Margate Hebrew Congregation Synagogue
Albion Road / Godwin Road
A century of Jewish worship, now transformed into a cultural space open to all.
Researched and Written by Katie Blythe
A Brief History of Jewish Life and Worship in Cliftonville, 1870 to the Present​
For over 150 years, Cliftonville has been home to a distinctive Jewish community. Its history mirrors the changing fortunes of the English seaside, from Victorian holiday culture through wartime disruption and postwar decline, to recent renewal through cultural preservation. From improvised prayer spaces and boarding-house services to a purpose-built synagogue, and later its transformation into ARK, Jewish life in Cliftonville has been shaped by resilience, generosity, and sustained communal effort.
1939 wedding of Eugen Cohn
In 1873, the Lipman family held the first known Jewish services in Cliftonville, converting Adelaide House boarding house into a "commodious SHOOL" for the High Holy Days.
Emanuel Isaac Samuels announces the 1888 establishment of the Margate Hebrew Congregation in the Jewish Chronicle.
An advert in the 1904 Jewish Chronicle, inviting the reader to the consecration of Sefer Torah at the Margate Jewish College.
Beginnings: Worship by the Sea​
By the late nineteenth century, Cliftonville had become a favoured seaside resort for London’s Jewish middle and upper classes, drawn by sea air, respectability, and a growing network of Jewish boarding houses along the seafront. Over time, more than 200 such establishments were recorded in the area, including the Northumberland, Majestic, Carmel, Highcliffe Hall, Windsor Hall, and Severn House hotels.
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Despite this presence, Jewish worship lagged. Many visitors returned to London for Shabbat and festivals or travelled to Ramsgate. The earliest known Jewish service in Cliftonville took place in 1873, when Jonas and Hannah Lipman of Adelaide House, Dalby Terrace, hired a Hebrew reader for the High Holy Days. It was an isolated initiative rather than the foundation of a congregation.
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Between 1888 and 1894, services were held at Freemasons’ Hall in the High Street under Emanuel Isaac Samuels. Later efforts followed at Forrester’s Hall in Union Crescent and at the Margate Jewish College on Approach Road, organised by the Reverend Philip Wolfers. Each depended on seasonal attendance and private initiative and had faded by 1906.
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Boarding Houses, Domestic Worship, and the Push for Permanence​
In 1904, Amelia Collier arrived in Cliftonville with her three young children and opened a kosher boarding house on Athelstan Road, before moving to Dalby Square, later developed into the Severn House Hotel. At that time, Ramsgate remained the nearest place of Jewish worship, a considerable journey before mass public transport. According to family testimony later recorded by her granddaughter, Norma Inch, Collier began holding Shabbat services in her hotel for residents and visitors.
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Severn House Hotel in a 1903 advert, shortly before Amelia Collier opened her kosher hotel there.
These informal gatherings proved popular but also controversial. Other Jewish boarding-house keepers objected, accusing Collier of using religious services to attract guests. Rather than discouraging her, the dispute sharpened her conviction that Margate required a synagogue independent of any single household or business
A 1923 Jewish Chronicle advert for a fancy dress ball at the Palais de Danse, Hammersmith, in aid of the Margate synagogue building fund.
Renewed momentum followed in 1910, when the Bonny family opened their home, Brooklyn Lodge on Albion Road, as a small synagogue. In 1913, the Margate Hebrew Congregation was formally established, with Hermann Saloman Meyer as President and Sacerdote Bonny as Honorary Secretary. Amelia Collier was named among the committee members appealing for funds, marking her transition from domestic host to institutional organiser.
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In 1915, the congregation moved to Grasmere Lodge on Edgar Road, converted into a synagogue with accommodation for its first full-time minister, the Reverend Solomon Fogelnest. Consecrated that August, it represented a decisive step towards permanence. Wartime conditions soon placed the congregation under severe financial strain, but the synagogue remained open, serving local families as well as Jewish soldiers stationed nearby or recovering in East Kent hospitals.
From Edgar Road to Godwin Road​
By the early 1920s, plans were already underway for a larger, purpose-built synagogue. Fundraising gathered pace in the mid-1920s, driven by committee leadership and grassroots effort. Amelia Collier played a central role, mobilising family networks, hotel guests, and fellow business owners. Donations from her extended family included sanctuary doors, windows, and fittings, embedding personal relationships into the fabric of the future building.
