Extract from papers on
Provincial Jewry in Victorian Britain

Papers prepared by Dr. (later Prof.) Aubrey Newman for a conference at University College, London, convened on 6 July 1975 by the Jewish Historical Society of England
(Reproduced here with Prof. Newman's kind consent)

Paper first published on JCR-UK: 10 January 2015
Latest revision: 11 December 2016

LIVERPOOL - Introductory Data

A.    Liverpool in 1851 was the largest provincial community. It possessed two synagogues and had by 1850 a complete set of social institutions. The community had taken part in the election of Chief Rabbi Nathan Adler. Day schools had been founded in 1840-41.

The Seel Street synagogue had 45 Ba'ale Batim in 1845, and 31 seatholders. In 1851 there were 250 appropriated seats and 200 at services. The New Synagogue had 58 Ba'ale Batim and 12 seatholders in 1845 and 160 appropriated seats in 1851, with about 50 at services. The total estimated population for both congregations was about 2500.

[Primarily The Rise of Provincial Jewry (1950) by Cecil Roth or Social History of the Jews in England 1850-1950 (1954) by Vivian Lipman]

1874  [extracted from The Jewish Directory for 1874, by Asher I. Myers]

Old Hebrew Congregation, Seel Street. Founded in Turton Court, near the Customs House, 1780. Present building erected 1807. Has seat accommodation for 290 persons: 169 gentlemen's and 121 ladies' seats. Seat rental - gentlemen's scats from £l.ls. to £21 per annum; ladies' seats from £1.1s. to £3.3s. per annum. Income 1872-3 £1651.7s.; expenditure 1872-3 £1387.4s.11d.

New Hebrew Congregation, Hope Place. Founded 1842. Has seat accommodation for 205 persons, 163 gentlemen's seats; 142 ladies'.

Liverpool Hebrews Education Institution and Endowed Schools, Hope Place. Founded 1840. Present building erected 1852. Number of pupils, 95 boys, 93 girls.

Liverpool Hebrew Philanthropic Society. Founded 1811. Annual income £80, annual expenditure £120.

Society for Visiting and Aiding the Sick.

Jewish Ladies' Benevolent Institution, founded 18 February 1849. For the relief of poor married women during sickness, confinement, and week of mourning. Annual income £345, annual expenditure £248.

Liverpool Soup Kitchen for the Jewish Poor.

Society for Clothing the Necessitous Boys of the Hebrews' Educational Institution. Founded 1866. Income 1872-3, £80.11s.6d., expenditure 1872-3, £80.5s.7d.

Liverpool Hebrews' Free Loan Society. Founded 1861.

The Liverpool Jewish Choral Society, Synagogue Chambers, Hope Place. Founded 1871. For providing an efficient honorary choir for the Liverpool New Hebrew Congregation; and for giving amateur entertainments and reunions to which subscribers and their friends are admitted. Terms of subscription, one guinea per annum; members' wives, half a guinea. Number of subscribers about 100.

Jewish population 5,000. 1900, 45 marriages, 57 deaths.

Old Hebrew Congregation, Princes Road (founded 1790). Seatholders 399. Income 1900, £2309.13s.6d., expenditure £2043.2s.8d.

The Princes Road Synagogue holds and administers several important bequests:-

1. The Eliza Jackson Home, North Hill Street. Giving a house and 10/- weekly for life to six spinsters or widows without children, of the Jewish faith. Built and endowed by the late Eliza Jackson and Henrietta Braham.

2. About £13300 from the late James Braham for the payment of stipend of Minister and Reader, provided they are English and born of English parents.

3. The Earned Annuity Fund, which provides four old people with a pension for life of £20 per annum.

4. The 'Mozley and Elias Joseph' Coal and Blanket Fund for providing the poor with these necessaries during the winter. About 70 relieved.

5. £1000 bequeathed by the late Mrs. Augustus Levy to provide annuities for two old deserving people.

Liverpool New Hebrew Congregation Synagogue, Hope Place (Consecrated 1857). Seatholders 152. Income 1901 £764.1s.4d., expenditure £748.1s.4d.

Fountains Road, Kirkdale (founded 1887). Seatholders 36.

New Beth Hamedrash, 55 Crown Street. Seatholders 86.

Princes Road Synagogue Religious Classes. Average attendance 50.

Liverpool Board of Guardians for the Relief of the Jewish Poor (founded 1875). Income 1900 £586, expenditure £1160. [In 1897 it was stated - administrative expenses £127. 2811 applications granted.]

Liverpool Hebrew Educational Institution and Endowed Schools (founded 1840). Ladies' Committee Income 1900 £1570.9s.1d., expenditure £1527.7s. The children number 715; 309 boys, 295 girls, and 111 infants.

