The Manchester Jewish Museum is a Jewish history museum, located on 190 Cheetham Hill Road in Manchester, England, in the United Kingdom. The museum occupies the site of a former OrthodoxJewishsynagogue, the place of worship for the Congregation of Spanish & Portuguese Jews, called the Spanish & Portuguese Synagogue, also the Sha'are Tephillah Synagogue. The congregation worships in the Sephardicrite from premises located at 18 Moor Lane, Kersal, Salford.[2]
The museum reopened on 2 July 2021 following a ££6 million redevelopment and extension. The museum includes a new gallery, vegetarian café, shop and learning studio and kitchen, as well as complete restoration of the former Spanish and Portuguese synagogue.[4]
Following completion of the renovation works, Manchester Jewish Museum won two awards at the annual British Construction Industry Awards (Cultural and Leisure Project of the Year and Best Small Project of the Year) alongside architects Citizens Design Bureau and structural engineers Buro Happold.[5]
The museum holds over 31,000 items in its collection, documenting the story of Jewish migration and settlement in Manchester. It includes over 530 oral history testimonies, over 20,000 photographs, 138 recorded interviews with Holocaust survivors and refugees and other objects, documents and ephemera.[6]
Moorish Revival building
The 1874 synagogue was completed in the Moorish Revival style, designed by Edward Salomons, a prominent Manchester architect. Although the synagogue was not the largest or most magnificent of the world's many Moorish Revival synagogues, which include the opulent Princes Road Synagogue in Liverpool, it was considered to be a "jewel".[7] The style, a homage to the architecture of Moorish Spain, perhaps seemed particularly fitting for the home of a Sephardic congregation. The two tiers of horseshoe windows on the façade were emblematic of the style, and the recessed doorway and arcade of five windows on the floor above the entrance are particularly decorative. Inside, a horseshoe arch frames the heichal and polychrome columns support the galleries. The mashrabiyya latticework on the front doors is particularly fine.[7][8]
^ ab"Spanish & Portuguese Synagogue". Jewish Communities and Records - UK. JewishGen and the Jewish Genealogical Society of Great Britain. 2 July 2017. Retrieved 12 May 2024.
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