My interest in Jewish Suffolk started on a walk in Christchurch Park with my friend, Beverley Levy. As Chair of the Suffolk Liberal Jewish Community at that time, she was involved in a project for Suffolk Archives which had been inspired by a memoir written by Fritz Ball. He was a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany who lived in a hostel at Palace House Stables, Newmarket. I joined the project and this research – and all its offshoots – took me all through the Covid lockdowns until now (February 2024).
As part of this research, I have found the names of about 350 adult Jewish refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe who lived in Suffolk at some time in the war years. There are also known to have been hundreds of children mostly from the Kindertranports who were housed here in the county at various time. Added to these were Jewish evacuees from London schools. (These were not, in the main, refugees but whose families had settled in the East End several generations previously.) The resident Jewish community was tiny and there were no kosher shops, Jewish schools or synagogues. This is the context into which the refugees arrived.
Fieldwork 