Fieldgate Street Great Synagogue

A ‘house’ in front of the synagogue, three stories high, comprised a shop, a first-floor caretaker’s flat and a top-floor committee room. To the right of the shopfront, double iron gates opened outwards for two entrances, as a synagogue requires segregation of men and women: The women's door led directly to a staircase accessing the gallery, and the men's led to a corridor to the main floor of the synagogue behind. The synagogue itself was in a spacious, well-lit and ventilated, long room which could accommodate for 280 men below and 240 women in the three-sided gallery. On two tiers of paired Corinthian columns, the ceiling rose to a part-glazed seven-sided central vault. The bimah (reading platform) was in the centre, flanked by high-backed benches on the long walls. Extra rows were inserted behind the bimah. The ark (containing the Torah scrolls) was set against the back wall at the north end, it had a tall upper tier with large luhot (Decalogue tablets) flanked by lions of Judah and topped by a semi-dome. Above it was a large round window. It did not point to Jerusalem as is traditional, as it was impractical to do so with the building's south orientation. == History ==

The synagogue was built with a ninety-year lease of land previously occupied by a private house and workshop that served as a home of ginger-beer maker and a tea chest dealer. This was part of a synagogue project by the Federation of Synagogues, which oversaw the amalgamation of three small through appeals that condemned existing premises as unsuitable for public worship. Building costs were estimated at £3,500, from which the Federation of Synagogues contributed £500, private members raised £700 and Samuel Montagu put down at least £200 of his own money. Upon establishment, Montagu was made honorary president, while Nathaniel Charles Rothschild performed the opening ceremony. Solomon Michaels, a clothier, was the acting president. William Whiddington, a city-based architect, was commissioned to design the synagogue, to comply with an Ashkenazi shul tradition. In the 2000s By the early 2000s, the synagogue had a reduced capacity of just 150, and attendances continued to fall gradually as the local Jewish population in the East End declined. A movable curtained trellis mechitzah was installed at the rear of the ground floor for a dwindling number of elderly women, so that they no longer had to climb the stairs to attend at the original women section on the second level. By November 2009, regular services were stopped, and the synagogue was open only once a month for a symbolic Shabbat services. The Federation of Synagogues sold the building to the East London Mosque in 2015 which had by then enclosed the small synagogue building which was dwarfed by it. In a conversion of 2016 designed by Makespace Architects, furnishings were removed and a new shopfront was created for a Zakat Centre (for the receipt of donations to charity). == See also ==