Jewish Communities and Records – United Kingdom (JCR-UK) is an online project whose aim is to record details of all Jewish communities and congregations that have ever existed in the British Isles, in order to preserve the information for posterity and to make this information freely available via the Internet.

Archive Description

Jewish Communities and Records – United Kingdom (JCR-UK) was established in 2002 as a joint project between the Jewish Genealogical Society of Great Britain (JGSGB) and JewishGen. Its aim is to record details of all Jewish communities and congregations that have ever existed in the United Kingdom (as well as the Republic of Ireland, the Channel Islands, the Isle of Man and Gibraltar), in order to preserve the information for posterity and to make this information freely available online.

JCR-UK comprises a wide range of scanned communal documents, photographs, articles, conference papers; databases, lists and other information and data covering London and nearly 250 provincial or regional Jewish communities, encompassing some 1,100 existing and defunct Jewish congregations of every persuasion, each with its own page.

Some specific examples of the wide range of material available on JCR-UK are the Susser Archive of the late Rabbi Dr. B. Susser; archives of Exeter Synagogue; historic communal documents of the Bristol Hebrew Congregation; the papers of the 1975 conference on Provincial Jewry in Victorian Britain (including the 1845 Chief Rabbi’s Census); and much more.

In addition, apart from its own database – the All-UK Database, operated by JewishGen, JCR-UK is host to a growing number of community Hosted Databases, generally providing ready access to burial records, gravestone images and cemetery maps. So far the communities covered include Bradford, Bristol, Doncaster, Harrogate, Leeds, Liverpool, Sunderland, Cardiff and Swansea, as well as the burial records of London’s Federation of Synagogues’ cemeteries, with several further community cemeteries in the process of being added.

The latest ongoing project within JCR-UK involves the enhancing, reformatting and expanding of the congregation pages to include a more detailed history, lists of ministers and officers and other data, coupled with links to a new Rabbinic Profiles section, containing profiles of the ministers listed. So far (late 2020), pages for some 270 congregations (approximately 25%) have been enhanced listing over 850 different ministers.

Online Accessibility

JCR-UK is available to the public online with no access limitations.