This message
comes to you by way of sad news as well as greetings. First of
all, as everyone knows, our Kehilah in Middlesbrough has closed
down and there is now no central location for the members there to
meet and worship. I personally think that having dwindled to the
numbers that now exist in Middlesbrough, 15 men and 18 women, most
of whom are getting on in years and who live many miles from the
centre of town, this was inevitable. They say all good things come
to an end. On the other hand the closure ceremony on the weekend
of October 31st November 1st 1998 showed that there was sufficient
interest from former members to make a real effort to ensure that
the Kehilah continues in some shape or form. The fact that up to
200 people came out on the Sunday has created a momentum, starting
off in Israel with a very successful 40 member reunion in
Jerusalem. I believe that renewed correspondence by way of letter,
fax and e-mail throughout the world shows that the main people
interested in Kehilat Middlesbrough no longer live in
Middlesbrough.
Those of us
in Israel were of more than two minds as to how to continue to
preserve the Middlesbrough memories for at least one generation,
or maybe longer, taking into account the fact that some of the
younger generation not born in Middlesbrough came to the reunion.
We thought that we could do no wrong in starting off a newsletter,
but the success of this newsletter obviously depends on its
readers. It is not good enough to read the letter. You must also
contribute to it.
There is, I
hope, much food for thought in this current newsletter; so
let us hope that whilst the sunny days of Kehilat Middlesbrough in
Yorkshire may have ended, they are being reborn not only in Israel
but in other parts of the world.
Editor
David Saville 24 Ben Maimon Blvd
Jerusalem 92261
Tel: 02-566 9263
Fax: 02-566 9265
Webmaster
Donald Wiseman
P O Box 16301
Jerusalem 91160
Tel: 02-585 4689
Fax: 02-585 8277
e-mail:sunmist@netvision.net.il
Kehilat
Middlesbrough Newsletter © by
David Saville and Donald Wiseman 1999. All rights reserved. No
part of the material in the Kehilat Middlesbrough section of this
website may be used or reproduced in any form whatsoever without
prior written permission except in the case of critical articles
and reviews.
Middlesbrough 1874-1998:
North Yorkshire England
The Final Journey
As soon as I received a
notice that the Middlesbrough Kehilah was finally closing on
November 1st I was in no doubt that I should go. When I
told my 28 year old son that I was going, he immediately said that
he was coming with - all his life he had heard from his
grandmother and father about the town where we were born and in
fact as a co-driver and cameraman his company proved to be most
beneficial.
We arrived at
Middlesbrough 2 hours before Shabbat and in our spare time we
visited 3 generations of our family in the cemetery - and then we
went to childhood haunts, the houses where we used to live, the
kosher grocery shop which my parents ran for 30 years and which
was in fact the centre of the community—much more so than the
Synagogue and the schools where of course I was more often than
not the only Jewish boy in the class.
At the Kiddush in Shul I
spoke about the 40 residents of Israel from Middlesbrough,
explaining that there was much more Jewish life there than
there was in Middlesbrough. We had already brought over a Sefer
Torah in 1987 to a community in Jerusalem and now I was taking 2
of the last 3 Sefarim from Middlesbrough to a synagogue in Pisgat
Zeev, Jerusalem – Donald Wiseman’s grandparents had presented
them many years ago.
The next day was the
formal closing service which was attended by nearly 200 people
including the remnants—less than 30 souls, their average age
being about 80—and former members such as myself who had come
from Israel, United States and all over Britain. It was a
tremendous Shulcoming, schoolcoming and homecoming, showing a
nostalgia for a community that is now no more since November 1st
1998. The Service was impressive and the Shul was packed—nothing
like it had ever happened since 1874.
I had some thoughts
afterwards; the former British Chief Rabbi, Lord Jacobowitz, had
said 24 years ago on the celebration of 100 years of the
Middlesbrough Kehilah: "We do not need monuments; we need
people." The Middlesbrough Synagogue is the largest in the
North East but I do not think that it serves its purpose if there
is no Minyan. The funds from the sale of the synagogue, together
with a previous bequest by Mrs. Agnes Spencer, a Middlesbrough
resident, of Marks & Spencer fame, could have been better used
in my opinion, had they been given to needy communities wishing to
develop, 24 years ago.
Rabbi Dr Epstein served
the community from 1920 to 1929 and went on to become the
Director of Jews College—Middlesbrough was his only pulpit. The
story is told that when he came to Middlesbrough he was asked to
attend a meeting of the Shul Committee, which asked why he was
burning electric light so late. One of the members said, perhaps
our young Rabbi needs the light to study Torah, whereupon the rest
of the Committee retorted, in Yiddish: we need a Rabbi who is
learned, not a Rabbi who has yet to learn!
In the fifties, when Rosh
Hashana fell on Thursday and Friday, there was a large notice in
the Middlesbrough Evening Gazette by the Jewish owners of a large
store : "Closed Thursday and Friday, Open Saturday as
usual". But the members were down to earth Jewish
Yorkshiremen who had little time for the niceties of Halacha—nor
for communal strife—which is probably why, with never more than
150 families, they lasted so long.
David
Saville
Middlesbrough
1998 onwards—Jerusalem
Revival in
Jerusalem— November 1st 1998 onwards
The six of us who
travelled from Jerusalem to Middlesbrough in November came back
full of mixed feelings, and decided that the first thing to do was
to correspond with the last officials of the Kehilah, in order to
ascertain whether there was any possibility of transferring some
of the large amount of funds and synagogue objects to worthy
causes in Israel.
We prepared a detailed
list of Middlesbrough residents in Israel. Those qualifying had to
be born in Middlesbrough, or had spent at least three years there,
or had very close connections with the town. Then we made plans
for a new Kehilah far from England’s fair and pleasant land,
without a centre.
Accordingly, on the last
day of Chanuka, some 40 of us crowded into the Jerusalem home of
Anne (Goldberg) and Stuart Dove. It was quite moving to see people
greeting each other for the first time, in some cases in 60 years.
People's faces change during such periods and this problem was
solved when everyone stood up and said who they were, with many
not realising that some other people there had been living in
Israel for the past 30 years and more. Then a phone call came in
from New York from Rabbi Alan Miller, the son of the penultimate
Rabbi in Middlesbrough, who spoke very movingly about his father's
place in the community, which was difficult at times and even more
difficult during the war years.