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A plot was purchased at the corner of Albion Road and Godwin Road, and the foundation stone was laid on 13th June 1928. While construction was underway, services were held at Ascot House, an adjacent property already familiar as a community space. A nearby house on Godwin Road was also acquired for the minister and his family, reinforcing the synagogue’s role as a communal centre.
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The synagogue was designed by Cecil Jacob Eprile with Margate architects Reeve and Reeve and built by E. Peall and Co. Constructed in Kentish sand-faced brick with oak-framed leaded windows and a copper-domed apse housing the Ark Kodesh, it cost between £5,000 and £6,000 (approximately £280,000 to £330,000 in 2026). It seated 300 worshippers beneath a coffered plaster ceiling, with classrooms and meeting rooms below.
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The Building Committee was chaired by Barnett “Barney” Hann, with Hyman “Hymie” Black as Vice-Chairman and Maurice “Morrie” Black as Honorary Treasurer. Other members included Joseph Sokel, Harry Freeder, and Leon Gradel. Alongside this formal structure, the Ladies’ Guild, led by Amelia Collier, proved critical in the final stages of fundraising. Shortly before the dedication, she presented substantial sums raised through the Guild and through her own collections, work for which she received a formal vote of thanks.
Dedication and Early Years​
The synagogue was dedicated on Sunday, 19th May 1929, a day described by the East Kent Times and Mail as a milestone in the history of the Margate Hebrew Congregation. The ceremony was led by the Chief Rabbi, Dr Joseph Herman Hertz, assisted by the Reverend Joseph Herman, and attended by civic dignitaries, including the Mayor of Margate, Alderman Edward Coleman.
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A procession carried the Torah Scrolls from Ascot House to the new synagogue. At the entrance, the Chief Rabbi proclaimed a verse from Isaiah before the doors were opened with a golden key by Joseph Prag of the Board of Deputies. Inside, the congregation sang verses celebrating the beauty of the house of Israel.
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Chief Rabbi Joseph Hertz in the late 1920s, at the time of the Margate synagogue's consecration.
Family memory preserves a vivid account from the day of the consecration. According to Norma Inch, her grandmother, Amelia Collier, then President of the Ladies’ Guild, had arranged refreshments for visitors travelling from London and returning the same day, laying out tables with cups and saucers at the back of the synagogue. Family tradition holds that when Chief Rabbi Hertz arrived, he objected, declaring that this was a synagogue and not “a Lyon’s tea shop,” and demanded the tables be removed. Collier, described as strong-minded and unafraid of authority, is said to have replied that people had travelled 75 miles for the ceremony and would not be sent home without a cup of tea, adding that if he objected, “he could turn around and go home and we would consecrate the synagogue ourselves.” A compromise was reportedly reached, allowing the service to proceed once the cups and saucers were covered with white cloths. While it is impossible to vouch for the precise accuracy of the exchange, the story aligns closely with Collier’s recorded reputation as a formidable organiser who united religious observance with practical hospitality.​
In his sermon, the Chief Rabbi described the occasion as a milestone in the community’s spiritual life. Soon afterwards, a Kashrut Committee was established under Joseph Sokel to regulate Jewish boarding houses and hotels, with fifteen registered by July 1929. Memorial panels, embroidered hangings, and stained glass windows followed.
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The year concluded with the synagogue’s first wedding, held on Christmas Day 1929, between Daphne Edgard and Samuel Green. Conducted by the Reverend Isaac Waller, it was followed by a large reception attended by many of Margate’s leading Jewish families. In a later coincidence emblematic of Cliftonville’s tight-knit Jewish world, the couple’s daughter would go on to marry Amelia Collier’s grandson.
The Margate Hebrew Congregation, shortly after its opening in 1929.
Leadership, Service, and Continuity​
The Margate Hebrew Congregation was sustained not only by its ministers but by a dense web of lay leadership and affiliated organisations that structured religious, social, and cultural life. Early presidents included Sacerdote Bonny, Hermann Saloman Meyer, Jonah Rosenthall, Harry Shaw, and Alexander Hirschfeld, followed by Arthur Beaconsfield Leigh, Hyman Black, Adolph Gradel, Benjamin Gradus, Denis Coberman, and Dr Montague Curwen. Their work extended beyond synagogue governance into welfare, education, and community organisation.
