Jewish Heritage UK - Historic Synagogues

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JEWISH HERITAGE UK

"And your descendants shall build the ancient ruins, you shall restore the foundations of old..." (Isaiah, 58:12)

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Britain’s rich heritage of historic synagogues ranges from the famous three-hundred year old Bevis Marks (1701) in the City of London, through the discreet Georgian gems of Plymouth (1762) and Exeter (1763), to the exuberance of grand "cathedral synagogues" in city centres at Birmingham, Brighton, Liverpool and Glasgow that reflected the confidence of the newly emancipated Jewish community in the Victorian era. It also includes small-scale buildings constructed in provincial towns with modest building budgets and little-known Edwardian and Art Deco synagogues built between the two world wars.

The need to record the architectural heritage of British Jewry has, in the last twenty years, become urgent because it is fast disappearing. The population of British Jewry is rapidly shrinking, currently standing at 267,000 (according to the 2001 national Census), having fallen from a post-Second-World-War peak of perhaps 450,000. Over the past twenty years steps have been taken to protect and preserve outstanding historic synagogues, cemeteries and other sites of Anglo-Jewry’s architectural heritage.