The Jews who arrived in Manchester came from diverse cities, towns, and shtetlach, propelled by financial hardship, anti-Semitism, and unrest, attracted by economic opportunity. But the town most closely linked with the frum community’s origins is Brody in Galicia, known as Brod in Yiddish.

“Brod was the center of the textile trade in Galicia,” Elozor Reich explains. “That was where our family was from, and where my father was born in 1898. My great-grandfather Elozor Reich used to come over to Manchester once a year from Brod to buy textiles. On his visits, he saw that Yiddishkeit over here was slowly improving.” Eventually, he was among those who moved his family to the UK, settling in Manchester.

The Reichs’ maternal grandfather, Eliezer Adler, arrived in the UK in 1880, and made his way to Gateshead, where he was a founder and leader of the community. But three of his sons-in-law, Herschel Heilpern, Hershel Reich, and Yosef Halpern, moved to Manchester and took on key roles in the establishment of Machzikei Hadass, its chareidi community.

Bucking the Trend

In Manchester, the concept of a “neighborhood shul” has yet to take off. Shuls dot the streets, but a disproportionate number of them are on Northumberland Street (and, in the Prestwich neighborhood, on Kings Road), which features steady traffic of Jewish pedestrians and minivans throughout the day.

Back in the very early days, the frum immigrants organized themselves into shtiblach in groups of landsleit, so that the shuls which populated the poor areas of Red Bank, Cheetham Hill, Waterloo Road, and Bury New Road were called after their places of origin, creating the “Ostreicher shul,” the “Poilisher shul,” the “Broder shul” and the “Romanishe shul.” The Romanishe shul actually survived all the transitions, relocated itself to Vine Street when the community moved out of the inner city, and is still active today.

“The Poilisher shul was where the big casino is now, on Bury New Road, going toward town. The Ostreicher shul included people from Brod, because Brod was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and ‘Ostreich’ [Austria in Yiddish] was a more snobby title for the empire,” explains Elozor Reich.

Until around 1900, these shuls bustled with activity, featuring daily services, Chevros Mishnayos, and even a mikveh. (He adds that in 1940, when the Machzikei Hadass mikveh on Teneriffe Street was bombed out of existence in the German bombardment of Manchester, Rav Feldman of Machzikei Hadass went to the head of the general community and asked for permission to use their old mikveh. When it was shown to him, it was apparent from its state that the mikveh had not been in use for years, and his reaction was, “I wouldn’t wash my dog in this!”)

Sadly, though, this piety didn’t extend to the second generation. The children of these original immigrants didn’t follow in their parents’ ways, leaving what Z. Yaakov Wise, author of The Establishment of Ultra-Orthodoxy in Manchester termed “piety and poverty” behind to become anglicized. The shuls emptied out quickly. Parents who were careful not to carry even a handkerchief on Shabbos often had children who barely came to shul. Then there was the sad emergence of the “market” or “workers” minyanim, which enabled some to daven in shul on Shabbos and then get in the day’s work, which they felt essential to their survival in this new climate.

With very few exceptions, such as a Yid named Reb Zusia Golditch, who is recorded as having held on to his full chassidish mesorah down to wearing chassidish garb, the Jews of Manchester were striving to become gentrified. (Reb Zusia’s persistence was not for naught. His son, Dayan Yitzchak Golditch, would grow up to be the av beis din of Manchester.)

But at some point, the pendulum swung again, as evident by the copious amount of black-hatted teenagers filling the town today. (Manchester offers several mesivta options that draw bochurim from across England and Europe, as well as a small but distinct Australian contingent.) In a large building on Seymour Road, with rooms lined with hundreds of memorial plaques and a beis medrash reverberating with the sounds of Torah, the Manchester Yeshiva Kollel keeps the flame alive in the place where it all started.

The very first significant attempt to stop the town’s spiritual downward spiral happened in 1911, when the Manchester Yeshiva was founded. Some of those most active in this venture would later form the core of the Machzikei Hadass community, too. The first rosh yeshivah was Rav Tzvi Hirsch Ferber, author of Kerem Hatzvi, who soon moved on to become a rav in London. (An illustration of how meager his salary was and the yeshivah’s financial state can be seen in the introduction to one of his seforim, where Rav Ferber writes that he was compelled to use shorthand because of printing costs.) But it was slow going at first. Only a tiny proportion of the city’s Jews were drawn to the yeshivah. In a city with well over 30,000 Jews, the yeshivah had no more than 35 full-time talmidim, some of them from other towns.

