East End

Lord Levy keeps Stoke Newington centenary in the family

Sandy Rashty — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 10:15:24 +0000

Lord Levy’s “emotional” family connection to the Walford Road Synagogue in Stoke Newington was a feature of the independent Orthodox congregation’s centenary dinner on Monday.

The Labour peer was barmitzvah and married at Walford Road, where his late father Samuel was shammas. He said that returning to the shul as chatan bereshit on Simchat Torah had brought back “wonderful memories. The community has changed dramatically, but the lovely little shul has stayed the same.

“It’s just the way I remembered it as a little boy, with my dad standing up in his hat and my mother looking down at us,” Lord Levy recalled before the dinner at the Mercure Hotel, Watford. “Frankly, it’s quite remarkable that the shul has survived 100 years — it looks like the inside of a film set.”

In its heyday, Walford Road had more than 600 families but, as Jews moved away, it faced closure in the late 1970s. Today, membership is around 60 and chairman Ike Albert says the community is “very mixed”.

Artists tour with Anne Frank Trust

Anna Sheinman — Fri, 16 Nov 2012 12:08:55 +0000

Clila and Hadasa Bau, daughters of concentration camp artist Joseph Bau, had a positive message as they toured schools with the Anne Frank Trust.

Clila Bau said at Morpeth School, Bethnal Green, that pupils should understand “that our parents, even though they suffered, even though they met in a concentration camp, always found a way to be happy”.

The Baus’ clandestine marriage inside Plaszow concentration camp was immortalised in the film, Schindler’s List.

Fings ain't what they used to be around Olympic Village

Ivor Davis — Fri, 20 Jul 2012 15:23:41 +0100

'Known for its cutting-edge bars, off-beat galleries and ethnic restaurants, East London is by far the city's trendiest area…" so trumpeted the New York Times in April.

Was this chic neighbourhood - now the site of the Olympic village - the one in which I spent the first 21 years of my life?

I was born in Whitechapel on July 27 1938. During the Blitz, along with many of our neighbours, we slept in our back-garden bomb shelter or crowded into a three-room house opposite a noisy laundry on Leaside Road, 100 yards from the then very smelly River Lea.

After the war, we were weaned on ration books, powdered eggs and cod-liver oil, as the bomb-devastated city pulled itself together. Every day, my baker father walked four miles from Hackney to Brick Lane in the early hours to make bread at Bernstein's Bakery. Does it sound too Dickensian to say we always had a crust on our table?

Life was a struggle. Grey was the main colour of the landscape and choking fog coated everything. I went to Grocers school and, for occasional entertainment, to the Hackney Empire or the Grand Palais Yiddish Theatre on Commercial Road.

Radio was our showbiz diet, voiced by cheeky comic Tommy Handley, who would sign off: "TTFN… Ta Ta For Now." We played football on the primitive Hackney Marshes (freezing sheds for dressing rooms, carry and erect your own goalposts) or in the AJY league at the more pleasant Elms in Walthamstow. I even went on to play for England in the European Maccabiah Games. But in November 1960, after two years serving the Royal Army Medical Corps in Millbank - cycling distance from home - it was my time to leave.

Not long after my 21st birthday, I fled to California, seeking sun, a new future and a new life.

It's curious to see how, in my absence, adventurous souls have moved to what were once working-class Jewish neighbourhoods. First to Islington (along with Tony Blair) and then to places like Shoreditch and Dalston. Ralph Fiennes, Keira Knightley and all manner of artists proudly call the East End home - a community brimming with culture, food and maybe even paparazzi.

Once, you would have been banished to Stamford Hill if you dared describe down-at-heel Stoke Newington or Bethnal Green as fashionable. For us Jewish Eastenders in the 1950s, the pinnacle of shopping wasn't trendy clothing from designers like Alexander McQueen, but a half-yearly trip to Gardiners department store, labelled the "Harrods of the East" and site of the Cable Street rally of 1936, to splurge on a new pair of trousers. Today, a towering financial building stands in its place.

"Cuisine" was not a word in our lexicon. A food treat meant a trip to Johnny Isaacs' fish-and-chip shop opposite the Salvation Army in Whitechapel, or a journey to Bloom's deli in Aldgate for their world-famous salt-beef sandwiches and their inevitably rude waiters. Alas, the once iconic eatery is kosher gastronomic history.

A sophisticated, adventurous evening out was a drive from Hackney Boys' Club to Heathrow Airport in the club leader's car. We cavalierly ordered coffee as we watched the take-offs and landings.

Sometimes, we hopped on to the 38 bus to Piccadilly, to dine in style at one of the many Italian holes in the wall - our idea of an ethnic restaurant. An indifferent spaghetti bolognaise (now that was what you called cuisine) and a glass of wine set you back three shillings and sixpence.

Times, of course, have changed dramatically. Stratford, the seedy and neglected suburb where I began my career on the now defunct local paper, has been made into Olympics Ground Zero. Amazing what you can do with a spare few billion.

In my youth, our nearest playing field was the odorous environs of the Beckton gasworks. Certainly, we watched good football at Leyton Orient and West Ham United. But never in our wildest dreams could we have imagined Stratford with an Olympic Stadium and restaurants serving healthy food from around the world.

There was one cultural gem. Occasionally, we walked round the corner to the Theatre Royal Stratford, to watch Joan Littlewood plays like Oh! What a Lovely War. I wonder if Joan ever imagined that she would be the forerunner of an East End inhabited by luvvies. The East End used to export its best talent up West when they made it big. Now the traffic is going in the opposite direction.