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Ministerial leadership provided continuity through change. Reverend Solomon Fogelnest oversaw the Edgar Road synagogue, followed by Reverend Alexander Schloss and Reverend Joseph Herman, under whose leadership the Godwin Road building was completed. In the 1930s, Reverend Moses Cohen combined congregational duties with humanitarian work, assisting refugee children from Spain and Nazi Europe and supporting the Richborough Refugee Camp near Sandwich.
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The years following the Second World War marked a decisive transition. As the Jewish population of Margate grew from around 150 in 1945 to approximately 300 by 1949, Emmanuel Morris and Michael Isaacs guided the congregation through recovery and consolidation. At the same time, the geography of Jewish life in East Kent shifted. Where religious infrastructure had once centred on Ramsgate and the Montefiore Synagogue, postwar growth increasingly focused on Cliftonville, reflecting both a rising resident population and the return of Jewish holidaymakers who now made the area their regular destination.​​
This renewed confidence unfolded against a backdrop of heightened antisemitism. In May 1947, the Margate synagogue was the target of what police investigated as a deliberate act of arson. Paraffin-soaked firelighters were found burning on a lavatory windowsill, and serious damage was avoided only because fourteen-year-old Ronald Hoser, son of former councillor Jack Hoser, noticed smoke from a rear window and alerted the caretaker in an adjoining flat. The incident followed an anonymous warning shortly after Christmas that the synagogue would be destroyed and coincided with anti-Jewish slogans being pasted on its doors. Around the same period, a window was smashed at the Montefiore Synagogue in Ramsgate, reinforcing fears of coordinated intimidation. These events formed part of a wider postwar surge in antisemitic activity in England, linked to international tensions surrounding the British Mandate of Palestine and exploited by far-right groups. In response, the Margate community requested police protection, organised a nightly guard, and formally established the Margate and District Jewish Defence Committee, led by Marks Banus. Although deeply unsettling, these incidents were rare and did not stem the postwar growth or the congregation’s expanding sense of permanence and confidence in Cliftonville.
Practical questions of religious provision followed. In the 1940s and 1950s, discussions were held regarding the need for a local casting pen for shechita. The Margate Hebrew Congregation indicated its willingness to install one and sought governmental assistance in securing a suitable site, preferably in Margate itself. This marked a clear departure from earlier arrangements, when shechita for the area had been carried out in Ramsgate, and signalled growing independence. These developments laid the groundwork for the long ministry of the Reverend Bernard Landau, from 1951 to 1984, which came to define synagogue life for a generation.
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Alongside formal leadership, a wide range of social and cultural organisations flourished. In 1930, the Reverend Isaac Waller served as President of the Margate Hebrew Social and Literary Society. In 1933, Isaac Arone inaugurated the Thanet (Montefiore) B’nai B’rith Lodge, which remained active into the 1990s. The postwar years saw the establishment of a Jewish Social Club in 1950, followed by a Friendship Club and Jewish Knitting Circle run by Bessie Taylor in 1960, and a Jewish Youth Club founded in 1962 that lasted for over a decade. These groups provided spaces for sociability, education, and mutual support beyond formal worship.
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Women’s organisations were central to this continuity. From the Margate Union of Jewish Women, founded in 1897 under Louisa Wolfers, through the Jewish Ladies’ Guild established in 1921 by Mrs Harry Shaw and active until the late 1980s, to the League of Jewish Women Thanet group formed in 1978, women sustained fundraising, welfare, and social cohesion across generations. Amelia Collier exemplified this tradition. Active in synagogue administration into the postwar period and listed as Honorary Treasurer in 1950, she also helped secure a dedicated Jewish section within the Margate Cemetery, where she is buried alongside family members. From the first Shabbat services held in her hotel to the establishment of a permanent synagogue and burial ground, her influence illustrates how Jewish life in Cliftonville was built through sustained communal labour as much as through formal authority.
