Community
Plans afoot to revive community in Huddersfield
The last organised Jewish community shut up shop in 1963
March 5, 2025 15:50
2 min read
The last organised Jewish community shut up shop in 1963
March 5, 2025 15:50A new Jewish community could be forming in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire more than 60 years after the town last had an organised Jewish group.
A “Bagel and Chat” meet-up event in March will bring together Jewish people living in Huddersfield and the surrounding areas in what is hoped will be the beginning of a new Jewish community.
According to a 2021 census, there were 187 residents in the metropolitan borough of Kirklees – out of a population of approximately 437,500 – who self-identified as Jewish, with 59 of them living in Huddersfield. In neighbouring boroughs, there were 153 Jewish people in Calderdale and 68 in Wakefield.
Robert Markless, a Huddersfield resident who moved to the West Yorkshire town five years ago from Kingston-upon- Thames, south-west London, is playing a key role in the mission to revive and re-establish a proactive Jewish community in the area.
Markless, who has experience in fostering inter-community relations in Kingston as chair and trustee of an anti-discrimination charity, said he hoped that people might want to meet “with others on a non-religious basis, to connect socially with our roots and culture. This could include any residents form a Jewish background, with any non-Jewish family members and those of Jewish heritage who would like to reconnect with their culture.”
Jewish life was first recorded in Huddersfield as early as 1841, but it was only in the mid-1890s that the community became properly established. It consisted primarily of immigrants from central and eastern Europe, who likely met and conducted services from a member’s home. The Huddersfield Jewish community was formerly recognised in about 1902, but 30 years later, that community had largely become defunct.
The town’s Jewish congregation was then re-established in the 1940s due in part to an influx of Jewish refugees and evacuees, but that too began to decline in the 1950s and folded for good in 1963.
Holocaust Centre North, located in Huddersfield, will be hosting the Bagel and Chat event for the nascent community on March 20 at its base at the University of Huddersfield. The meet-up is part of the museum’s communities programme, set up in memory of the late Rudi Leavor BEM, one of 16 Shoah survivors whose story is told in the centre’s permanent exhibition Through our Eyes.
It will be one of the first of many community outreach opportunities launched by the centre and it is aimed at encouraging individuals and families in West Yorkshire who would not normally engage in Jewish activities to meet other members of the community.
Elanor Stannage, head of the centre’s communities programme, said an important part of her work is “to support and connect the Jewish community across the north of England”. She said: “We are so keen to support Robert in bringing together potentially disengaged Jewish people in Huddersfield and the surrounding area to help them reconnect with each other and the culture.”
Holocaust Centre North was founded in the mid-1990s by Holocaust survivors and refugees in Leeds, with the aim of providing friendship and support. It has had a permanent home on the University of Huddersfield campus since 2018.
Anyone interested in attending the Bagel and Chat event or seeking more information on becoming part of the wider Huddersfield Jewish community, should contact the Holocaust Centre North’s website or email: e.stannage@hud.ac.uk.