He tries to ensure that people can combine work with religion. Because the congregants are very busy — he describes most as “young professionals working in the area” — and taking time out of the day is not an easy task, punctuality is the key to success. “If we stopped running to time, people wouldn’t come,” he says.
Worshippers, he feels, are also attracted by the history of the synagogue — often their own home synagogues in the suburbs are more modern buildings. “When you walk into that shul, you have a wonderful feeling of going back in time.”
Parlons is especially passionate about the tehillim service, which concludes the daily minchah. Psalms are recited, along with the Hebrew names of people who are ill. “I’ve seen miracles happen for many people, several of whom live in the East End,” he says.
David Parlons runs services for 90 City workers
Other minchah services conducted in the area exist in less traditional surroundings. In Docklands there is a daily service in the offices of the Clifford Chance legal firm. When the firm moved to its new premises on the Isle of Dogs, its large Jewish legal community could no longer attend Sandy’s Row. Senior partner Adrian Cohen joined Danny Seliger of Canary Wharf Group developers to organise a daily minchah for Jews who worked in the Docklands. “The first minchah in Canary Wharf was held at Citigroup in 2000,” says Seliger. “We moved it to Clifford Chance in 2004 and we have a regular room to use there. We can get between 30 and 40 on a good day, and the numbers are increasing. We had a celebration at Purim, and at Pesach we arranged kosher lunches for people working here, sponsored by the companies represented at Canary Wharf.” Seliger also hosts with Cohen a weekly lunch-and-learn seminar at the firm.
“On fast days I take a Sefer Torah to Clifford Chance from Bevis Marks,” says Reverend Malcolm Gingold. A familiar figure to any East End synagogue attender, Rev Gingold is the area representative for the Federation of Synagogues, an organisation which has its roots in the working-class, ghetto synagogues that have now disappeared.
He looks after the Nelson Street Synagogue in Whitechapel, the last remaining Federation synagogue in the area, and is keen to point out that, while its Shabbat service might only just draw a weekly minyan, “the shul is always busy during a time of simchah”.
He also helps to organise the fortnightly Shabbat services at Sandy’s Row, which he says are “quite separate” from the weekday minchah with its City-worker crowd. Again, the services just about manage a minyan, but a barmitzvah celebrated last month was well-attended. In addition to Nelson Street, there are two congregations affiliated to the Federation — the Congregation of Jacob on Commercial Road, which hosts weekly Shabbat services, and the Fieldgate Street Synagogue, which was recently closed for renovations but is due to reopen in the winter.
Rev Gingold began his career in the community mentored by the great East End philanthropist Montague Richardson, whose memorial service he is organising at Nelson Street on June 22. He says the East London Orthodox Synagogues Association, a group he formed in 2001 to represent all the synagogues mentioned here, plus the Hackney United Synagogue, “presents more functions than any other Jewish organisation in London”.
Rev Gingold is a stalwart attender of the morning service at the grand Bevis Marks Sephardi synagogue in Aldgate. The shul has always been the most conspicuous site of Jewish religion in the East End, often seen as a symbol of Anglo-Jewry, and now, for the first time in over 100 years, it has its own full-time, permanent rabbi living in the area.
“I was appointed to help rebuild the community,” says Rabbi Natan Asmoucha, who travelled over 5,000 miles with his young family to take the job — all the way from Zimbabwe. “Many of the Sephardi Jews here moved to Maida Vale [West London], and I want to reach out to younger people in the East End as well as offering more for the 127 families that are still members.”
He hopes to make the synagogue a “social hub” as well as a religious centre. “I don’t want Bevis Marks to turn into a museum — the social element is crucial for community-building,” he says.
It is clear this is part of a longer-term strategy by the Bevis Marks congregants, a process which began with the opening of a kosher restaurant in 2003. In addition to the well-established morning service (with free breakfast), Bevis Marks now offers a daily evening service for the first time in 40 years. Rabbi Asmoucha has started a monthly Friday-evening service, with a communal Shabbat dinner, and has ambitious plans for the future. “I’d like to see Sephardi cooking demonstrations, wine-tastings, and more cultural activities like the exhibition on Argentine Jews held here in 2007.”
He is planning beginners’ prayer classes, which he hopes will demystify unfamiliar Sephardi forms of worship for Ashkenazi Jews or those with little religious background. His credo is that “people must feel comfortable here, there must be no divisions”.
Business and work have brought Jewish prayer back to the East End. And even if most of the congregants are commuters, their ever-increasing numbers herald a renaissance for the religious identity of the area. As David Parlons says: “We have given people the opportunity to pray here. I hope there will continue to be a revival.”