As Rabbi Yisroel Yoffey, chairman of its Vaad Hachinuch, lamented in the Jewish Chronicle newspaper:

The environment here is distinctly unfavorable to Jewish learning. There are so many other attractions and distractions for our Jewish youth that every single pupil who attends the yeshivah should be to us a source of rejoicing. With the fire of assimilation raging furiously, every such pupil may justly be regarded as an ‘ud mutzal me’eish — a brand plucked out of the fire.’

It didn’t take long for the tension between the zeitgeist of the general Jewish community and the fiercely held personal standards of the “real Yiddisher Yidden” to leave the latter group, feeling that they did not belong there. If they wanted their children to live their lives along the same principles as their parents, to live Yiddishkeit not just in shul but at home, there was no choice but to break away and form an independent entity. Through the lens of the Reich brothers’ personal reminiscences, against the backdrop of the local area that they’ve lived in all their lives, history comes to life.

“On Acharon Shel Pesach in the afternoon, Herschel Reich walked from Wellington Street to the kosher bakery on Waterloo Road, and waited around there, to ensure they didn’t start baking before nacht. That was the kind of thing that was going on that made it clear they needed a kehillah of their own,” Akiva Reich says.

Standing in one of the Machzikei Hadass butcher shops on Leicester Road today, it’s hard to think of a chicken, meat, or lamb product they don’t have in stock. Machzikei Hadass currently shechts 6,500 chickens a week to satisfy local demand. Customers seem to know each other, and be on good terms with the staff, too. In the 1920s though, the shochtim and kosher butchers were not all up to standard. Some of the frum Yidden in Manchester resorted to bringing shechted meat and chicken weekly by train from Gateshead, others limited themselves to chicken and stopped eating meat, and one Reb Wolf Dresner shechted his own chickens.

Still, Elozor Reich, who has compiled extensive history notes about the kehillah, is careful not to tar the entire Jewish establishment with the brush of laxity. “It should not be thought that there were no reliable shochtim or butchers in those days. The problem for the fastidious individual was in ensuring that he or she got meat from a particular shochet, via a preferred butcher.”

By 1925, some of the Shabbos-observant Jews had moved out of the inner-city area, which meant that the shuls were emptying out still further. It was time for action. Posters in Yiddish were hung up, calling a meeting for people who were concerned about the dwindling state of Yiddishkeit in the Manchester community and the laxity they could see around them. The few who attended were mainly chassidim who davened in the Poilisher shul, but they were joined by some from the Ostreicher and one or two others. Would it be possible to establish their own independent kehillah, run as they wanted?

The establishment, both locally and nationally, thought not, but these pioneers were undeterred. They took the first step of opening a Friday night minyan in private houses, charting a course whose ultimate goal was to form a communal organization independent of the office of the chief rabbi in London, and of any other Anglo-Jewish umbrella.

Those Friday night minyanim, first held at the Feingold home on Wellington Street, paved the way to their own shul. “The first actual shul we had was at the corner of Cheltenham Crescent and Northumberland Street,” Reb Akiva says. “Paul Webster’s dairy was opposite there, and at one point that was where we organized our chalav Yisrael milk supply. But all that took time to get organized.”

Slow Progress

Today it’s MH, but originally the name of the new shul was Yesoiday HaTorah. The Machzikei Hadass appellation came just a little bit later, Elozor tells us. “There was a warm and well-liked Belzer chassid called Reb Wolf Dresdner, a choshuve Yid who was also a talented baal tefillah, who didn’t originally join the group. When they asked him to be part of their minyan, Reb Wolf agreed on condition that the shul would perpetuate three Belzer minhagim: that they would say Hallel after Maariv on Seder night, they would say all the piyutim in Kedushah of Yamim Noraim, and they would not say piyutim on the first day of Shavuos. Because of Reb Wolf, the shul was renamed Machzikei Hadass, a name associated with Belz chassidus.”

