Redbridge Central Library which houses Redbridge Museum & Heritage Centre • Hidden Treasures/Rachel Lichtenstein

The London Borough of Redbridge is one of the most culturally diverse London suburbs, geographically connected to both East London and the fringes of Essex. Inside the modern Redbridge Central Library in the busy town centre of Ilford you can find Redbridge Museum and Heritage Centre, which is where I met manager Gerard Greene. Before we went to explore the newly redeveloped museum, we made our way into the Heritage Centre study room on the same floor to meet with local resident Bernard Chaplin, who was responsible for rescuing and putting together the archive of Newbury Park Synagogue, which is now held at the Heritage Centre archives.  

Gerard and Bernard looking at synagogue collection Newbury park • Hidden Treasures/Rachel Lichtenstein

On a table in the main space were four large binders containing the material Bernard had gathered from the synagogue, which had opened in 1973 and closed in 2015. ‘It was an orthodox synagogue and a lot of the congregation there came originally from the East End,’ said Bernard as he flicked through the many pages in the neatly arranged chronological folders he had compiled. Collectively, these folders contain a great array of fascinating archive material, from historic photographs of fundraising dinners to newspaper clippings, letters, wedding invitations, pamphlets, an order of service from the consecration at the synagogue and many other items besides. It is a wonderful collection that gives a real sense of the rich life of a British synagogue in the late 20th and early twenty-first centuries. ‘It was so much more than just a place of worship,’ said Bernard who had been a member there for many years. 

A page from the scrapbook of newspaper cuttings • Hidden Treasures/Rachel Lichtenstein

Gerard had also selected some other Jewish material from the Heritage Centre’s extensive collections for us to view, including a scrapbook of newspaper cuttings about the Jewish community in Redbridge from 1972 to 1979 which had been put together by Redbridge libraries. There are newspaper cuttings pasted inside the scrapbook from articles about many subjects which were important to the local Jewish community of that period such as Jewish women’s protests about the condition of Jewish people in the Soviet Union, antisemitic graffiti, new schools and community appeals. ‘There’s so much here and it really gives an indication of the size of the Jewish community in Ilford in the 1970s, which was one of the largest in the UK,’ said Gerard as we examined the scrapbook. ‘There even used to be a Redbridge Extra supplement distributed with the Jewish Chronicle, which again gives a good sense of the community size.’ Another folder on the table was filled with contemporary pamphlets sent to the local library in 2005 on local Jewish community activities ranging from IT classes to Kabbalah, Israeli dancing, and lessons on Hebrew and Jewish history. 

Soon after we were joined by Denise Fluskey, another local resident who had been involved with the newly reopened museum, which is on the same floor as the Heritage Centre. Thanks to a £100,000 grant from the National Lottery Heritage Fund, and funding from Vision Redbridge Culture & Leisure, Arts Council England, Art Fund and others, the permanent Redbridge Museum has now re-opened, with state-of-the-art display cases and interactive exhibits sharing stories and artefacts of the Redbridge area dating right back to the Ice Age and on to the present day.  

‘The museum explores 200,000 years of history in Ilford, Wanstead, and Woodford’ said Gerard whilst pointing to a display of mammoth bones in the first case. Gerard was part of the original team who developed the first iteration of the museum in 2000, and he is rightly proud of what his small team has managed to achieve with this amazing new exhibition. We walked through the museum, passing display cases packed with fascinating objects, archive photographs, historic maps, and interactive displays that tell the story of how Redbridge developed from marshland and forest to rural villages then into the diverse and busy suburb of London it is today.  

Denise in front of the Moving Stories display • Hidden Treasures/Rachel Lichtenstein

The final section of the museum is called Moving Stories and looks at the history of the borough from 1939 up to the present day. Each of the display cases in this section are based around individual stories and tell histories of communities and events such as the local impacts of the Second World War. One of the displays explores the Jewish history of Redbridge and includes artefacts loaned by Denise and Bernard, so it was wonderful to be with there with them to hear their very personal stories behind these items. 

In the centre of this display is a painting from the 1970s by Denise’s late father Stanislaw Brunstein, which depicts a traveling band of Klezmer musicians. ‘These were the kind of characters and scenes that he committed to memory, from his childhood in Poland. He could recall the traditional villages he’d visited in his mind’s eye, and when it was all destroyed, he said as an artist he felt he had a mission to commit memory to canvas,’ said Denise, as we looked at the expertly painted rendition of the traditional shtetl scene. 

Denise’s parents were both survivors of the Holocaust. Her father had been a scenic painter for the Yiddish theatre in Warsaw before WWII. He ended up in a Russian prison then in a Siberian labour camp, before joining the Polish Eighth Army then fought at the Battle of Monte Cassino. ‘His parents were gassed in Treblinka, and he was an only child, so there were absolutely no members of his family left in Poland. He came to London and continued his scenic design work in the Yiddish theatre in the East End at the Grand Palais and that’s where he met my mother, Esther, who was a survivor of Auschwitz and Belsen, and who was acting on the Yiddish theatre stage,’ said Denise. In later years the Brunstein’s moved to Ilford as so many East End Jews did, which was where Denise and her sister grew up, and Denise still lives in the area today.  

Gerard curated the museum including the Jewish Redbridge display, which along with the wonderful Brunstein painting includes pieces of Judaica Bernard collected from Newbury Park Synagogue and many other fascinating items which reflect the story of the Jewish experience in that London borough. There is a miniature model of a taxi and a taxi drivers’ sign, ‘a recurring theme in the oral histories of local Jewish people’; items donated from Ilford Jewish Primary School including an invitation to the opening ceremony in 1971; a Treasury of Jewish Folklore book awarded as a prize for local resident Susan Frankel’s Hebrew and Religious classes in 1955; and a DVD of Simon Amstel’s sitcom ‘Grandma’s House’ which was loosely based on his own family experiences of growing up in Gants Hill. One of the most striking items is a large table plan from Vincent Goodman’s Bar Mitzvah in 1973. Vincent grew up in Gants Hill and a photograph in the display shows him in his vintage flared suit and bow tie.  

This fantastic exhibition at the museum is entirely free and open to visitors, information can be found at https://visionrcl.org.uk/centre/redbridge-museum/. 

If you have any material related to the Jewish community of Redbridge, Gerard and the team would love to hear from you, please do get in touch.

—Dr Rachel Lichtenstein