On to temple Bristol’s Jewish history
Exactly 150 years ago today, Bristol’s Park Row synagogue was consecrated. Eugene Byrne looks into the backstory of this well-known local landmark, and one which is also welcoming visitors for Bristol Open Doors
AT 3pm on Thursday September 7 1871, the Chief Rabbi of the British Empire, Dr Nathan Marcus Adler, walked up to the door of the new synagogue on Park Row and said: “Open unto me the gates of righteousness; I will enter then and praise the Lord.”
The doors opened, and Dr Adler and the procession entered.
The consecration of the new synagogue, exactly 150 years ago today, was extensively covered in the local press - editors assuming, probably correctly, that the great majority of their readers (nominal or practising Anglican and Nonconformist Christians) would find the ceremony rather exotic.
Britons, particularly Anglicans, had an awkward relationship with Jewish people, who had a similar status to Roman Catholics in Victorian Bristol – a minority treated with some suspicion and sometimes even outright hostility. Legal discrimination against Jewish people was still within living memory, and Adler’s term of office had seen the election of the first Jewish MP and the first Jewish Lord Mayor of London.
Bristol’s Jewish community was not large compared to some other cities, and while most of them were of poor or modest means, there were a few wealthy figures including the first Jewish man to be elected to the Corporation, Abraham Alexander in 1846. Bristol’s first Jewish Mayor was Joseph ‘Joe’ Abraham, appointed in 1865.
Bristol had a Jewish community in the Middle Ages; most or all may have arrived here from France and they appear to have settled in the neighbourhood around Broad Street and Small Street. It’s even thought that they had a synagogue in the crypt of Great Giles Church. This had its own separate entrance, so both Christians and Jewish people worshipped in the same building without ever bumping into one another.
There are other traces of the community, most notably in what’s thought to have been a mikveh – for ritual bathing – on Jacobs Wells Road. But with the expulsion of all those of Jewish faith from England by King Edward I, they disappeared, though it’s possible that some might have remained keeping their religion a secret.
We know for certain that there was at least one Jewish person living openly in Bristol in Tudor times. Joachim Ganz was an expert mining engineer and metallurgist who worked in England in Elizabeth I’s reign, and in the 1580s was living and working in Bristol and offering lessons in Hebrew until an outraged Bishop protested to the Corporation, who sent him to London.
Ganz was obviously too valuable an individual to persecute; his knowledge of metals probably meant that he was involved in making guns or other weapons, and therefore just the sort of person you’d need with Spain planning to invade.
They were formally permitted to return to England because Oliver Cromwell and many of his co-religionists believed that the return of Jewish people to England was a necessary precondition for the Judgement Day.
While some may have arrived in Bristol in the later 1600s, there’s little evidence for their presence before the mid-1700s. Among their earliest known activities here was the leading part they played in Bristol’s glass industry. Bristol’s famous Blue Glass may have been an innovation of glassmaker Lazarus Jacobs or one of his family.
By the 1780s, there was a large enough group to purchase or rent a small building near what’s now Victoria Street to use as a synagogue, Needing more room they lavishly refurbished a former Quaker meeting house in Temple Street in the 1840s, but a generation later this was to be demolished to make way for the construction of Victoria Street.
The search for a new home settled on a building on Park Row which had previously been a convent occupied by a Roman Catholic order of nuns, the Little Sisters of the Poor.
The site and the new building cost just over £4,000, some of the money coming from Bristol’s corporation as compensation for the loss of the previous building. About a third of the cost was money spent on excavating the site so that it was closer to the road level.
One of the leaders of the project was Michael Joseph Platnauer, who probably originally came from Poland and with his brother was running a successful clock-making business. By the 1870s they had a shop on Victoria Street, which also sold silverware and jewellery, and the wider family and descendants were prominent in local society. The clock on the front of their building was famous among locals for its reliability.
The architect was Samuel Charles Fripp, though the interior was designed by Londoner Hyman Henry Collins, one of the first Jewish architects in Britain.
This September is busy for Jewish people, with many of their most important holy days falling during the month. Partly for that reason, the Park Row Synagogue will not be celebrating its 150th anniversary until October, when they’re planning a civic service with the Lord Mayor, Lord Lieutenant and other civic leaders as well as representatives of other faiths.
“The Jewish community of 150 years ago in Bristol as in other cities around Great Britain would have been very formal, quite rigid and hierarchical,” says Dr David Turns, President of the Bristol Jewish Congregation.
“The consecration service of 1871 would have been an extremely formal affair with lots of ceremony; the wardens or honorary officers of the synagogue would have been top hats and tails, the congregation would have been absolutely in their Sunday best - so to speak.
“The minister leading the congregation and the cantor leading the musical parts of the service, which is actually most of the service, would have wearing been canonical garb, long flowing black gowns which are hardly worn in synagogues today. There would have been a choir sitting or standing in the choir stall.
“The whole thing would have been done with immense dignity and formality. Which is not to say that the service we’re planning in October will not have dignity and formality, it’s just that it will be of a different order.”
As the Chief Rabbi entered the building, he was followed by eight prominent members of the congregation, including Michael Platnauer, and Levy Levy, the oldest (male) member of the community. These men carried the scrolls while the synagogue’s Reader, Mr Berliner, chanted: “How goodly are they tents, O Jacob, thy tabernacles, O Israel!”
The procession passed around the synagogue seven times, chanting a different psalm on each circuit before approaching the ark - the ornamented chamber to house the Torah scrolls - was opened.
The scrolls, the five books of the Pentateuch (corresponding to the first books of the Old testament) handwritten in Biblical Hebrew, were then deposited.
Dr Adler preached a sermon, and after the service the ladies and daughters of the congregation provided “a good, substantial tea” for some of the less wealthy Jewish population of Bristol and gave them a small sum of money.
In the evening, Dr Adler joined the men in a small celebration at which several toasts were drunk, not the least being to “The Queen”.
The Jewish Record newspaper noted Dr Adler’s observation that of all the congregations in Britain, the Bristol one was the one which seemed to have the least squabbles and faction-fighting.
“The Jews of Bristol,” said the paper, “are to be praised not only for their spirit and energy in raising a temple for the worship of the Most High, but also for the spirit of amity and peace which has characterised this – for many reasons the most interesting Hebrew Congregation of Great Britain.”
For more on Park Row Synagogue today, see www.parkrowsynagogue.org
It is also one of the venues open to the public over Bristol Open Doors weekend on the Friday and Sunday (not Saturday) – see opposite page.