The Ministry of Reverend Bernard Landau, 1951 to 1984
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When Reverend Bernard Landau, born in 1917 in Czechoslovakia, arrived in Margate, he inherited a synagogue shaped by postwar uncertainty but sustained by a core of local families. Having previously served as minister in Stoke-on-Trent and then in Llandudno from 1947, he came to Cliftonville with a background that combined Central European origins with many formative years in Wales. His strong Welsh accent, remembered vividly by Arnold Schwartzman, would become inseparable from the sound of the synagogue itself. Appointed minister of the Margate Hebrew Congregation in 1951, he would serve for 33 years until he died in 1984, becoming the defining presence of Jewish religious life in Cliftonville.
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Landau was not experienced as a distant rabbinical authority but as a familiar, everyday presence. As Perrina Hoser recalled, “he wasn’t a Rabbi; he was a Reverend… just like everyone’s friend.” He lived close to congregants and moved easily between synagogue and domestic life. For many families, he was simply “Landau”: the man who conducted services week after week, officiated at weddings and funerals, and prepared boys for their Bar Mitzvahs. Arnold Schwartzman remembered learning his portion “parrot fashion,” testing Landau’s patience, but ultimately being guided through by his persistence.
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His authority in the synagogue was real and unmistakable. In educational settings, particularly Cheder, expectations were strict. Ernestine Ruback recalled being frightened of him as a child, remembering the formality of his gown and the seriousness with which discipline was enforced. Yet this strictness coexisted with a broad tolerance. As Perrina Hoser observed, Landau understood that “we were all human beings,” and that keeping people within the community mattered more than rigid observance.
Reverend Bernard Landau stands at the doorway into the synagogue, with his wife Ilse and son Robert, in 1959.
This balance shaped synagogue life. Landau could be sharp when order was required; moments recalled by Tania Hoser, when the women’s gallery grew too lively and were “told once in a while to shut up.” Such interventions are remembered with affection rather than resentment, part of a shared understanding that the synagogue was both a place of prayer and a social space. What mattered was that it remained full, active, and socially alive.
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Beyond formal worship, Landau’s presence was notably informal. Jean Gaffin remembered him as “a proper human being and not just a religious figure,” someone who came for meals or tea, played cards with families, and moved easily between sacred and everyday worlds. This permeability between synagogue and home recurs throughout the oral histories and helps explain why his long tenure is remembered as a period of cohesion.​
In 1952, Landau married Ilse Baumann at the Margate Synagogue. Ilse, originally from Germany, was a survivor of the extermination camps. Together, they had three children: Robert, Martin, and Felicity. Ilse Landau was also a visible presence in the wider community. Remembered with particular warmth, she worked as a local schoolteacher and was widely praised for her kindness, reinforcing the sense that the Landau household was woven into Cliftonville life.
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By the time Reverend Landau died in 1984, many interviewees described a perceptible shift. Attendance declined, warmth ebbed, and the sense of a community held together through personal familiarity became harder to sustain. In retrospect, his ministry is remembered not simply as long but as formative: a period in which authority and tolerance, discipline and warmth, combined to create a synagogue that felt serious, humane, and deeply lived-in; a place where, for decades, the sound of prayer was inseparable from Landau’s own distinctive Welsh-inflected voice.
The Synagogue as Place: Space, Sound, and Everyday Life
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At its height, the Margate synagogue was not a marginal institution but a large, confident communal space. Perrina Hoser remembers it as “a big synagogue” serving “a big community,” especially during the High Holy Days, when it was “absolutely full, the whole length.” On Yom Kippur, she recalls the pause of Yizkor, when children were ushered outside to wait, talking and milling about for what felt like “a good hour,” marking time at the edges of adult solemnity.
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The synagogue followed an independent Orthodox pattern. Services were conducted entirely in Hebrew, which Perrina Hoser notes most congregants could read without necessarily understanding. Meaning travelled less through explanation than through rhythm and repetition. Participation required presence rather than fluency.​
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The building’s organisation reinforced this continuity. Seating was fixed and named. Ernestine Ruback remembers her mother and aunts in the Ladies’ Gallery, with the men seated below. On crowded days, visitors stood behind the rows or sat wherever chairs could be found, particularly in summer when families arrived from outside Margate. Socially, the building stretched even when it could not.