In the 1930s, when the shul advertised for a rabbi, a Rabbi Dovid Feldman from Leipzig, who was intensely interested in leaving Germany, applied for the job. By 1934, this outstanding talmid chacham, author of the Ir Dovid (Metzudas Dovid) Haga’os (commentary and glosses) on Kitzur Shulchan Aruch, also referred to as “Feldman’s Kitzur Shulchan Aruch,” was their rav, and the infant kehillah had begun to gain standing. They established a full infrastructure, from a mikveh to a chevra kaddisha to certified chalav Yisrael, and a separate section of the cemetery. Slowly, one step at a time, their determination bore fruit, but every single step was a struggle.

When the Machzikei Hadass group wanted to build their own mikveh, for example, the local council refused planning permission. Even the gas company refused to connect their structure to the gas grid, which meant that the mikveh needed to be heated by burning coal, a messy, labor-intensive endeavor.

Shechitah was centrally controlled from London, and the board didn’t want to give up their monopoly. They fought the Machzikei Hadass people every step of the way to independence. But after a sustained battle, the Machzikei Hadass group got their way, first attaining a license for their own shechitah, and years later setting up a butcher shop that only sold Machzikei Hadass meat.

Reb Akiva remembers standing on the street outside the first Machzikei Hadass butcher shop as a little boy, handing out pamphlets. “It was an exciting moment. We wanted people to come and use our butcher.” Today, there are three MH-licensed butchers in the community.

Rav Feldman was a strong and respected leader. He innovated a printed calendar for the community, the first luach for Jewish Manchester, with all the local halachically pertinent times. The constitution of the shul assumed that the members were all shomer Shabbos, the married ladies covered their hair, and kashrus was kept. “That means that even on holiday [vacation] you took your own food with you. Because sadly there were a lot of people at that time who kept kashrus at home, but relaxed it when they were traveling.”

There were no internal battles over these standards, because, Reb Akiva Reich says, “The people who were there wanted that kind of thing. But very, very few women in England wore sheitels at that time. When the Yekkehs came over, escaping Germany, that got a boost, because the Yekkishe ladies covered their hair.”

In fact, hair covering was such a challenge and an issue at that time, that when Rav Dovid Schneebalg, the next rav of the community, arrived in 1947, the brothers recall that he emphasized this mitzvah in every derashah he gave.

Fascinatingly, when Rav Schneebalg, who was a Vizhnitzer chassid, arrived in town, one of the conditions in his contract was that he was not allowed to wear his shtreimel outdoors on the city streets. The community felt it was best to keep a low profile and avoid such obviously Jewish clothing, so as not to stir up extra anti-Semitic attention or tension regarding Palestine.

Surprisingly, perhaps for a breakaway from the Anglo establishment, the Machzikei Hadass group actually received support from Chief Rabbi Israel Brodie. Although his office was at the heart of the Anglo-Jewish establishment, he sympathized with them. The venerated Dayan Yechezkel Abramsky, who presided over the London Beis Din at the time, helped them, too.

Naturally, the presence of the MH kehillah had an influence on promoting Yiddishkeit in the city in general. By the 1940s, the Manchester Shechitah Board had begun to seek improvements to its own standard of shechitah, and of course, in 1950, with the arrival of the towering talmid chacham, the “posek’s posek,” Rav Yitzchak Yaakov Weiss, the Minchas Yitzchak, who took on the position of av beis din, its standing was much enhanced.

The rabbanim were recognizable as representatives of true Yiddishkeit. “Not long after World War II, when there were still Jewish manufacturers in town, there was one well-known family who kept their business open late on Fridays. One Friday afternoon, Rav Feldman and Rav Schneebalg walked down to the Strangeways area together. People saw them coming, and the owners came out, ‘We’re closing, we’re closing!’ and that was that.”

Under the magnetic chassidish leadership of Rav Dovid Schneebalg, and then his son, Rav Menachem Mendel, the kehillah would thrive and expand exponentially, and spawn many offshoot shuls and shtiblach, too.

Deep Roots

Walking through Manchester today, you’ll see cheder boys scooting through the streets and girls in pleated skirts meeting friends on the corners, between 8:15 a.m. and 9 a.m. Here and there, there’s a minibus offering school transportation service, but overall, frum Mancunians either walk or bike to their schools or fill the family car in a “rota,” the British term for carpool. It’s a young community, and a handful of new frum schools have opened in the last ten years alone, trying to ease the pressure on school placements.

