Leo Epstein's fabric shop is woven into London's East End 

Photos: Mendel photography

IT

was at the height of Covid-19, and business was pretty much dead. Until the day the phone finally rang.

“Hi, is that Epra Fabrics?” a woman on the other end inquired.

“Yes,” said Daniel Epstein, son of Leo Epstein, the octogenarian proprietor of the fabric wholesaler in London’s East End who was isolating at home. “How may I help?”

“I’m calling from the Scrub Hub. We’re a group of volunteer women sewing hospital scrubs for nurses across the UK. We’re desperate for fabric. What can you sell us?”

The first few months of Covid, hospitals in England were incinerating scrubs at the end of every day. The risk of infection, they felt, was too great to launder them. Even the clothes nurses arrived to work in — cheap, disposable-grade garments decent enough to travel to work with and suitable to provide care in — were discarded at the end of the day.

Many fabric suppliers were left without stock because of shipping and manufacturing issues, yet Epra Fabrics, a longstanding trader, had connections and was able to procure bulk stock of solid-colored fabrics, flying the stock in from China even when the skies were so restricted.

Even though the frantic demand swiped their shelves clean of over half a million meters of fabric, it didn’t make Leo Epstein rich, or even boost his business much. The orders were paid for by private charities, so the company gave a rock-bottom rate. But it kept the Epsteins busy and the Epra storefront bustling, the echo of the delivery trucks rolling down an otherwise eerily still Brick Lane. And it even drew the appreciation from Her Majesty the Queen, transmitted on her behalf by HM Lord Lieutenant of Greater London.

But 89-year-old Leo Epstein attributes the fact that his textile business was the only one in England that kept the nurses working during Covid to a series of events in earlier, more precarious times, when moral and religious decisions would determine the Jewish future of so many struggling families.