Jewish Ladies' Benevolent Institution (founded 1849). Object, relief of poor married women during sickness and confinement. Income 1897 £345, expenditure £299.

Hebrew Philanthropic Society (founded 1811). Object, giving weekly relief during the winter to the respectable Jewish poor. Income and expenditure about £200. Administrative expenses £18. 50 families relieved. Election by ballot.

Hebrew Provident Society, 46 Paradise Street (founded 1850). cont. To provide old people with a pension of 5/- weekly for life. Income and expenditure, about 2,100. Administrative expenses £7. The number of pensioners varies from six to nine.

Society for Clothing the Necessitous Boys of the Hebrew Schools, Hope Place. Founded 1867. Number of boys clothed, 75 to 80. Conditions of relief: regular attendance at school, cleanliness and tidiness in appearance. Income and expenditure, £85.

Children's Clothing Society (founded 1884). Making and distributing clothes to poor Jewish children. Income and expenditure about £50. Over 70 children clothed.

Liverpool Hebrew School Children's Soup Fund, Hope Place. Founded 1870. Providing the children of the schools with hot dinners during the winter. Income and expenditure about £85.  367 children fed daily.

Children's Jewish Charities Aid Society (founded 1895).

Orphan Aid Society. To aid the Jews Hospital and Orphan Asylum. Income about £60.

New Hebrew Burial Society and Chevra Kadisha. Income 1900, £303.2s.9d., expenditure £336.

North End Young Men's Jewish Association, Fountains Road, Kirkdale (founded 1897).

Chevra Torah.

Liverpool Hebrew Tontine Society (founded 1883). Income 1900, £1688.4s.9d. Number of members 500.

Liverpool Jewish Young Men's Social Club.

Liverpool Hebrew Workmen's Benefit Society.

LIVERPOOL
(Prepared by Aubrey Newman)

(For the Community's earlier history, see "Liverpool" in Cecil Roth's "The Rise of Provincial Jewry", 1950)

(See the article by Bertram B. Lenas, 'A survey of the Jewish Institutional History of Liverpool and District', Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England, vol.. xvii (1953) pp.23-37, and the references there cited. )

The basis for the study of the Liverpool community must still remain the works of the Benases, father and son, to which may now be added the history of the Liverpool Old Hebrew Congregation,1780-1974 recently compiled by the late David Hudaly. It is from these that this sketch has been entirely drawn.

In 1838 the Liverpool Old Hebrew Congregation split into two. congregations, the secessionists building a synagogue in Hope Place, Liverpool, which was opened in 1857. Although thereafter smaller congregations were established in the neighbourhoods of Brownlow Hill and London Road, the differentiation was not based on a sharp division between Anglo-Jews and Jews from abroad but on the nature of the services, differences existing amongst the immigrants themselves. The foundation, however, of the Fountains Road Synagogue in Kirkdale was the result of entirely geographical reasons; the residents there were too far distant from the then centre of Jewish population. At the same time, however, it and the congregation established shortly in Crown Street represented a very different class from the other synagogues, very much artisan in origin, creating in a sense a narrow environment for themselves. A further congregation, not mentioned in the Yearbook for 1901, was that developed in Birkenhead, opening in 1889.

The older congregations had also created for themselves a wide range of communal institutions. The Hebrew Philanthropic Society was founded in 1811, the first women's organisation - the Hebrew Ladies' Benevolent Society - was founded in 1849, and in 1850 the Liverpool Provident Society. These were typically Anglo- Jewish, English in the systematic approach and Jewish in the ways they envisaged their fields of action. A Board of Guardians was founded in 1876, to co-ordinate the charitable activities of individual members of the congregation, and more especially those activities outside the scope of the other organsations , and in 1884, a conjoint committee of representatives of Liverpool and Manchester Jewry was set up to visit local hospitals, asylums, and prisons. In 1881 there was set up also a Jewish Temporary Shelter.

Educationally, too, the communities had done a great deal. The Liverpool Hebrews' Educational Institution and Endowed Schools were established in 1842, with the aim of providing a general secular educational, together with Jewish religious instruction and teaching of Hebrew, but with the coming of large numbers of immigrants come also, in 1894, the establishment of a Talmud Torah. Also set up, in 1866, was a Society for clothing necessitous boys at the school, and in 1870 Liverpool Hebrew School Children's Soup Fund.

The Liverpool congregations were also responsible for a Zionist society, which acquired premises for a reading room in 1896, before the first Zionist Congress.

Provincial Jewry in Victorian Britain - List of Contents

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