Brooklyn Lodge
12 Albion Road
Birthplace of Cliftonville's Jewish life, later scarred by wartime attack.
Researched and Written by Katie Blythe
The Italian Tailor from London
​
The Bonny family’s story begins in 19th-century​ Italy. Sacerdote Bonajuto, born in 1838 to Solomon and Serena Bonajuto, came from a Sephardi Jewish family that moved between Mediterranean ports and London’s East End. The name “Sacerdote”, meaning priest, reflected their status as Cohanim, descendants of the Temple priests of Jerusalem. When he settled in England, he anglicised his name to Sacerdote ‘Sam’ Bonny, blending devotion with adaptation.
​
In 1864, he married Clara Sarah Braham, the eldest daughter of Alfred Braham of Toronto, at a ceremony conducted by ministers of Bevis Marks Synagogue. Their reception at Brooklyn Lodge, Cliftonville, marked the family’s first connection to the house that would later define them.
In London, Sacerdote Bonny worked as a tailor and businessman, living for many years at 23 City Road, Finsbury. A long-standing Yahid of Bevis Marks, he was honoured as Hatan Torah in 1879 and 1892, known for combining worship with philanthropy, and for helping to preserve the historic synagogue from demolition.
​
He and Clara Bonny raised nine children, balancing Jewish tradition with Victorian respectability. By the 1890s, the family, like many of their class, sought the sea air of Cliftonville, settling permanently at Brooklyn Lodge, 12 Albion Road, a bright villa with a garden and sea view that became a centre of hospitality, prayer, and conversation, and the birthplace of Jewish life in Margate.
26 Mar 1914 Bonny and Hann: Wedding invitation
Services by the Sea
By the late 19th century, Margate had become a fashionable resort for London’s Jewish visitors seeking sea air, kosher food, and Shabbat rest. Boarding houses thrived, yet there was still no synagogue.
​
Around the turn of the century, the Jewish Chronicle repeatedly condemned this neglect, noting that English resorts “teemed with Jews” but offered “no provision for public worship”, lamenting the community’s lack of initiative.
​
One man rose to act. Writing from Brooklyn Lodge, Sacerdote Bonny declared his astonishment that Cliftonville had “not even a room for attending Divine Service” and offered his dining room and conservatory free of charge.
​
His offer sparked immediate organisation. By early 1902, a committee had formed under his presidency, and by July, services began at Rostellan, Approach Road, led by Rev. Philip Wolfers and intermittently at Brooklyn Lodge. Sacred items were lent by Sir Joseph Sebag-Montefiore of Ramsgate, linking Margate to its older neighbour.
​
From Bonny’s hospitality emerged the town’s first Jewish services, the first light of a congregation that would later maintain its Ner Tamid in synagogue buildings on Edgar Road, and later Godwin Road.
Community and Contention
The success of the 1902 services made Sacerdote Bonny Margate’s de facto Jewish leader. His letters appeared regularly in the Jewish Chronicle, offering both advocacy and admonition. In 1903, he protested against Ramsgate’s “one-penny fine” on kosher meat, calling it unfair to Margate’s residents. “Several Jewish families,” he warned, “purchase trifah meat rather than be imposed upon.”
​
By 1905, Bonny was deeply embedded in Cliftonville life, letting properties and supporting local causes. At Brooklyn Lodge, the Bonny household embodied prosperity and piety, though tragedy shadowed them. Two sons, Arthur and Ernest, suffered from severe mental illness and were confined to Colney Hatch Asylum, where they both died before the war. Publicly, the family remained pillars of respectability; privately, they bore their losses with dignity, their faith unshaken.
c. 1910 Back garden of Brooklyn Lodge
30 Aug 1914 Bonny, Sacerdote and Clara: Golden wedding invitation
From Family Home to Makeshift Synagogue
Into the new century, Brooklyn Lodge had become more than a home. Its drawing rooms hosted Shabbat prayers and festivals, turning the Bonny household into a makeshift synagogue.
