Shtender in the shul room in Newcastle

This is the shtender in the shul room in Newcastle:

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It comes with quite a history. It originally stood (along with a matching ark) in the synagogue in Kretinga, in Lithuania. During the pogroms of the 1880s and 1890s, the Kretinga community, like many others, upped and fled, but unlike most, they all went to the same place, and reestablished their community in Sunderland—and they took this shtender with them.

The shtender was reinstalled as the main lectern in the synagogue on Villiers Street there; later, it was moved to the shtiebl in the Mowbray Road synagogue.

When I was growing up, the Sunderland Jewish community, like all the provincial communities in the UK with the exception of Manchester, was dying. This became apparent when it merged its youth groups with Newcastle's. Then, some years later, there was a mass emigration of Jewish Mackems to Newcastle, and the Joel Intract old age home (of which my great-grandfather was amongst those who opened it, as recorded on a plaque there) moved to Newcastle too (under a new name). Finally, about a decade ago, the Sunderland synagogue closed, and a century and more of Jewish existence in Sunderland came to an end, with the exception of a few die-hards—not enough to get together a minyan—determined to stay even in the absence of a community.

But though the community may be gone (and indeed most of those who moved to Newcastle have since left for London or Israel, as Newcastle follows Sunderland along the road of gradual attrition), its legacy remains in the form of this shtender. Three times a day, the Orthodox community in Newcastle meets for prayer, and every time, except on sabbaths and festivals, the service leader stands before this shtender, embodying a living continuity with the bygone communities of Sunderland and Kretinga.