This week, the East London Central Synagogue, also known as Nelson Street Synagogue, is set to be sold at auction. The guide price is £2 million. Yet in a video posted on February 4, a local Muslim community, the Ashaadibi Centre in Tower Hamlets, announced it had already secured the building by placing a £250,000 deposit. Now, the group says, it has nine months to raise the remaining funds to close the sale.
Demographic shifts in London are commonplace. The changing hands of sacred spaces is not new either. The East London Mosque still contains columns from Fieldgate Street Great Synagogue, sold in 2015. Around the corner, Brick Lane Mosque still features a sundial dating back to 1743, when the building was a Huguenot chapel. In between, in 1897, the building was acquired by a group of Orthodox Lithuanian Jews known as the Machzike Hadath “Strengtheners of the Faith,” who espoused a stricter version of established English Judaism.
And yet, much of the public debate around Nelson Street is narrowly focused on who will buy it, as if the only options are “keep it Jewish” or “turn it into something else.” Far fewer people are talking about the possibility that should have been the obvious one all along: preserving it as a heritage site, a museum, and a living archive of one of the most extraordinary Jewish neighbourhoods Europe has ever produced.
We have become a community that spends enormous sums preserving the places where Jews died, and almost nothing preserving the places where Jews lived. In the same breath that people mourn the potential loss of this shul, some suggest using the proceeds of its sale to maintain Jewish cemeteries. Of course cemeteries matter. But what does it say about us that we instinctively fund the geography of Jewish death, while allowing the geography of Jewish life to vanish into rubble, redevelopment, or someone else’s memory?
The East London Central Synagogue stands at 40 Nelson Street. It was established in 1923, at a time when the East End was teeming with Jewish immigrant life. Between 1880 and 1914, London’s modestly-sized Jewish community was transformed by the influx of some 150,000 Eastern European and Russian Jewish refugees fleeing economic hardship and religious persecution. Up to 70% of them settled in the East End, between Spitalfields and Whitechapel, working in the clothing industry and filling the streets with the sounds of Yiddish.
At its height in the early twentieth century, the East End was home to roughly 250,000 Jews and some 150 synagogues.
Now, Nelson Street is the last purpose-built synagogue in the East End, and one of just three remaining synagogues in the area, alongside Sandys Row and the Congregation of Jacob.
The building has been closed since 2020, after a leaking roof collapsed. Following COVID-19 lockdowns, the shul has remained largely unused and increasingly vulnerable, not only to redevelopment, but to something more humiliating: slow erasure. Today, it is daubed with graffiti, its immediate surroundings marred by rubbish.
Leon Silver, 76, the synagogue’s last president, has described the situation as “so upsetting.” Three generations of his family were associated with the shul; his parents were married there in 1936. He called it a “historic treasure.”
And architecturally, it is. The architectural historian Sir Nikolaus Pevsner described the building in 1951 as having a “discreet brick exterior” and a “fine classical interior” featuring a Venetian arch framing the bimah; and above the ark, a replica of the Ten Commandments.
The synagogue is owned by the Orthodox Federation of Kehillas and is being sold through auctioneers Acuitus. It is locally listed, but it does not have the more robust protections of a nationally listed building, meaning that internal changes could be made with far less scrutiny than many assume.
Meanwhile, the Ashaadibi Centre’s public messaging suggests that the transition is already a done deal. Its website homepage features a bird’s-eye view of the synagogue with the words “Synagogue to Masjid” superimposed.
It is tempting, at this point, for the Jewish community to respond defensively, and to see this story primarily as a humiliation, or even a defeat. The serious truth is that the Jewish community did not lose this building to anyone else.
We lost it to our own lack of imagination.
The East End did not simply “change.” Jewish life in the East End was displaced by war, poverty, housing pressure, and upward mobility. During World War II, the area was heavily bombed. Many Jewish people moved north and north-west, to new centres in Stamford Hill, Finchley, Golders Green, and Hendon. Over the years, as numbers dwindled, around 20 neighbouring synagogues were amalgamated into Nelson Street. The building effectively became a kind of last ark of the East End, holding not only people, but Torah scrolls, with some dating back to the eighteenth century.
