Across the Water: The Jewish Story of Wirral and Liverpool
- Rory Wilmer
- 11 hours ago
- 7 min read
On a summer’s day in 1937, behind a tall stone wall on Balls Road, a small crowd gathered in Birkenhead to open a new synagogue.
It was not a grand affair by the standards of Liverpool, but it mattered enormously to the families who stood there that day.
For decades they had prayed in borrowed rooms, upstairs halls, converted spaces that always felt provisional. Now there was stained glass, polished wood, a sanctuary that felt permanent. A place that said: we are not passing through.
Presiding over the opening was Professor Henry Cohen, already one of Britain’s most respected physicians and soon to become Lord Cohen of Birkenhead. His presence mattered. Communities are held together not just by numbers, but by signals. Having someone of national standing at the centre of that moment told everyone present, and everyone watching from the outside, that this small Jewish community belonged here. That it had put down roots.
But the story of Jewish life on the Wirral does not begin on Balls Road, and it does not end there either. It is inseparable from Liverpool, from the river that divides and connects in equal measure, and from the older towns of Cheshire and Chester. It is a story shaped by movement: by arrivals and departures, by people who came looking for safety or opportunity and stayed just long enough to make an imprint. It is also a story about how communities form, flourish, and then, quietly, thin out. Not with drama, but with time.
Liverpool is where it starts. In the middle of the eighteenth century, the docks were already busy with ships arriving from the Atlantic. They brought cotton and sugar, timber and tobacco, and with them came people. Among the sailors and traders were Jewish merchants from Germany and the Netherlands, drawn by a port city growing faster than its institutions could keep up. By 1745, Liverpool had its first organised Jewish congregation, the earliest in northern England since Jews were formally readmitted to Britain.
At first the numbers were tiny. By 1790, perhaps twenty Jews lived in the city, clustered around streets close to the docks. They were watchmakers, silversmiths, pawnbrokers, small traders. They prayed in cramped rooms above shops and relied on travelling shochtim for kosher meat. There was nothing monumental about their presence. But Liverpool itself was expanding at an extraordinary rate, and Jewish life expanded with it.
By 1860, there were around three thousand Jews in the city. Liverpool had become the largest Jewish centre in Britain outside London. What is striking is not just the speed of this growth, but its character. Early families were often German or Dutch, relatively well educated, commercially confident. They built the Princes Road Synagogue in 1874, a building so lavish it still feels almost defiant today. Gothic arches, Byzantine mosaics, a ceiling painted like the night sky. This was not simply a place to pray. It was a declaration. A way of saying that Jewish life in Liverpool was not temporary or marginal, but part of the city’s fabric.
Later waves arrived from Eastern Europe. Jews from Poland, Lithuania, and Russia came fleeing pogroms and poverty. They were poorer, often Yiddish-speaking, and crowded into the narrow streets of Toxteth and Brownlow Hill. They founded their own synagogues and mutual aid societies, rooted in the towns they had left behind. Yet even with these internal differences, Liverpool’s Jewish community functioned as a whole. Established families and new arrivals shared institutions, schools, burial grounds. The city became both a refuge and a hub.
From here, Jewish families began to spread outwards. Some moved to leafier suburbs like Wavertree and Childwall, following a familiar pattern of social mobility. Others crossed the Mersey. Birkenhead, with its docks, shipyards, and rapidly growing middle class, offered opportunity without the density of Liverpool. By 1889, there were enough Jewish families there to found the Birkenhead Hebrew Congregation.
In the early years, everything about the congregation was provisional. Services were held in hired rooms on Chester Street, then above a shop, then in a modest chapel. Nothing stayed fixed for long. And yet, life happened anyway. Children learned Hebrew after school. Committees were formed. Funerals were organised. The slow work of community building continued, even without a permanent home.
That is what makes the opening of the Balls Road synagogue in 1937 so symbolically important. It marked the moment when Jewish life on the Wirral stopped feeling temporary. The Mayor attended. The local press reported warmly on the “new house of worship for Birkenhead’s Hebrew community.” Inside, light filtered through stained glass onto polished pews. Outside, the wall offered privacy without secrecy. This was a community that did not shout about itself, but did not hide either.
Daily life revolved around ordinary things. Shops in Birkenhead market. Professional practices. Family routines shaped by Shabbat and festivals. Women organised fundraising teas and welfare visits. Men served on committees that managed everything from burial arrangements to visiting rabbis, who often crossed over from Liverpool for the High Holy Days. The synagogue was not just a religious space. It was where people met, argued, celebrated, mourned, and shared news from both Liverpool and Europe.
Further north on the Wirral, Wallasey developed its own, smaller centre of Jewish life. In 1909, a handful of families began meeting for prayer. Two years later, they opened the Egremont Synagogue in a converted chapel on Falkland Road. It could seat 250 people, though it rarely did. Still, for decades it served as a spiritual home for families in Wallasey and New Brighton. Children attended Hebrew classes. Weddings were solemnised. Festivals marked the rhythm of the year. Scale did not diminish significance.