1939 ketubah of Eugen Cohn
Members of the Jewish community seated together, including Rosie and David Schwartzman
​The synagogue also shaped the surrounding streets. Perrina Hoser recalls that on Shabbat and festivals, no one parked directly outside, since driving was formally prohibited. Cars were left in neighbouring roads instead, creating the outward appearance of strict observance. In practice, many congregants had driven and walked the final stretch, a quiet choreography that allowed everyone to look as though they had arrived on foot. The empty road became a visible signal of holiness, even when observance was more elastic. This was not hypocrisy so much as communal shorthand, a shared understanding of how far one could bend without breaking.​
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This balance was one Reverend Bernard Landau managed instinctively. He knew where to press for seriousness and where to turn a blind eye. Congregants may not have eaten kosher at every meal or observed every law to the letter, but they were fiercely loyal to the synagogue and deeply invested in its survival. Landau understood that commitment mattered more than perfection. By insisting on participation rather than policing private behaviour, he kept people inside the communal frame.
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Gender separation was taken for granted rather than contested. Women and men occupied distinct spaces upstairs and downstairs, but as Perrina Hoser puts it, “everyone’s welcome.” Conversation flowed freely, sometimes too freely. Tania Hoser remembers the women chatting upstairs and being told, occasionally, to be quiet by Reverend Landau, while the men downstairs carried on. These moments are recalled with affection, part of the building’s lived etiquette rather than breaches of decorum.
Reverend Bernard Landau and the congregation in the basement of the Margate Hebrew Congregation synagogue.
Sound mattered as much as sight. Tania Hoser describes the synagogue as filled with Eastern European accents, reflecting the congregation’s migrant histories. Musical instruments and electronic amplification were forbidden on Shabbat and major festivals, so worship relied entirely on unaccompanied voices. In a building like the Margate synagogue, those voices had to carry on their own, filling the space with warmth and intimacy. Within this soundscape, Reverend Landau’s voice, marked by a strong Welsh inflexion layered over Central European origins, became inseparable from the experience of prayer.
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Children experienced the space differently. Ernestine Ruback remembers finding services boring as a child, unable to follow Hebrew and intimidated by the formality of Cheder classes, where Reverend Landau’s gown and authority could feel frightening. By contrast, Jean Gaffin recalls a synagogue alive with movement. On an ordinary Shabbat, children ran up and down the aisle, people talked, and the atmosphere was relaxed. It was not polished, but it was full.​
The Margate Cheder celebrates Purim by dressing up in costume in the 1970s.
Reverend Landau and congregants standing at the bimah reading from the Torah during a service.
Ritual moments anchored memory. Tania Hoser recalls the stairs, the Ark, and the ceremony of opening it and removing the scrolls. The stained glass was modest rather than spectacular, the proportions distinctive, the balcony memorable. Ernestine Ruback singles out the greenish copper dome at the front as an instantly recognisable feature.
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Social life extended beyond prayer. Kiddushes after services drew people downstairs, marking the moment when eating was once again permitted and synagogue time softened into social time. Tania Hoser remembers cakes, knishes, strudels, and baked cheesecakes, foods that felt different not simply because of taste but because they belonged only to this setting. Sharing them and lingering together turned the kiddush into a ritual in its own right. Arnold Schwartzman recalls his Bar Mitzvah there at thirteen, and photographs of his father preparing to read from the Torah alongside Reverend Landau, civic figures, and synagogue officers.​
What emerges is not a hushed sacred interior but a working synagogue: noisy, crowded, disciplined and permissive by turns, shaped by accents, habits, and long acquaintance. Its energy reflected real numbers. When Reverend Bernard Landau arrived, the Jewish population of Margate stood at around 300, rising to a peak of approximately 400 in 1973. The building absorbed that density, holding prayer, conversation, disagreement, and everyday sociability within its walls. Yet this vitality was not fixed. By 1989, numbers had fallen sharply to around 100. As Tania Hoser puts it simply, the building was the focal point: the place where Jewish life in Cliftonville gathered, unfolded, and made itself visible week after week, year after year. By the end of the decade, however, the synagogue had become too large for the community that now attended it, its scale outlasting the congregation it was built to serve.
