Patrick Comerford
We spent last weekend in York, and for the first time ever I visited Durham, the county town of County Durham and a cathedral city on a bend in the river Wear, with a population of about 50,000 people.
During my short visit, I went in search of the stories of Jewish life in Durham, including the early 20th century synagogues and the stories of Jewish family and community in Durham.
These are the stories of a community was always small and that was one of the late communities to emerge in England at the end of the 19th century. The Jewish community in Durham faded away in the mid-20th century, but in recent decades a small new community has been formed, Jewish student life has become vibrant, and Durham University has become an important centre in the academic world for Jewish studies.
There may have been a minyan of Jews in Spennymoor, seven miles south of Durham, in the mid-19th century. But it seems the first Jews moved to Durham ca 1888, and that regular services were being held in private homes by the early 1890s.
Those first Jewish families came to Durham for economic reasons, and many of those early Jewish settlers sold clothing and furniture on credit to local miners, with weekly payments.
The earliest Jewish resident in Durham seems to have been a Mr B Morris, who arrived from Lithuania in 1888. He was soon joined by his brother Edward Morris, his father Jacob Morris, and his nephews Nachman and Boruch. They were a family of learned Talmudic scholars and they dominated Jewish community life in Durham for many years.
Jacob Morris led a deputation to Sunderland in 1891 seeking a loan of a Sepher Torah, and at the time members of the Jewish community in Durham were members of the Sunderland Hebrew Congregation. Reports in Jewish Chronicle show early services in Durham were held in members’ homes, in particular at the home of Jacob Morris at 8 The Avenue in 1899-1900.
The London Jewish Board of Guardians had a policy of ‘dispersal’ in the early 20th century, and sent a number of East European Jews to Durham. As a consequence, the Jewish community in Durham was able to form a minyan and set up a small place for communal worship at 11 John Street, in the Viaduct area.
The congregation held its annual general meeting at the synagogue at 11 John Street in 1901, when Edward Morris was elected president, S Herman treasurer, and B Morris the secretary. The New Year and High Holy Day services were held in the Shakespeare Hall, North Road, in 1903.
A request for the congregation in Durham to become a branch or affiliate of the Sunderland congregation was rejected by Sunderland on 13 April 1904. By then the premises on John Street were too cramped and a new synagogue, with a capacity for 125 people, was built at 107 Laburnum Avenue, off Hawthorn Terrace, in 1909.
The foundation stone of the new synagogue was laid in January 1909 and the synagogue was opened on 19 August 1909 by the Bradford philanthropist Jacob Moser (1839-1922). He was Lord Mayor of Bradford in 1910 and a founder of the Bradford Reform Synagogue, the second oldest surviving Reform synagogue in the United Kingdom.
The new synagogue in Durham was consecrated in a service led by the Revd S Franklin of Newcastle, with addresses by Rabbi Dr Salis Daiches (1880-1945) of Sunderland and Rabbi Yochel Myer Sandelson (1880-1935) of Newcastle.
The Archdeacon of Durham, the Ven Henry Watkins (1844-1922), sent a cordial letter, writing: ‘All lovers of humanity must thankfully acknowledge their indebtedness to the Jewish nation, and all Christian people must recognise the indebtedness of the church to the synagogue.’ Watkins was also Professor of Hebrew at Durham University, and his letter concluded with a Hebrew blessing.
The ceremonies were followed by a reception in the Durham Miners’ Hall.
The only known resident minister in Durham was the Revd Maurice David Hershman (1862-1931), who was appointed reader, teacher and mohel in 1912. His appointment was of very short duration and there was no minister or shochet in Durham for much of the time, although Dr Samuel Daiches, the resident minister of Sunderland, was a visiting minister from time to time.
The community at one time had over 70 members in 15 families, and the principal family names included Bergson, Garstein, Robinson, Cannon, Garbett, Berg, Book, Herman and Cohen.
Some notable Jewish connections with Durham include Farrer Herschell (1837-1899), 1st Baron Herschell of the City of Durham, who was MP for Durham (1874-1885), and Lord High Chancellor (1886, 1892-1895). Herschell’s father, the Revd Ridley Haim Herschell (1807-1864), from Strzelno in Poland, had converted from Judaism to Christianity.
Isidore Newman (1916-1944) was a British secret agent in the French section of the Special Operations Executive during World War II. The son of Russian Jewish immigrants Joseph and Tilly Newman, he grew up in Durham and trained there as a teacher.
He joined the Royal Corps of Signals in August 1940, and transferred to the French (F) Section in ‘Churchill’s Secret Army’ in July 1941. He was betrayed in France, arrested on 31 March 1944, taken to the Gestapo prison in Paris, and moved to Mauthausen concentration camp, where he was murdered on 7 September 1944. A plaque in his honour was unveiled at his former home at 52-53 Hawthorn Terrace, Durham, in 2023.
Gerald (Gerry) Steinberg (1945-2015) was born in Durham and was a teacher in Spennymoor; he was co-Leader of Durham City Council (1983-1987) and Labour MP for Durham (1987- 2005).
The community began to decline in the 1930s. The synagogue continued to be used by the Durham Hebrew Congregation until the last services during autumn 1944. The building was finally sold in 1955, and the last trustees are named in 1962, when the community was dissolved.
The last two Jewish families – the families of Dr Harry Waters and Sonia Waters and Dr Harry Shenkin and Cynthia Shenkin – left Durham in the 1970s.
The former synagogue building at the top of Laburnum Avenue was bought in 1997 by Durham Presbyterian Church, which was formed 10 years earlier in 1987. The Revd Phil Baiden has been the minister since 2015.
In behind the hedges and the growth at the top of Laburnum Avenue last weekend, I found four large stones and eight smaller ones embedded in the wall commemorating some of the trustees of the former Durham Synagogue, although most of the names have been erased over time.
Durham and North-East Liberal Jewish Community is a new community that meets about once a month in Durham and other parts of the north-east.
The other Jewish communities nearby are in Newcastle: Newcastle United Hebrew Congregation and Newcastle Reform Synagogue.
The Centre for the Study of Jewish Culture, Society and Politics at Durham University was founded ten years ago in 2015. It brings together a group of leading scholars coming from a wide range of disciplines including anthropology, cultural studies, geography, history, literary theory, political science and theology.
The centre provides a multidisciplinary forum for scholars working at the intersection of Jewish Studies and other fields of academic inquiry, developing cutting edge theoretical and empirical scholarship and engaging with issues of wider societal concern.
Durham University’s Jewish Society is one of the fastest-growing in Britain. In partnership with the university, UJC and the North East Jewish Chaplaincy Board, it holds weekly events open to all Jewish students and staff of the university. These events are usually held in Saint Aidan’s College, Durham. They include a weekly Shabbat dinner cooked in the dedicated kosher kitchen.
Shabbat Shalom, שבת שלום
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