But back when the Reichs were growing up, and until after World War II, children of the frum families had to mix with the non-Jews as a matter of course.

“There was a Jews’ school on Torah Street in Cheetham Hill,” the brothers recall, “but it was run by Lithuanian maskilim. Our circles preferred to send the children to non-Jewish schools and then to cheder after school. We went to Grecian Street school. The Rosh Yeshivah (Rav Yehuda Zev Segal ztz”l) went to the Jews’ school, though. His father didn’t worry about the maskilim.”

In the 1940s, Reb Moshe Grosskopf, Reb Pinchos Harris, and Reb Hershel Reich opened the Jewish Day School, the first to offer a truly Orthodox chinuch for both boys and girls. It was named Yesoiday HaTorah, taking the title they had originally conceived of for their shul and kehillah. In the 1950s it was followed by a second institution when Rabbi Berel Waldman and Rabbi Shmuel Krausz, a chassidish refugee, established the town’s pioneering chassidish cheder, Chinuch Neorim, where the first chassidish shtibel was opened. And the Reich brothers look back at 1956, when the Hungarian Revolution brought another wave of staunchly frum refugees to town, as another turning point that boosted the Machzikei Hadass kehillah and all its institutions.

Every community enterprise needs financial backers. In the case of Machzikei Hadass, there were no big gvirim to put down a few hundred thousand pounds each to cover expenses for the shul, the mikveh, and the rav’s annual salary. Instead, the Jewish drapers and textile dealers, who had generally been moderately successful and achieved balabatish status, all pulled together to build their families’ future.

“Membership of the kehillah cost sixpence [46 US cents] a week, at a time when wages were around £1 [$1.36] a week,” Mr. Elozor Reich says.

At a crucial moment, a nice-sized property on Legh Street came onto the market, presenting the community with the opportunity to buy a property to house a shul of their own. It had been the Manchester headquarters of Mosley’s Blackshirts, the British Union of Fascists, but by the late 1930s, the fascist group was going bankrupt.

Avrohom Yaakov Pfeffer, a Poilishe Yid who was a furniture importer, was the one who jumped for it. (“He was a Poilisher, not a Galicianer. It was a different style, they were more self-confident,” Elozor Reich says). In a daring move, Mr Pfeffer’s lawyer put in a bid for the property. By the time the owners, sworn Nazi sympathizers and anti-Semites, realized that the client was a Jew, it was too late.

It took two or three years for the money to be collected and the shul to be built, with families Rechnitzer, Reich, Dresner, and others playing a major role. Although the MH building was central for the kehillah’s members in the 1940s and 50s, as the Lower Broughton and Bury New Road areas declined in the 1970s and 80s, it marked the edge of the Jewish community, and few dared set foot beyond it into what had become rough streets. In the past two decades, though, as the community has grown, those areas are once again full of Yidden, this time with black hats and peyos, sheitels and headscarves.

Today, the Machzikei Hadass site is buzzing until late in the evening, with young boys on their scooters mingling with businessmen coming in for Maariv or sitting down to learn with chavrusas. In the early days, the shul was simply closed after the evening minyan.

“In the winter, the shul was locked after Maariv at half past five or half past six. That was it, besides twice a week, when Rav Gedalia Rabinowitz gave an evening Gemara shiur.”

This local legend, who was a textile merchant as well as a talmid chacham, had corresponded with the Steipler Gaon.

“When I went to learn in yeshivah in Eretz Yisrael in 1953, I took a copy of Reb Gedalia’s sefer on Kodshim to the Steipler, and the Steipler mentions that in his letters,” says Elozor Reich, whose encounters with gedolim and experiences in the nascent yeshivah world are recorded in his book A Treasure of Letters.

The story of these trailblazers is the story of the few who broke ground for the many. Until today, Manchester is a magnet for young frum families and boasts dozens of kollelim. Belz, Satmar, Vizhnitz, and Skver all have shtiblach and schools in the city and dozens of other chassidishe and yeshivish shuls and subcommunities feel welcome in the once-industrial environs. Reb Akiva Reich is happy to have passed the baton on to a younger committee who will take the kehillah forward.

One hundred years ago, a group of men with foresight and principles laid the foundations not just for their own shul and community, but for all those who followed.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1079)