​
In 1913, a formal Margate Hebrew Congregation was established under Hermann Salomon Meyer, a wealthy stockbroker, with Sacerdote Bonny as Hon. Secretary, and Edward Abinger (barrister-at-law), Harry Shaw (fancy goods dealer), and Emanuel Ricardo (proprietor of the Savoy Hotel) on the committee. Rev. Charles Solomon Fogelnest served as minister, shochet, and shomer under licence from the London Beth Din.
​
Their appeal for funds noted that Margate was “a town where every other religion has its church or chapel,” yet Jewish children had no synagogue or instruction. Their goal was to secure premises to serve as a synagogue, school, and minister’s house. Donations flowed through the Jewish Chronicle, and the Bonnys’ own home remained the congregation’s beating heart until permanent premises could be found.
When War Reached Margate
By May 1914, the Jewish Chronicle reported that regular Shabbat services were being held at Brooklyn Lodge, led by Rev. Fogelnest. That Shavuot, Rabbi Dr Samuel Daiches preached moving, spontaneous sermons there and appealed for funds for a permanent synagogue.
​
In August 1914, Sacerdote and Clara Bonny celebrated their golden wedding anniversary at the same house that had hosted their wedding reception fifty years earlier. Days later, war was declared. Margate’s streets grew quiet, but Shabbat prayers at Brooklyn Lodge continued. The following July 1915, the Bonnys hosted a military service for Jewish soldiers, officiated by Rev. Herman Shandel and Rev. Fogelnest. When the congregation overflowed the rooms, the service moved into the garden, where Clara Bonny and her daughters served refreshments to the troops.
​
Two months later, the war reached their home. On 13th September 1915, a German seaplane dropped ten bombs over Cliftonville. The last fell outside Brooklyn Lodge. Kate Cleopatra Bonny, Sacerdote and Clara Bonny’s 37-year-old daughter, was standing at the gate awaiting her parents’ return from London before Yom Kippur.
c.1906–1909 Bonny family
Deeply mourned by her sorrowing parents, sisters and brothers. gone from our home but not from our hearts
Born in 1878 in Stoke Newington, Kate was bright, artistic, and well-educated, an accomplished music scholar at Lynton House School, and later worked as a dress designer. That afternoon, she stepped outside Brooklyn Lodge to look for her parents’ delayed train, shielding her eyes against the sunlight. The bomb exploded on the road, killing a horse and hurling shrapnel in all directions. A fragment struck Kate in the chest. She was carried inside and taken to Margate Cottage Hospital, where she died four days later, on 17th September 1915, the eve of Yom Kippur.
​
Her death, suppressed by wartime censorship, was briefly noted in The Jewish Chronicle:
“Deeply mourned by her sorrowing parents, sisters and brothers. Gone from our home but not from our hearts.”
​
The Thanet Advertiser later described how her parents returned to find a crowd gathered outside their damaged home. She was buried at Ramsgate Jewish Cemetery, her tombstone inscribed simply: “Killed by a German Bomb.”
​
Kate Cleopatra Bonny’s name now appears on the Bevis Marks Synagogue War Memorial, linking the peaceful house in Cliftonville to the London congregation where her father had once been Hatan Torah. Her death, one of Britain’s earliest civilian casualties of aerial warfare, brought the violence of modern war to the doorstep of a Jewish family whose home had stood for faith, music, and hospitality.
The Final Seasons at Brooklyn Lodge
Even after the tragedy, Sacerdote continued his work. In August 1915, plans were already in motion to consecrate the new Edgar Road Synagogue, fulfilling the vision first realised in his own home. Rev. Fogelnest remained minister, serving both townspeople and Jewish servicemen.
​
Sacerdote’s health declined, but his reputation as a man of learning and faith endured. He died in 1917, aged 79, and was buried in London with the dignity due to a Cohen.
