"Why Hackney? Because I didn’t want to bring my children up in a Jewish bubble. I grew up in Barnet, and I wanted my raise my family somewhere a bit cooler, somewhere with a bit more edge,” says Daniel Stander.
On the Hackney street where Stander lives there is a Turkish mosque, a Baptist church and an Orthodox synagogue. At his kids’ school you can count the number of Turkish children in their classes on the fingers of both hands. “You’re not Jewish by default in Hackney, it’s an active choice,” he says. “This will probably look awful in print, but I’ve set up home in Hackney because I don’t want to be an unthinking Jew.”
Actually, he has done more than simply set up home in Hackney, a part of London his parents could not leave fast enough in the Seventies when they and other Jews of their generation moved out of their East End council flats and into north London’s tree-lined suburbs. Stander has played a particularly active role in its Jewish life. Until recently he was the chair of New Stoke Newington Shul, a community under the umbrella of the Masorti movement which has been meeting in members’ homes and local community centres for festivals and simchas since 2007.
If a synagogue’s membership roll is an indicator of its wellbeing, this Hackney shul is in rude health. Even though it doesn’t have its own building and only acquired a rabbi five years ago it now has 130 members, half of whom are under the age of 40. And over the past two years the number of bnei mitzvah and weddings celebrated by the community has increased so greatly it recently appointed Daniel’s partner Annie, a solicitor, as the shul’s marriages secretary. This means members can now stand under the chuppah at their community centre and have their marriage recognised by the state at the same time.
Annie is, if you like, catering for the needs of Jews who are moving back to Hackney, who are doing the opposite of what her partner's parents did 50 years ago. These Jews are going back to their roots. They are bringing a Jewish renaissance to Hackney.
Morane Cohen-Lamberger, 30, has not required Annie’s wedding services yet, but she hopes she will soon. The French-born violinist who freelanced for the London Symphony Orchestra pre-lockdown is looking for a long term Jewish partner. And she has what many JC readers might view as an unusual ask of her future beshert. She’d like him either to already live in Hackney, or be prepared to move there.
When she arrived in London eight years ago Morane lived in Tower Hamlets but it didn’t feel right. “I didn’t see people like me on the streets, and I found that difficult.” But neither does she feel comfortable in the capital’s north-west Jewish enclaves. “Life there feels a bit disconnected from reality. Hackney Jews are arty and liberal, and we have normal incomes. When I go to Abbey Road Studios for recording sessions, I can’t wait to come home to Hackney afterwards.”
Fellow New Stoke Newington Shul member Sylvia Levy, 24, feels similarly. She had a peripatetic childhood that included a spell in West Hampstead but when she decided to return to London as an adult in 2018 she made a beeline for Dalston, a diverse neighbourhood, even by Hackney standards, where, before the lockdown, hip cocktail bars and experimental cultural hotspots sit cheek by jowl with classic Turkish kebab shops.
It also had a lively music scene of which she was a part. “I play sax and clarinet in the East London Community Band, which has several other Jewish musicians,” she notes. “I came to London hoping to get involved in its musical and Jewish life and Hackney has given me both things. It’s a creative and bohemian part of town, the kind of place where Jews have always lived. ”
They have. One of the borough’s first known Jewish residents was one Isaac Alvares who bought a house in Homerton in 1674. Fast forward two centuries and records describe Hackney Synagogue as serving a district “thickly populated by the better class of the Jewish working man.” By the early 1950s Hackney had the biggest Jewish population in the country with two housing estates alone on the Amhurst Road, a main Hackney artery, being home to around 2,000 Jews. At nearby Hackney Downs School, described by the late Michael Freedland in this newspaper as the “nursery of Britain’s intellectual Jewish community”, 60 percent of the boys were Jewish.
Two of them were Harold Pinter and Steven Berkoff. Fellow playwright Arnold Wesker was schooled elsewhere, but his kitchen-sink dramas Chicken Soup with Barley, Roots and I’m Talking about Jerusalem are thick with reference to his working-class Jewish childhood in Hackney.
