Letchworth, the thriving Jewish community that time forgot - The Jewish Chronicle

Under the headline, No Minyan in Letchworth, the JC on 24 September 1971 reported: “One of Britain’s most unusual provincial communities is dying. The community is Letchworth, and it is unusual because since the early days of the Second World War, it has been a stronghold of Orthodoxy. The congregation in recent years revolved around the Sassoon family. It was at their home that services were held twice daily. But the Sassoons have emigrated to Israel and other members of the congregation have left the garden city too. Now one of its leading members has moved to London — because he says he can no longer get a minyan in Letchworth on Shabbat.”

The first phase of the Letchworth Jewish community began in 1939/1940 when hundreds of London Jewish families descended on Letchworth Garden City in Hertfordshire seeking temporary refuge from the bombing.

If you draw an arc of about 30-50 miles around the Jewish areas of 1930s London, you will identify about 20 of what I describe as “pop-up satellite” Jewish communities. Because property developer Aba Bornstein had just built a workers’ estate in Letchworth that still lay empty, and because Bornstein was a leading member of the Mizrachi Modern Orthodox community, most of the people who moved into his estate were frum family and friends, as well as families from the Strictly Orthodox enclave in Stamford Hill. During the war, these temporary Letchworth residents created a sophisticated communal infrastructure.

An estimated 10 per cent of Letchworth’s wartime population of 16,000 was Jewish. Of all the pop-up communities, Letchworth had the highest proportion of Orthodox Jews.

The second phase began in 1945 when the bulk of the community returned to London. A rump of the community, consisting of several dozen families, remained in Letchworth for the next 13 years, during which time the town even had a small yeshivah.

The third and final phase — the rump of the rump — lasted from 1958 to 1971. What extended the community’s sell-by date was that every weekend, the Jewish community was bolstered by students from Cambridge University and young visitors from London. When Jonathan Sacks first arrived in Cambridge he was studying philosophy. His transition to the rabbinical world was significantly influenced by Rabbi Solomon Sassoon. In 2000, he wrote to my parents, Eli and Chava Fachler: “Your letter brought back marvellous memories of the old days in Letchworth, which were an important part of my own spiritual development.”

During this final phase of the community, synagogue services were held in the Sassoon home, while my parents hosted a very boisterous Shabbat morning kiddush, where visitors included Letchworth MP Shirley Williams. When the last president of the community, my father, was no longer able to raise a Shabbat minyan, he moved to London and the Letchworth Jewish community came to an end.

The genesis of my history of the Letchworth Jewish community was an enquiry I received in 2016 from the Letchworth Local History Research Group. They wanted to know about the Judaica library, regarded as the most important private collection in the world, that David Sassoon brought to Letchworth when he arrived with his household in 1940. The library included the 1,100-year-old Codex Sassoon, the world’s oldest Hebrew Bible, that recently set a new world record when it sold for $38.1 million at auction at Sotheby’s in New York.
I discovered that because the Jewish community left no physical footprint — no synagogue, no school, no cemetery — there is close to zero collective memory in Letchworth that so many Jews once lived there. I also found an intense renewed interest in the community.

Mindful that once my generation disappears there will be no more eyewitnesses to the miracle that was Letchworth, I decided to take on this project. The avalanche of memories and anecdotes that poured in only confirmed that there was still intense interest in the community.

As I wrote Jewish Letchworth: A Microcosm of the Jewish Communal Experience, two expressions hovered in my consciousness: “It takes a village to raise a child” and “You can take the boy out of Letchworth, but you can’t take Letchworth out of the boy.” Letchworth was the world’s first garden city. Lewis Mumford, the American philosopher of technology, and expert on cities and urban architecture, said: “At the beginning of the 20th century, two great new inventions took form before our eyes: the aeroplane and the Garden City.” Letchworth served as the model for dozens of places worldwide, including Welwyn Garden City, Hamstead Garden Suburb, Tel Aviv, Nahalal and Canberra.

George Orwell lived for several years in the nearby village of Wallington. When I used to decamp to the Letchworth Public Library to study for my A Levels in the early 1960s, I had no idea that a mere 20 years earlier, Orwell had frequently cycled to that same library to conduct his research. He is famous for saying that Letchworth attracted “every fruit juice-drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, quack, pacifist and feminist in England.”

During the war years, several famous rabbis lived in Letchworth or were frequent visitors, including Rabbi Isidore Epstein, Rabbi Elya Lapian, Dayan Abramski and Rabbi Dessler. After the war, the community was led by Rabbi Asher Feuchtwanger. His charismatic Sephardi brother-in-law Rabbi Sassoon looms large in the collective memory. A fluent Yiddish speaker, this eccentric genius turned down the post of joint Ashkenazi/Sephardi chief rabbi of Israel.

Through all three phases of the Jewish community, there was a thriving cheder. After the war, Rabbi Sassoon started paying for taxis to bring children from miles around for instruction.

Letchworth residents and visitors have described the extraordinary legacy of the community: “It says a lot about this cross-section of Jews, from English-born to Continental to Eastern, and from highly Orthodox to highly unorthodox, that they were able to create such a tightly knit and cohesive community.”“I remember the warmth and mutual respect, the unity within the community.” “For my family, Letchworth was an island of calm and almost complete tranquility in a war-torn world.” “Above all, I recall the wonderful people. Their tolerance and understanding were, without doubt, Letchworth’s most outstanding legacy. There will never be another Letchworth.”

Letchworth-born writer, broadcaster and historian Yanky Fachler’s ‘Jewish Letchworth, A Microcosm of the Jewish Communal Experience’, published by Vallentine Mitchell is out now

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