​
Clara Bonny remained at Brooklyn Lodge, the house that had witnessed both the birth of Margate’s Jewish life and the death of her daughter. She lived there until she died in 1930, aged 89. Her brief obituary in the Jewish Chronicle read simply:
“On the 1st of May, at Brooklyn Lodge, Albion Road, Cliftonville, Clara S. Bonny, widow of the late Sacerdote Bonny.”​
Bevis Marks Yehidim 1914 1918
Running to the door to glimpse her parents' train... a bright and pretty figure. The next, the iron bird of death had claimed her
In the years after the war, local papers remembered the 1915 air raid as one of Thanet’s darkest days. The Thanet Advertiser recalled Kate Bonny “running to the door to glimpse her parents’ train… a bright and pretty figure. The next, the iron bird of death had claimed her.”
​
Yet, as in so many Jewish stories, tragedy led to later endurance. The Edgar Road Synagogue grew, Jewish families returned to holiday in Margate, and Brooklyn Lodge remained both the cradle and the memorial of Jewish life on the Kentish coast.
​
The story of the Bonny family is inseparable from that of Jewish Margate. Through their faith, perseverance, and hospitality, Sacerdote and Clara Bonny transformed a private home into a house of prayer and laid the foundations of the Margate Hebrew Congregation.
​
Brooklyn Lodge, first a home, then a synagogue, later a reluctant memorial, represents a distinctly Anglo-Jewish story of domestic life sanctified by community and continuity. Beginning with an Italian Jewish immigrant tailor named Priest, it ends with the heartrending resilience of his family, spanning half a century in which their home staged the journey of a people, from exile to belonging, and from memory to history.
© Katie Blythe 2026
Primary Sources & Further Reading
British Jews in the First World War, Kate Cleopatra Bonny. Memorial ID BON0937.
​
Castle, Ian (n.d.), The First Zeppelin Raids: 13 September 1915.
​
Find a Grave, Kate Cleopatria Bonny (1883–1915). Ramsgate Jewish Cemetery, Ramsgate, Thanet District, Kent, England. Memorial ID 252280041. Maintained by Ramsgate Historical Society.
​
General Register Office (1864), England & Wales Civil Registration Marriage Index, 1837–1915. Marriage of Sacerdote Bonny and Clara Braham.
​
General Register Office (1837–1915), England & Wales Civil Registration Death Index. Entries for Ernest Bonny, Arthur Bonny, Kate Cleopatra Bonny, Sacerdote Bonny, and Clara Bonny.
​
Jewish Chronicle (1893–1930), Notices, correspondence, and reports relating to the Bonny family, Brooklyn Lodge, and the Margate Hebrew Congregation, including education notices (1893–1896); letters and reports on Sabbath services at the seaside and the formation of Jewish worship in Margate (1901–1902); community affairs and property advertisements (1903, 1905); death and marriage notices (1912, 1915, 1917, 1930); synagogue services, military services, and consecration of the Edgar Road synagogue (1914–1915).
​
Jewish World (1902), Jewish services at Rostellan College, Cliftonville. Jewish World, 27 June.
​
London Metropolitan Archives (1892–1894), Arthur Bonny, City Road Workhouse admission and discharge registers. Refs: HOBG/542/18; HOBG/541/061.
​
London Metropolitan Archives (1908), Ernest Bonny, Poor Law Removal and Settlement records. Refs: SHBG/128/033; SHBG/134/28.
​
Spanish and Portuguese Jews’ Congregation, Bevis Marks (1915), War Memorial for Yehudim fallen during the First World War. Bevis Marks Synagogue, London.
​
Thanet Advertiser (1915–1919), Reports and retrospective accounts relating to the Cliftonville air raid of 13 September 1915 and its impact, including notices concerning the death of Kate Cleopatra Bonny (reported as “Miss L. Bonny”) and later reflections on the raid as one of Thanet’s darkest days.
​
The National Archives (1908), Admission register entry for Ernest Bonny. Lunacy Patients Admission Registers, 1846–1921. Kew, Surrey. MH 94/43.
​
UK Census Records (1871; 1881), 23 City Road, St Paul’s, Finsbury. Census returns.
​
University College London, Special Collections (1914), Moses Gaster Special Collection, including Bonny and Hann: Wedding invitation (GASTER/1/A/2/68, Item 2619, 26 March 1914) and Bonny, Sacerdote and Clara: Golden wedding invitation (GASTER/1/A/1/293, 30 August 1914).