Patrick Comerford
Bletchley is part of the new city of Milton Keynes, and the town is best known for Bletchley Park, the headquarters during World War II of the codebreakers who broke the German Enigma code.
Bletchley Park had been the home of Sir Herbert Samuel Leon (1850-1926), Liberal MP for Buckingham (1891 1895), who bought the Bletchley Park estate in 1883 and built the Bletchley Park mansion. The family kept the estate until 1938.
Bletchley Park was the headquarters of GC&CS, the codebreakers, during World War II. Hugh Sebag Montefiore, a descendant of Sir Herbert Samuel Leon, is the author of Enigma: The Battle for the Code, the story of the codebreakers at Bletchley Park.
Many Jewish men and women were among the codebreakers, and the author and historian Martin Sugarman, in World War II: Jewish Personnel at Bletchley Park, has identified 250 Jewish personnel at Bletchley Park, many of them key codebreakers.
They included Ruth Sebag-Montefiore (1916-2015), a great niece of Sir Herbert Samuel Leon. She became the matriarch of the Sebag-Montefiore family, and in her memoirs, A Family Patchwork: Five Generations of an Anglo-Jewish Family, she recalled her time at Bletchley Park and her family’s links with the estate.
However, during my visits to Bletchley in recent weeks, I went in search of the lives and stories of ordinary Jews who had lived in Bletchley over the years, and tried to find where they had worshipped, lived and gone to school.
Notable Jews who lived in Bletchley in the past include the comedian Joe Dindol (1920-2008). He was born in East End, but grew up in Bletchley, where his father, Angel, ran a small drapery shop. Growing up in a non-Jewish environment, at least until the war-time evacuation, he, his sister and their two brothers were sent to cheder in Northampton, where he was bar mitzvah. His parents were founder members of the synagogues in Northampton and Luton.
Bletchley Hebrew Congregation was founded in Bletchley during World War II, one of two Jewish congregations formed in the Milton Keynes area at the time. The Wolverton United Synagogue Membership Group, sometimes known as the Haversham Jewish Community, met in New Bradwell and Haversham.
Bletchley Hebrew Congregation was organised among the strictly orthodox evacuees, and was a strictly orthodox congregation. It was one of very few evacuee congregations affiliated to the Union of Orthodox Hebrew Congregations, an umbrella organisation of Haredi or ultra-Orthodox congregations, mainly in London. It was founded by Rabbi Victor Schonfeld (1880-1930) in 1926 with a stated mission ‘to protect traditional Judaism’.
Rabbi Solomon Schonfeld (1912-1984), Presiding Rabbi of the Union of Orthodox Hebrew Congregations, was the guest of honour at a gathering in July 1941 to mark the new congregation’s affiliation with the UOHC.
During those war-time years, the Beth Jacobs schools began classes at Bletchley in 1940 and at other centres for evacuated pupils. Jewish evacuee children came from Edlesbrough, Dunstable and Winslow to attend Hebrew classes in Bletchley.
There was an open clash in June 1941 between the strictly Orthodox Keren HaTorah organisation, directed by Rabbi Gellas, and the Joint Emergency Committee under the authority of the Chief Rabbi, over which organisation was responsible for the Hebrew classes at Bletchley. Rabbi Shlomo Baumgarten and Mrs Annie Wachsmann were the teachers in the classes. Later, Rabbi Baumgarten was one of the rabbis who joined British troops in Germany in April 1945 liberating the concentration camp in Bergen Belsen.
Meanwhile, Rabbi Chayim Weingarten (1883-1970) set up a yeshiva in Bletchley in 1941. He was born in Janov, probably the village of Yaniv in Ukraine that was abandoned after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. He founded a yeshiva in Wishnovitz, now Vyshnivchyk in Ukraine. He then became rabbi to the Orthodox community of Liege, Belgium.
He came to England in 1939 and established a small yeshiva, which he moved to Bletchley in 1941. At the end of the war, the yeshiva moved to premises near Staines and Egham and became known as the Staines Jewish Theological College or the Staines yeshiva. Later it was known as the Law of Life College and Synagogue, Slough, Slough Hebrew Congregation, or simply the Jewish Theological College.
Bletchley Hebrew Congregation had an address at 9-11 High Road, Bletchley throughout World War II, but it seems to have used schools and church halls for major events. The congregation was served until 1946 by Rabbi Jacob Teitlebaum. Shortly after the end of World War II, the congregation closed ca 1946. Rabbi Teitlebaum became President of Zeire Agudas in the United Kingdom, the youth wing of the Aguda Israel movement.
As for the yeshiva set up in Bletchley by Rabbi Chayim Weingarten, it continued in Slough until 1953. With ill health, he felt obliged to close the yeshiva and established a beth haMidrash or small synagogue at his home in Stamford Hill, north London. He died in 1970.
Since the 1960s, the shops in the heart of Bletchley have been refurbished and rebuilt and the streets have been realigned and renamed, so in my recent visits I found it difficult to identify the address at 9-11 High Road where Bletchley Hebrew Congregation was located in those war-time years, or any indication of the short-lived Bletchley Yeshiva.
However, apart from Bletchley Park, Jewish memories survive in Bletchley, where the names of Leon Avenue, the Leon Recreational Grounds Park, the Sir Herbert Leon Academy, the Leon Leisure Centre all honour of the town’s great Jewish benefactor.
Shabbat Shalom
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