Photographs of the area where the Abertillery synagogue was located, 12 March 1977

Disgrifiad

These photographs were taken around the area where the Abertillery synagogue was once located. The synagogue was built in 1910 behind a terraced Newall Street house that belonged to a successful furniture dealer called Harry Simons. This would explain the somewhat cryptic note on the JCR-UK website according to which the premises of the Abertillery Hebrew Congregation later became a furniture depository. Services are believed to have ended towards the end of the 1940s. According to the Abertillery-based collector and amateur historian Graham George Bennett, the synagogue formed the first floor of a two-story house. The building was in the Gothic style and had a school room on the ground floor. It was big enough to accommodate one hundred worshippers and one hundred pupils. According to our research, these photographs depict views down Newall and Blythe Streets, towards the river. Also included are two photographs of a building at 56 Powell Street that has since been demolished and two almost identical photographs of an unidentified street. Information on the Jewish community in Abertillery is conflicting, but it is known that a Hebrew Congregation was founded in the early 1900s and ceased to exist in the 1950s. According to the research of Abertillery historian Graham Bennett, a synagogue with a Hebrew school was erected in 1910 on Newall Street and it had space for 100 worshippers and 100 pupils. In Cai Parry-Jones's doctoral dissertation this account is disputed, and the synagogue is said to have been a room in a residential building. Contemporary newspaper sources confirm that weddings and events took place at the Abertillery Synagogue, but they also note that in the early 1940s, religious services for evacuee children were held in a private home. At the time, the Abertillery community had shrunk from around 100 members to 14. Sources: 'The History of the Jewish Diaspora in Wales' by Cai Parry-Jones (http://e.bangor.ac.uk/4987); https://www.jewishgen.org/jcr-uk/Community/val1_abertillery/Abertillery_Press_Reports.htm; https://outoftheblueartifacts.com/the-hebrew-synagogue-abertillery. Depository: Gwent Archives.