Last year, a mezuzah that had hung next to the front door of my flat either fell down or was removed. I would like to think that it fell, but I can’t be sure: I live in a neighbourhood of North London which has only a small Jewish population and I’ve seen a few antisemitic things happen here.
But in the largely non-Jewish seaside town of Ramsgate in Kent, something different is happening. Montefiore Synagogue declares itself audibly to the local community four times every hour, when the clock on the exterior façade of the shul chimes, and a handful of non-Jewish volunteers help to keep the shul up and running.
The chiming clock on the street-facing external shul wall looks like something you’d find in Alice’s Wonderland: gold letters placed around a bright-blue clock-face state: “Time flies. Virtue alone remains.” When I first glimpsed the clock, I couldn’t help but smile: I’d never before seen such a whimsical statement on a shul building.
This is the only chiming clock on the exterior of a synagogue in the UK; the only one west of Florence. There is another in Prague, and several in India, but you can count the number of such clocks in the world on both hands.
Montefiore Synagogue is an unusual, special place. It sits atop a knoll, amid its own small, nature reserve. The Regency-style building and attached mausoleum, built in 1833, is painted white, and you find the shul by ascending up a quiet, little lane.
Eddie Gadd, 50, makes the trip up the lane on Sundays, when he comes to wind the clock. “I own a pub just around the corner from the synagogue, the Montefiore Arms. One night, the guys who look after the woodland around the synagogue came in. They told me they needed a new clock winder, and I told them it feels right that the landlord of the Montefiore Arms should be the one to do it.”
Mark Negin, deputy keeper of the shul, told me: “Chiming of clocks and bells was always associated with the Church. It must say much for the confidence of Sir Moses in his and his religion’s acceptance by the Ramsgatonians that he was confident enough to install an outside clock on his ‘estate synagogue’ in imitation of an ‘estate church’, attached to the house of the Lord of the Manor.”
The clock made it into the local paper, the Thanet Advertiser, in 1863: “There is now in course of erection at the Synagogue, a large clock, which will prove a great boon to persons passing along the Hereson Road, as well as to the residents of the East End of town, as it will, when completed, chime the quarters, similar to the Pier Clock.”
The clock is still, even in this age of iPhones, a help — schoolchildren use it to help them be on time for school, locals rely on it to prompt them to set off to work in the morning.
“At ten to ten on a Sunday, I walk over to the synagogue and I climb up to the top…” Eddie tells me. “There are three mechanisms that need winding. One of the chime mechanisms needs to be wound 280 times, the other 180 times. Then I wind the clock itself up, which takes 40 winds. It’s a bit of a workout! And if the timing is out, we adjust the pendulum mechanism —lengthen or shorten it as we need to. It takes less than half-an-hour to do the job. The synagogue is such a beautiful building, and I like to feel that I’m doing my little bit to help to keep it running well.”
On the day I visited, the clock’s time-keeping perfectly matched that displayed on my iPhone. But the chiming bell sound on my iPhone is nowhere near as sublime.