In 1975, the shul was renamed East London Central Synagogue. It continued, in its quieter years, the East End tradition of Jewish social responsibility: soup kitchens, charitable work, and support for the poor. It remained engaged in interfaith life through the Tower Hamlets Inter Faith Forum, alongside the East London Mosque. It welcomed historical societies, walking tours, and Open House London visitors.
In other words, it was already partway to being what it should have become: a Jewish heritage site that also belongs to the wider London story.
But we did not treat it like one.
We treated it like a shul that happened to be empty.
This is where the argument becomes uncomfortable. Because there is an instinct, especially among British Jews who feel exhausted by antisemitism, to be defensive about communal finances, and anxious about continuity, to respond to this story with a shrug.
Some of the comments circulating online, specifically on a Facebook post eliciting reaction for this article, have been raw but revealing. “I feel sad for people with sentimental family connections to this shul,” wrote one commenter. Another was pragmatic: the synagogue is historic, yes, but if selling it releases £3 million to invest in Jewish communities where people actually live, perhaps it is better to sell. A third voice was more fatalistic: there are no Jews left in the East End; this is a relic of bygone days; every diaspora community is temporary.
There is truth in all of this. But there is also a dangerous idea hiding inside it: that Jewish heritage is only worth preserving if Jews still live next door.
That is not how heritage works for anyone.
Britain does not preserve Roman ruins because Romans still live in London. The East End does not commemorate Huguenot history because French Protestants still dominate Brick Lane. London preserves its past precisely because it understands something we, strangely, have begun to forget: that history is not only something you mourn. It is something you cherish and maintain.
And Jewish heritage in Britain is now in an especially precarious position, because we are losing not only buildings but institutions. In June 2023, the Jewish Museum London announced it would sell its Camden building in order to develop plans for a new museum. The reasons were understandable. But the symbolism was hard to miss: at the very moment British Jewish history is being debated, politicised, and distorted, the physical spaces dedicated to telling our story are shrinking.
So what would it look like to do this differently?
It would begin with rejecting the false binary. The question is not “synagogue or mosque.” The question is: why was there no serious, well-funded Jewish plan years ago to preserve the last purpose-built synagogue in the East End as a museum and heritage centre?
Why was the only imaginable future for this building either collapse or sale?
And why is it that the Jewish community can mobilise extraordinary resources for Holocaust memorialisation – rightly – yet seems almost unable to mobilise comparable energy to preserve the places where Jewish civilisation actually flourished?
This is not an argument against Holocaust remembrance. It is an argument against a distorted Jewish memory culture, one that risks teaching future generations that Jewish history is something that happened to us, rather than something we built in extraordinary ways.
The East End was not a site of Jewish suffering. It was a site of Jewish life: of immigrant ambition, religious creativity and political organising. It was a place where Yiddish rang through the streets, where traders argued and joked and negotiated, where children ran home from cheder, where refugees arrived with nothing and built a community worth honouring.
That story deserves a home.
And it is hard to imagine a more fitting home than the last synagogue built for that community, with its galleries and iron railings, its Lions of Judah, its ark, its worn pews, and its accumulated Torah scrolls. A building that is not merely “old,” but saturated with the rich tapestry of Jewish East End life.
The tragedy is not that a Muslim community might buy it. The tragedy is that a Muslim community appears to understand the power of sacred space, continuity, and communal memory, while we have been arguing about whether preserving our own past is worth the money.
If we cannot preserve a building like Nelson Street, then we should be honest about what we are choosing instead: a Jewish future in Britain with fewer physical anchors, fewer public stories, and fewer visible traces except, perhaps, for cemeteries and memorial stones.
And that is not a future any community should accept.
Jonathan Harounoff, Israel’s international spokesperson, is the British award-winning author of “Unveiled: Inside Iran’s #WomanLifeFreedom. Rochelle Posner, Jonathan’s mother-in-law, was born and raised in London’s East End
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