UK: Scotland to get Jewish Heritage Center in Garnethill Synagogue

Thanks to a nearly £350,000 grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund, a Jewish Heritage Centre will be established in the grand Garnethill synagogue in Glasgow, Scotland — a Grade A listed building that was Scotland’s first purpose-built synagogue.

The Fund awarded £348,900 to the project, and the Jewish Chronicle reported that a further £100,000 has been pledged by the Association of Jewish Refugees.

The Centre is a joint project of the Garnethill Synagogue Preservation Trust, the formal owner of the building, and the Scottish Jewish Archives Centre, which is housed in the synagogue.  It is being planned as a facility that will educate school children, tourists and other visitors about the Scottish Jewish community and its contribution to Scottish society over its two centuries of existence.

The focus will be Jewish life and traditions and history as well as a Holocaust Era Study Centre that will include documents and testimony from Jews who came to Scotland fleeing Nazi persecution in the 1930s and as survivors of the Holocaust.

The magnificent synagogue — which in 1995 received a Heritage Lottery Fund grant of £59,150 for restoration — will be a key tool in the Centre’s educational program.

The Herald Scotland news site said more than 30 volunteers

will help develop and deliver community and public services once the centre is opened, and the project will extend out from the synagogue to establish a walking trail which will show how the Garnethill area was a hub for Jewish refugees in the 1930s and 1940s.

Bernard Goodman, chair of the Garnethill Synagogue Preservation Trust, was quoted in various media as calling the project

an important first step in realising a Scottish Jewish Heritage Centre by improving access to the synagogue site, creating new research spaces, developing interpretation and activities on Scottish Jewish heritage and building on the existing partnership between the trust and archives.

The Garnethill synagogue was built in 1879,  designed by local architect John McLeod in a style described as “Romanesque-cum-Byzantine with Moorish touches.”

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Read the Jewish Chronicle article

Read the Herald Scotland article

See a photo gallery of the synagogue