Jewish Manchester: Official Guided Tour (with expert historian Ed Glinert)

Welcome to Jewish Manchester: the Official Guided Tour!

Date: [Friday 8 August 2025]

Time: [1pm]

Location: Victoria Station wallmap.

Cost: Free to register. Pay at the end if you think it was worth it.

• It's erev shobbos (explanation: see The Big Lebowski), so join Ed Glinert, Manchester's leading tour guide and an expert Jewish historian already) on this heimishe tour.

Manchester’s Jewish community first appeared in numbers in the late 18th century around the parish church (hmm). Is that the kind of place where a good Jewish boy or girl should live? Well, that was the old town, where everyone lived.

Gradually Manchester Jews began to move north, first to Strangeways (the area, not the prison, you schmerel), then Cheetham Hill, Hightown, Prestwich and eventually Whitefield. No further north. No Jew has ever crossed the Irwell, just like Moses with the River Jordan. Alright. One or two.

Only London has a bigger Jewish population in Britain than Manchester. But only Manchester has a Torah Street (with its own bacon-curing factory; really!) and a prison built like a mosque in the heart of the ghetto. And that’s apart from a history embracing that rogue Robert Maxwell, the rich-beyond-rich Nathan Meyer Rothschild, and the rabidly irreligious Karl Marx – all Yiddisher fellers. Well, Marx, oh, we'll come to that.