York Historic Environment Record

Dating from the late-C18 with a stone plaque on the façade suggesting 1770, No.1 (formerly No.3) Aldwark is one of the modern Jewish community’s most important locations in York. Between 1892 and 1975 it was York Hebrew Congregation’s Synagogue and continues to be a Registered Place of Workshop.

In 1892, York’s Jewish population had applied to the Chief Rabbi for facilities to celebrate New Year and Day of Atonement, who presented the community’s new synagogue with Sepher and Shofar. This was reported on 23rd September 1892 by The Jewish Chronicle: ‘Divine service will therefore be held on the New Year in York for the first time, in all probability, since the expulsion in 1290.’

As Jewish tradition allows worship anywhere there is a group of Jewish individuals, a purpose-built building is not essential, and the Synagogue at No.1 Aldwark operated on the first floor above a joiner’s shop. The use of the building by joiners is understood to have predated the Synagogue, with J.W. Graves a joiner at then No.15 Aldwark in the 1870s, and in the mid-C20 when it was operated by a Jewish joiner, T.R. Roberts. At the time of the registering of the Synagogue as a place of worship in the 1890s, it was referred to as "Bowman's buildings", associated by many generations of Bowman family who lived here and elsewhere on Aldwark; Thomas Bowman, was an owner of a furniture removal company on the site in the 1880s-1900s, and his father John had been a joiner in Aldwark from at least the 1830s.

The Royal Commission’s Inventory of the Historical Monuments in City of York, Volume 5, Central details that “Th[is] L-shaped building appears to have comprised three tenements facing the street [Nos. 3-5] and further accommodation over coach-houses in the rear wing”. The entrances to the workshops or coach houses at ground-floor level are evident in the façade – now filled as windows. The ground floor was split into two rooms or workshops by 1851. Historic maps indicate a passageway ran through the building to a rear courtyard from approximately 1889 to 1929. The interior has historic timbers that may pertain to the C18.

The Bimah in the Synagogue had a railing in front of it, which can be seen c. 5-minutes into the 1978 British film, The Water Babies. The film used the Synagogue as a n internal and external location during shooting in November 1976.

York’s Jewish community grew in the late-C19, mostly due to immigration to the UK of Ashkenazi Orthodox Jews from Eastern Europe. Three of its first four Ministers, Rev. Moses Eker, Rev. Leopold Wolf Klein, and Rev. David Issac Devons came from Russia, Poland and Lithuania respectively. It exemplifies the role of York as a place of welcome, sanctuary and refuge for Jews fleeing pogroms in Eastern Europe. The community reached 124 individuals by 1903 before declining. According to the 2001 census the Jewish population of the city numbered nearly 200, and since 2014 there’s been a flourishing Jewish Liberal community in York, with the city’s first resident Rabbi in the City for seven hundred years appointed in 2023.

Members of the Aldwark Synagogue community became significant and important figures in York, and, through the Morris family, with the Jewish Community in New York.

No.1 Aldwark holds historic, architectural and communal heritage significance in having long-standing use as a Synagogue at first-floor level and an intertwined history with families of joiners operating on the ground floor below. The importance of the building is to the history of York, and the long relationship between Jewish people, businesses and York civic life.


Sources:
• Jewish Communities & Records: https://www.jewishgen.org/jcr-uk/community/york/index.htm
• Research by Prof. Helen Codd, Professor Emerita of Law & Social Justice, University of Central Lancashire
• Research by Michael Dobbs and Dr Duncan Marks, York Civic Trust
• Insight by Howard Duckworth, Warden of York Liberal Jewish Community
• The Royal Commission’s Inventory of the Historical Monuments in City of York, Volume 5, Central (1981), p.105
• Aldwark Synagogue, History of York website: http://www.historyofyork.org.uk/themes/victorian/aldwark-synagog

RCHME, 1981, City of York Volume V: The Central Area, p105 (Monograph). SYO65.