but I think to have a Jewish community at the heart of the city is vital…With our great leaders, and a proud history, the next couple of years, as we leave Jackson's Row and find a new home, is a time full of potential."

This article appears in the new issue of the Jerusalem Report dated 20 February 2023