Bristol Hebrew Congregation, Park Row

The late Victorian period was one of public health reform and the construction of new streets in the city. This purpose-built synagogue opened in 1871 occupied a small part of the site previously occupied by the Catholic Asylum of the Little Sisters of the Poor whose own buildings had been destroyed as part of the construction of Perry Road. The Jewish congregation had also relocated because of a street widening scheme, namely the building of Victoria Street which destroyed their previous synagogue. The city seems to have agreed to have supplied Samuel Fripp one of the city’s surveyors as architect for the new synagogue and the interior and fittings were designed by Hyman H. Collins of London, a well known Jewish architect who designed other synagogues in England. Some of the fittings in this synagogue came from two older synagogues in the city, which dated respectively from 1786 and 1842.

Poorer Jews who began to come into Britain in greater numbers after the persecutions in Eastern Europe were a feature of the late Victorian period exciting many of the prejudices and worries which New Commonwealth immigrants would also experience a half-century later. Bristol’s Edwardian Jewish community of less than a 1000 people comprised poor peddlers and sweated workers (such as the poet Isaac Rosenberg’s parents) at one end and wealthy businessmen and pupils at Pollacks House in Clifton College at the other-- with pawnbrokers, opticians, teachers and the like in between.