Putting synagogue history in the picture in Wales

Welsh-Jewish history specialist Dr Cai Parry-Jones is working on an illustrative history of the synagogues of Wales.

The 30-year-old, who is not Jewish, says his interest dates back to childhood. “My dad is an exhibition designer and always took me to visit museums and castles. I became fascinated by the details of buildings.”

There were modules on the Holocaust and Jewish architecture in his undergraduate degree and Masters in history at Bristol University. He went on to complete a doctorate in Welsh-Jewish history.

The first purpose-built synagogue in Wales was constructed in Swansea in 1818, he said. There were just under two dozen at the end of the First World War, when the Jewish population peaked at 5,000.

Dr Parry-Jones said many “were simply rooms in houses or commercial premises that were converted into synagogues. Most Jewish communities in Wales were too small in number and finances to fund synagogue buildings.”

Just four remain — Orthodox and Reform in Cardiff; Swansea, meeting in a room of its former synagogue; and Llandudno, run as a Chabad retreat centre.

“Architecturally speaking, my favourite shul is the former Merthyr Tydfil synagogue in Church St [1877]. It’s a rare example of a synagogue designed in the neo-gothic style,” Dr Parry-Jones added. “It also features a red dragon finial on its roof, a symbolic statement of Jews engaging and identifying with notions of Welshness and Welsh culture in the late 19th century.”

But, in research terms, he favoured the less prominent ones, “because they have largely been overlooked and ignored by historians. They are extremely valuable from a social-history perspective. The small Jewish community of Abertillery, for instance, was so few in number — no more than 100 people at its peak in 1912 — that they could only afford to build a small synagogue in a congregant’s garden. The “cathedral synagogue” was certainly not the norm for Wales’s Jewish communities.”

Although Dr Parry-Jones has found many images of synagogue exteriors, tracking down interior photos has proved more problematic.

His latest project follows the publication of his doctoral thesis on the history of the Jewish diaspora in Wales.