History of Merseyside Jewry

The Face of the Jewish Quarter

Prior to the 1880s Liverpool's settled Jewish community was fairly widely dispersed within a radius of some two miles of the earliest synagogues in Princes Road and Hope Place. The effect of Eastern European settlement was to create a close-knit and readily recognisable 'Jewish Quarter' in the cheaper housing around Brownlow Hill, Paddington, Crown Street and Islington. Here the immigrants found the necessary levels of mutual support, the company of landsleit (fellow-countrymen) who shared their language and culture, accommodation which suited their very limited resources, and religious facilities which approximated to those to which they had been accustomed in Eastern Europe.

Shunning the more anglicised, formal and only modestly orthodox Old and New congregations of the middle-classes, the highly observant immigrants formed religious societies (known as chevroth) which combined regular religious services with mutual aid and in which the membership fees were low, the levels of traditional orthodoxy high, and the ambiance, at least at first, warm, informal and often joyous. Talmudic discourses in Yiddish formed a desirable alternative to the rhetorical English sermons of Princes Road. Already by the end of the 1870s the earliest waves of Eastern Europeans had established two chevroth: the Chevra Torah (Society of the Holy Law), at the corner of Anson Street and Pembroke Place (and later in Great Newton Street) and the Chevra Ayin Jacob (literally, Society f the Eye of Jacob), opened in West Derby Street in 1876. A third is said to have been located off Copperas Hill, on the site of the present Adelphi Hotel.

From the later 188Os, as immigrant settlement consolidated and some of the newcomers achieved a modest economic success, some of the earlier chevra gave way to more formal immigrant synagogues, rendered 'official' by their recognition of the Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi, but still socially distinct from the 'English Shools' in Princes Road and Hope Place and still claiming a more intense traditionalism of belief and practice. Since even their better-off members were rarely as well-to-do as older-established settlers, these new congregations found space in domestic premises or, rather more frequently, in the disused places of worship of a retreating Christian population. The more important, in order of their foundation were:

• A synagogue opened in Fountains Road, Kirkdale, in 1888 and located in a disused Catholic Chapel. Within five years, it had attracted 93 subscribers.
• The New Beth Hamedrash (literally, House of Study, but in this instance also a place of worship), which opened in a former nonconformist chapel in Crown Street, close to Brownlow Hill, in August 1896. Rapidly out-growing its original premises and taking on board a small chevra from Devon Street - it had 100 members by 1904 - it removed to a former Presbyterian Chapel to become the Central Synagogue, Islington, officially opened by Arnold Bloom (the first Jewish Mayor of Birkenhead) in 1908.
• The Great Synagogue, Russell Street, which opened in a former Methodist Chapel in 1901 and which absorbed, amongst other chevroth, the old Chevra Torah.
• The Shaw Street Synagogue, an outcrop of the Great, which opened in 1907 in a former Wesleyan Chapel with a seating capacity of 800.
• The Nusach Ha'ari Congregation, a Chassidic group which in 1908 took over the chapel in Crown Street originally occupied by the New Beth Hamedrash.The Tiferet Israel (The Pride of Israel) Congregation, which opened in a former Baptist Mission Hall in Walnut Street in 1912.

In 1914 the evolution from chevra to synagogue was incomplete, for in addition to eight synagogues, six of them founded by new immigrants, there remained at least fifteen chevroth, dotted around the inner-city districts of Eastern European settlement. The older-established families, now just beginning to settle in the larger villas of Toxteth and Sefton Park, maintained their allegiance to Princes Road and Hope Place. Shopkeepers operating in Birkenhead inaugurated their first minyan in 1889 in a room in Argyle Street, while business and professional people who could afford to commute from across the Mersey opened their first synagogue in a former chapel in Egremont, Wallasey, in 1911.

The distinctive religious outlook of the new immigrants made itself felt well beyond the synagogue. It was the pressure which they exerted for higher standards of traditiona1 observance which led to the creation of new communal institutions designed to underpin them: a Talmud Torah (1894) for the elementary religious education of the young, a Shechita Board (1897) to co-ordinate the intricate structure through which the community was assured of its supply of Kosher meat, a committee to maintain a communal Mikvah, (ritual bath), a Communal Rav (1905) to provide overall guidance on matters of religious practice, and the Yeshivat Torat Chayim (College of the Law of Life) (1914) to provide a higher religious education for some 200 students a year. For the most part, the old elite yielded to new immigrant pressure, although not always with good grace. When the Russian Talmudic scholar, Jacob Rabinowitz, took office as Communal Rav (more properly, Liverpool and District Rabbi) in 1905, Princes Road was the only synagogue to withhold financial support, preferring to look solely for guidance to the very English Chief Rabbi in London.