VOICES FROM BRICK LANE'S JEWISH PAST

Nadia Valman and Rachel Lichtenstein investigate the Jewish history of Brick Lane. From the late nineteenth century until the Second World War, Brick Lane and the surrounding streets were home to Britain’s largest Jewish population. Originating from towns and villages in Russian and Eastern Europe, Jews came to London in search of freedom and a better life. Crowded into dilapidated eighteenth-century houses, they built a rich and complex subculture over generations. Professor Nadia Valman explores the locations around Brick Lane that once housed centres of Jewish social and religious life - where Jews prayed, shopped, debated, worked, learned and played – through the words of journalists, writers and residents. Rachel Lichtenstein shares voices from the archive of recordings she has gathered over the past thirty years researching the Jewish East End. Some of these appear in her book On Brick Lane  and, more recently, the digital project Memory Map of the Jewish East End. You will hear recordings of some who are no longer with us, such as Professor Bill Fishman, the historian who put the story of the Jewish East End on the map and the Polish tailor Majer Bogdanski, who made Brick Lane his home.