Suspension, Survival, and the Question of the Building
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The death of Reverend Bernard Landau in 1984 marked a decisive turning point, exposing how much his presence had held the community together as minister, mediator, and emotional anchor. With his passing, long-contained pressures surfaced. Yet the synagogue’s decline cannot be explained by leadership change alone. It unfolded within wider economic, cultural, and demographic shifts reshaping both Margate and British Jewish life.
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From the late twentieth century, the seaside holiday itself was in retreat. Once central to British leisure, it came to be seen as unreliable and unfashionable, eclipsed by cheap air travel and guaranteed sunshine abroad. Jewish tourists followed this pattern, increasingly favouring destinations with established kosher infrastructure, particularly Israel. At the same time, religious observance was changing. Fewer English Jews observed kashrut strictly, with culinary preference often displacing dietary law. Together, these shifts eroded the economic base that had sustained Jewish life in Cliftonville, from boarding houses to seasonal work.
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As visitor numbers fell, opportunities narrowed. Younger generations moved away in search of work, education, and cultural life, accelerating the contraction of the resident community. The synagogue, once embedded in a dense network of families and livelihoods, now stood increasingly oversized in relation to those who remained.​
Internal tensions sharpened this contraction. After Landau’s death, the synagogue attracted growing numbers of Charedi visitors from outside the area. While this brought a different form of vitality, it unsettled long-standing congregants. The resident Jewish population, officially Orthodox but historically flexible in practice, felt increasingly alienated as services and communal life shifted to accommodate markedly different expectations of observance. What had once been a broad, negotiated Orthodoxy became harder to sustain.​
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These pressures culminated in 1984, when local families broke away to form the Thanet and District Reform Synagogue. Initially meeting in Lorna Taylor’s kosher boarding house in Cliftonville, the group soon secured a permanent home at 293A Margate Road, Ramsgate, in a former Methodist church. The congregation endures and, in contrast to the Margate synagogue, has continued to grow.
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What followed was not sudden collapse but gradual thinning: of attendance, of everyday sociability, of the informal ties that had once animated the building. The synagogue’s decline mirrored the wider ebb of Jewish Cliftonville, shaped by changing patterns of travel, work, observance, and belonging.​
By the early twenty-first century, decline was visible in practice as well as numbers. In 2017, the Margate Hebrew Congregation cancelled its Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services after failing to assemble a minyan. Where festival services had once drawn over one hundred worshippers, only eight regular members remained. The chairman, Geoffrey Gradus, attributed the contraction to long-term demographic change: younger Jews had moved away “because there is nothing here for them,” while those who remained were largely elderly, for whom travel had become increasingly difficult.
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Despite this, the congregation did not dissolve. Ownership proved decisive. The synagogue building remained in communal hands, allowing it to survive at a minimal level even as formal worship ceased. Membership fees covered basic running costs, and Gradus, whose family involvement stretched back more than half a century, committed himself publicly to keeping it going. His stance reflected an attachment not only to religious practice, but to continuity itself.
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The contrast with developments elsewhere in East Kent was stark. Just four miles away, the Thanet and District Reform Synagogue in Ramsgate continued to hold High Holy Day services, drawing thirty to forty worshippers from a wider catchment area including Canterbury. With its own rabbi, regular services, and a membership of around fifty to sixty, it demonstrated that Jewish communal life in Thanet had not disappeared, but reconfigured.​​
This contradiction came to a head in 2020, when the dwindling Orthodox congregation concluded it could no longer manage the building and put it up for sale. The prospect of demolition or conversion into flats crystallised anxieties about the loss of a visible Jewish presence in Cliftonville. A campaign was launched to raise approximately £300,000 to secure the building and preserve it as a communal venue for cultural use.