Further south again, Chester had its own modest congregation. From 1894, Jewish families met first in private houses, then in a rented room in Whitefriars. By 1900, they had a synagogue of sorts. A few rows of benches. An ark. Rarely more than a few dozen worshippers. But to those who belonged to it, it mattered. It connected them to something larger than themselves, and to a tradition that stretched well beyond the city walls.
These small communities mattered precisely because they were fragile. They show that Jewish life in the region was not confined to Liverpool’s grandeur. It extended into seaside towns and ancient cities, into places where being Jewish was neither anonymous nor dominant, but quietly present.
The impact of Jewish life on Liverpool and the Wirral far exceeded its size. In business, David Lewis is the most obvious example. He arrived in Liverpool in the mid-nineteenth century and opened a small shop that grew into Lewis’s Department Store, one of Britain’s first truly modern department stores. His business transformed retail, but his philanthropy mattered just as much. He funded schools, hospitals, and relief efforts for Jews fleeing violence in Eastern Europe. His Liverpool store became a civic landmark, later crowned by Jacob Epstein’s sculpture, a symbol of post-war renewal.
In medicine, Henry Cohen’s influence extended far beyond Birkenhead. He advised government on the creation of the NHS, chaired the General Medical Council, and became one of the most influential doctors of his generation. Yet he remained connected to his roots, presiding at the opening of the Birkenhead synagogue and supporting Jewish institutions throughout his life.
In civic life, Arnold Bloom, a founding member of the Birkenhead congregation, became Mayor of Birkenhead in 1907. His election was not just a personal achievement. It was a signal that Jewish life was woven into local society, trusted and respected.
And then there was Brian Epstein. Born into a Liverpool Jewish family in 1934, he worked in the family furniture business before discovering a local band playing in a basement club. His management transformed The Beatles into a global phenomenon. Epstein rarely foregrounded his Jewish identity, but it shaped his worldview. His story is a reminder that influence is not always loud. Sometimes it operates quietly, behind the scenes, reshaping culture while remaining rooted in community.
Jewish life here was not without its shadows. During the Blitz, Liverpool was heavily bombed. Jewish homes and businesses were destroyed. Princes Road Synagogue lost its stained-glass windows. In Birkenhead, windows were removed and stored for safety, and services moved into basements during air raids. Families huddled in shelters with their neighbours, clutching whatever they could carry. Candles still burned on Friday nights, even as sirens sounded.
Then came August 1947. Anti-Jewish riots broke out in Liverpool, triggered by anger over events in Palestine. A synagogue in West Derby was burned down. Shops were attacked. Graffiti appeared. On the Wirral, slaughtermen at Birkenhead’s abattoir refused to process kosher meat. It was Britain’s last major outbreak of anti-Jewish violence, and it shocked a community that believed the war had settled such things.
Antisemitism did not disappear after that. It rarely does. It lingered in jokes, in slurs, in occasional acts of vandalism. But it existed alongside something stronger: integration. Jewish councillors, doctors, shopkeepers, and teachers were part of everyday life. The story is not one of exclusion, but of conditional acceptance, negotiated over time.
The war scattered communities but also bound them together. Jewish children from Liverpool were evacuated to rural Cheshire and North Wales. In Macclesfield, a temporary synagogue was set up for evacuees and ran until 1946. Refugee children from Nazi Europe were housed on farms and in schools. Families in Liverpool and Birkenhead took them in, helping them rebuild lives shaped by loss.
After the war, Holocaust survivors arrived quietly. Some had lost entire families. They opened shops, joined relatives, rebuilt lives without spectacle. Their presence was a reminder that Jewish survival was never just local. Liverpool and the Wirral were part of a much larger story of exile and return.
The decades that followed brought prosperity and dispersal. Young families moved to suburbs or left the region altogether. Chester’s synagogue closed in 1963. Wallasey’s closed in the 1970s. Hoylake’s brief experiment faded. In 2006, Birkenhead’s synagogue closed its doors. There was no drama. Just fewer people each year, until there were not enough left to sustain it.
Today, Liverpool remains the centre of Jewish life in the region. Around two thousand Jews live there, supported by synagogues, schools, and communal institutions. Princes Road still stands, dazzling and defiant. On the Wirral, Jewish life continues quietly in homes. Candles are still lit. Seders are still held. Journeys across the Mersey still happen.
Walk down Balls Road now and you would not know what once stood there. But memory has weight. It sits in archives, in photographs, in family stories passed down. It sits in buildings that remain, and in those that do not.
This is not a story about loss alone. It is a story about how communities form, how they signal belonging, how they adapt, and how they leave traces even after the last door closes. Across the water, in Liverpool and on the Wirral, Jewish life shaped the region in ways that still echo. Quietly. Persistently. Permanently.
RW
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