It's a pity the late East End lyricist Lionel Bart is not around to see what time has wrought. For indeed, "Fings Ain't Wot They Used T'Be."

East End street where Jews were safe from antisemitism

Jennifer Lipman — Thu, 05 Jul 2012 10:42:28 +0100

An East-End street described as a haven against antisemitism and British fascism is being remembered in a BBC TV documentary this week.

Arnold Circus, in Shoreditch, was once a Victorian slum with up to 60 people living in each house and an average life expectancy of 16.

In an 1886 survey, the social chronicler Charles Booth designated the area dark blue, indicating “chronic want”, and black, for “vicious and semi-criminal”.

But in 1890 the London County Council launched what was then a radical social experiment and began replacing the buildings with the country’s first council estate.

As BBC2’s The Secret History of Our Streets reveals, architects designed it without a pub but with green space and a bandstand. The intention was to help the poor to become respectable citizens.

Nevertheless, life on the estate was basic with 12 public baths between 5,000 residents. Many of the initial tenants were Jews who had fled Eastern Europe in the preceding decades.

Having established themselves in the garment industry and other trades, they were able to afford the rent for the new properties, which were only partially funded by the LCC.

When Booth returned after Arnold Circus opened, he discovered that one block was 75 per cent Jewish, a trend that continued until after the Second World War.

Kossoff’s bakery became a local institution and the council posted the signs for upkeep of the blocks in Hebrew as well as English. Yet, unlike elsewhere in the East End in the inter-war years, former residents today recall an absence of tension between Jews and non-Jews.

“It was like living on a precious island,” said Minnie Finkelstein, a former resident whose grandparents Celia and Simon were among the first to move in.

She described the non-Jews she grew up with as sharing Jewish ceremonies and coming to sit with the family when they lit candles on a Friday night: “Can you imagine that happening today?” she said. “We were an extended family.”

She was five when Mosley’s Blackshirts marched through Cable Street. “It didn’t trouble us,” she recalled.

“We were very aware of [the fascists],” said Aubrey Goldsmith, who grew up on Arnold Circus in the 1930s. “The conflict didn’t touch us. It was like Tony Martin’s song Tenement Symphony about the ‘Cohens and the Kellys’— we all lived together; we helped one another.”

His father was born and died on the estate. “I bought him a house in Cockfosters but he refused to move,” he said. “It was a great start in life… There are people I know that did very well in their lives but started on Arnold Circus with brown paper on the floor.”

‘The Secret History of Our Streets’, BBC 2, July 11, 9pm

Outcry over 'one-sided' Palestinian meeting

Simon Rocker — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 19:22:46 +0000

Hackney Council has promised to tighten bookings procedures after a complaint about a pro-Palestinian event held in one of its libraries on Tuesday night.

Martin Sugarman, chair of the Hackney Anglo-Israel Twinning Association, had called for the cancellation of the "one-sided" meeting at Dalston library, addressed by a group of visiting Palestinian women. One of the organisers was the Camden Abu Dis Friendship Association, a charity campaiging on behalf of a Palestinian town outside East Jerusalem divided by Israel's security barrier. The other was a group called Beit Sourik - Hackney Friendship. Beit Sourik is a West Bank village.

A Hackney spokesman explained that the council "doesn't take bookings from political parties or organisations. On this occasion, a private booking was taken, but the nature of the organisation wasn't clear. We have tightened up our procedures to ensure that this doesn't happen again."

The Palestinian women also spoke at the local Stoke Newington School and sixth-form college BSix.

In an email to Councillor Linda Kelly, who had queried the meeting, Hackney's head of library services Edward Rogers suggested that the manager who made the library booking might have linked it with "the genuine twinning that does exist between Hackney and Haifa".

Councillor Kelly was also due at BSix yesterday to discuss her concerns about the Palestinian visit, which the college said had been arranged by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign.

"If you are listening to one side of the story, you have got to listen to the other side," she said.

BSix head of external relations Rebekah Harris said: "As an educational establishment, we try to open our students' eyes to various political issues both in this country and on an international scale. We are careful that both sides of any issue are explored.

"We also hosted a visit from an Israeli group earlier this year. One of our students has recently won an international understanding award, part of which was due to her support of this and other visits."

Outcry over 'one-sided' Palestinian meeting

Simon Rocker — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 19:21:20 +0000

Hackney Council has promised to tighten bookings procedures after a complaint about a pro-Palestinian event held in one of its libraries on Tuesday night.

The Palestinian women also spoke at the local Stoke Newington School and sixth-form college BSix.

Councillor Kelly was also due at BSix yesterday to discuss her concerns about the Palestinian visit, which the college said had been arranged by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign.

"If you are listening to one side of the story, you have got to listen to the other side," she said.

Pre-Purim L'Chaim!

HackneyandEastLondonShul — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 02:27:20 +0000

Purim in the East End

the_ruckle — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 12:26:19 +0000

East End Purim Party

the_ruckle — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 12:23:59 +0000

Top Marks by Ofsted

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 15:34:24 +0000

Ofsted inspectors have issued a positive report on the Simon Marks Jewish Primary in Hackney, rating the school as "good" on all fronts.

They found that it got pupils off to a "strong start", and that they achieved "particularly well in English".

As for new head Gill Ross and her team, Ofsted reported that "good leadership and management have enabled the school to identify successfully its key priorities and actions".

Governors' chair Howard Pallis said: "This is an exceptional achievement by a head who has been in the post for just one term. It's confirmation that, under Mrs Ross's leadership, Simon Marks is going from strength to strength." The school roll now stood at 200, its highest ever.

Mrs Ross said Simon Marks was "consistently providing a good standard of education for all students".