Manchester's Real Jewish Museum

Society|Manchester Jewry

It looks like Bury New Road, Manchester, UK is as much of a showcase for local Jewish heritage as the recently revamped Manchester Jewish Museum on nearby Cheetham Hill. 

A quirky feature in the Manchester Evening News about a nine-month heritage project focusing on the area, nets a wide trawl of personalities and institutions with Jewish associations ranging from Communist philosopher, Karl Marx to musician, Graham Gouldman, film-maker, Mike Leigh and even Boddington's girl, Debby Carr! 

I once lodged there; knew, for example, both Gouldman's and Leigh's parents and insist that an article like this can never capture the essence of what's now termed the 'lived experience' of being  there.

Jazz it up as people may, in truth the area was and remains most relentlessly dismal.

The piece does not relate, for example, that ten doors up from the northern headquarters of the British Union of Fascists at 17 Northumberland Street, Salford were the premises of a Jewish kosher caterer that was forcibly shut when it was found to be using non-kosher ingredients! The house later became a student hostel and I sometimes saw the kids larking about in the rear garden from my bedsit window at adjacent No. 39.

A brief internet search reveals that the former Fascist bolthole is now owned by Machzikei Hadass Community Services Ltd; that No. 37 is a Satmar religious centre while my former home has become the Beis Hamedrash Hachodosh, owned by the Three Pillars Trust.

All three owners are strictly Orthodox Jewish organisations and while there have long been strictly Orthodox Jews in the locale, their convergence in such a small area in recent decades says much about the ultra-Orthodox ghettoisation of north Manchester and how the serried ranks of the Charedi world have reinvented the shtetl way of life that my anglicised immediate forebears were desperate to leave behind.

Black hats; glowering skies and now a Jewish women's group named Alevai, plans to make a film and compile a slang Prestwich Yiddish dictionary. Why turn themselves into a living museum? I wish it wouldn't be so!

NATALIE WOOD
17 JANUARY 2022