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The campaign was spearheaded by four local residents, all of Jewish heritage - klezmer cellist Francesca Ter-Berg, who described the synagogue as a “beautiful building” with the potential to celebrate Jewish heritage and cultural contributions, Margate-based artist Lucy Lyons , Kate Gillespie, and producer Jan Ryan. While the remaining Orthodox community no longer had the numbers for formal services, there was a strong desire to keep the building consecrated and available for informal worship. Preservation was explicitly linked to Margate’s expanding arts scene. In December 2020, shortly before the scheduled auction, an anonymous benefactor purchased the synagogue on behalf of the campaign group, removing it from sale. Coordinated through Cliftonville Cultural Space CIC, the rescue combined celebrity endorsement with extensive local support. More than three hundred donors contributed, and local businesses and residents mobilised to publicise the campaign. The building was now secured for a new phase of use.​
What followed was neither revival nor disappearance, but transformation. Plans were set in motion to convert the synagogue into a cultural hub, preserving its Jewish history while opening the building to wider cultural use. Built in the 1920s to serve Jewish holidaymakers, the synagogue was now being reimagined for a town shaped by migration, creativity, and reinvention.
In this final turn, the story comes full circle. Established to serve visitors as much as residents, the synagogue survived the contraction of its congregation by finding a different communal purpose. The decline of Jewish Cliftonville ended not in erasure, but in translation, carrying memory forward as the community that built it dispersed.
The building’s transition was ultimately decisive. The synagogue was formally deconsecrated. Now, a registered charity, it operates as ARK, an arts and cultural space run by Jan Ryan, one of the four women who led the campaign to save the building. In this final transformation, the synagogue passed fully from religious institution to community space: its original function concluded, but its physical presence now preserved, repurposed, and folded into the cultural life of contemporary Cliftonville. Ironically, a century after the first stone was laid, the building now serves a new community, drawing artists from London and, once again, Jewish people seeking connection with other Jews.
© Katie Blythe 2026
Primary Sources & Further Reading​
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Doherty, Rosa (2017), Struggling Margate shuts synagogue for festivals: Sadness on the coast as Orthodox congregation cannot attract a minyan for festivals. Jewish Chronicle, 3 October.
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East Kent Times and Mail (1929), “New Synagogue: Consecration Ceremony at Margate. Chief Rabbi’s Address”, 22 May, p. 10.
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Gaffin, Jean (2022), oral history interview. Cliftonville Voices Oral History Project. Unpublished interview recording and transcript.
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Grisar, PJ (2020), 91-year-old English synagogue saved by local artists. The Forward, 30 December.
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Hoser, Perrina (2022), oral history interview. Cliftonville Voices Oral History Project. Unpublished interview recording and transcript.
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Hoser, Tania (2022), oral history interview. Cliftonville Voices Oral History Project. Unpublished interview recording and transcript.
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Inch, Norma (2016), Mrs Amelia Collier: She Helped Found the Synagogue. JCR-UK (Jewish Communities & Records – UK).
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Isle of Thanet Gazette and Thanet Times (1906–1930), reports and commentary on Jewish life, seaside culture, synagogue events, and marriages at the Margate synagogue.
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Islington Gazette (1906), “Notes from the Islington Bells”, 5 July, p. 5.
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Jewish Chronicle (1888–2020), various reports, notices, appeals, correspondence, and community columns relating to Margate Hebrew Congregation, seaside services, synagogue buildings, congregational affairs, antisemitism, and Jewish life in Margate and Cliftonville.
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Jewish World (1902), reports on the establishment and early services of the Margate congregation, including notices dated 27 June and 4 July.
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Jewish Year Book (1903–2015), entries relating to Margate Hebrew Congregation and associated communal institutions.
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Phillips, Aleks (2020), Save our shul: Margate campaign to raise £400k: Target is to preserve “beautiful building” in dwindling community for religious gatherings and wider cultural activities. Jewish Chronicle, 6 November.
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Ruback, Ernestine (2021), oral history interview. Jewish History Thanet Project.
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Ruback, Ernestine (2022), oral history interview. Cliftonville Voices Oral History Project. Unpublished interview recordings and transcripts.
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Schwartzman, Arnold (2022), oral history interview. Cliftonville Voices Oral History Project. Unpublished interview recording and transcript.
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Shulman, David (2025), Margate Jewish Community & Hebrew Congregation, Margate, Thanet, Kent. JCR-UK (Jewish Communities & Records – UK).
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Thanet Advertiser (1915–1947), local reporting on synagogue ceremonies, wartime events, community affairs, and antisemitic incidents, including “Fire at Synagogue: Jews Begin Nightly Guard”, 2 May 1947, p. 1.