And the borough also of course has the largest Charedi community outside New York and Israel. The community was established in Stamford Hill in the 1920s, grew rapidly during the Second World War as Jews fled Europe, and today has as many 50 synagogues and shtiebls in its midst.
And now Jews like Daniel, Sylvia and Morane are setting up home next to the frummers, buying chopped liver and challah in their kosher delis and bakeries on Dunsmere Road and Oldhill Street, and getting their schmaltz herring in Egg Stores, the Stamford Hill grocery where Jewish punk pioneer and Hackney boy Malcolm McLaren once got his. And if Daniel and the others want 200 bagels for a simcha, they ring Mr Deutsch on Dunsmere Road. His shop is actually called Dagim, Hebrew for fish, but the locals always call it Mr Deutsch’s. And Mr Deutsch, for the record, can bake 200 bagels at the drop of a hat, if not his kippah.
The fact you could pre-lockdown buy and eat Jewish food in this corner of London is certainly a lure for the young professional Jews who are buying homes in the area. And by London’s crazy standards, the property they are buying is affordable. GP Robert Freudenthal paid £370,000 for his two-bedroom flat in 2014. As a boy he used to come to Hackney to visit his grandmother’s elderly cousin in Stamford Hill. Back then he says the journey “felt like a schlep and an odd place to live if you were Jewish but not Orthodox.” Today, the 33-year-old lives with his husband in the flat he bought six years ago and the couple are members of Kehilla North London, a Stoke Newington community under the umbrella of Liberal Judaism.
And if they start a family one day, there’s a great local primary school where the doctor and his husband can send them. Simon Marks Jewish Primary is a socially mixed school where Jews from all backgrounds – from the strictly Orthodox to the stridently secular – and lots of non-Jews all get along. It is also home to very many mixed Jewish families with, for example, one parent who is white and another who is black. Its highly regarded headteacher, Gulcan Metin, was born into a Muslim family and the school she leads is directly opposite a Muslim primary and a few doors away from a vegetarian yoga-practising nursery. In other words, the diverse community of this Orthodox primary is a mirror of its location.
Simon Marks is certainly one reason American-born Ilana Webster-Kogen and her French-rised husband are raising their young family in Hackney. “We send our older daughter, who’s four there, and we really like the families at the school. Our own families don’t live in London, so this is a big thing for us.”
Initially, though, Ilana was hesitant about living at close quarters with strictly Orthodox Jews. “I come from America and I have lived in Israel – I was worried about their clout.”
In the event, she says living among frummers has made her more sympathetic to them. “I chat to my ultra Orthodox neighbours and I like the fact that I live in a visibly Jewish part of London. Against the background of the past four years, it feels very reassuring.”
It also means a lot that she can talk to other parents at the school about the pain caused by four years of Corbynism. “I teach at SOAS where conversations have been awkward. At Simon Marks political views differ too, but conversation is civilised. I am on a WhatsApp group with three other mothers. Two of us vote Labour, one votes Lib Dem and another votes Tory. We have never fallen out.”
Some of those civilised conversations took place at The Good Egg, an Israeli-owned all-day breakfast spot serving New York and Middle East-inspired nosh like za’atar fried chicken and Iraqi pita with fried aubergine.
The Good Egg is just one of the many trendy eateries on Stoke Newington Church Street that would serve great coffee. And underestimate the pull of a good caffeine shot at your peril, says Roni Tabick. He is the rabbi at New Stoke Newington Shul and says, only half joking, the fact you can now get a good cup of coffee in these parts is why Hackney throbs with young professionals. “And,” he adds, “because public transport here is so good – we drive less than our parents’ generation.”
You could say the narrative of the rabbi and his wife’s families tell the story of the Jewish experience in Hackney. She was brought up in Belsize Park, but her grandmother was born in Hackney. His mother was born and bred in Ilford, but he grew up in Mill Hill. In 2015, when the rabbi was 31, the couple moved to Hackney. Like Stander and partner Annie they are raising their family somewhere a bit cooler than the Jewish enclaves of north London, somewhere with a bit more edge.
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