Jewish Heritage UK is dedicated to caring for the historic synagogues and cemeteries of Britain’s Jewish community.
The Ark at Britain's oldest synagogue, Bevis Marks in the City of London, opened in 1701.
After over 350 years of secure settlement unrivalled anywhere in Europe, Britain’s Jewish community, the oldest non-Christian faith group in the country, proudly possesses a unique architectural heritage that is now acknowledged as part of the nation’s heritage.
Jewish Heritage’s origins go back 25 years, to a campaign in 1987-8 to save the fine Victorian East London Synagogue at Stepney Green. That campaign spawned in 1991 the establishment of a Working Party on Jewish Monuments in the UK & Ireland.
The Survey of the Jewish Built Heritage in the UK & Ireland supported, by amongst others, the Heritage Lottery Fund, English Heritage and the RIBA was launched in 1996. The Survey resulted, ten years later, in the publication of the first ever guidebook to Jewish Heritage in England by English Heritage in 2006 and a major architectural study of The Synagogues of Britain and Ireland by Yale University Press in 2011, both by Dr Sharman Kadish. The guidebook proved so popular that it sold out and a second edition, retitled Jewish Heritage in Britain and Ireland, came out in summer 2015 under the imprint of Historic England.
Dr Kadish founded Jewish Heritage in 2004 and it attained UK Registered Charity status (Registered Charity No. 1118174) in 2007 under the governance of a Board of Trustees.