Manchester, home to Britain’s second largest Jewish community of around 35,000 people, is home to the Manchester Jewish Museum. Located on Cheetham Hill Road, the museum is housed in a restored former Spanish and Portuguese synagogue, originally built in 1874. It celebrates the history, culture, and contributions of Manchester’s Jewish community through its historic building and engaging exhibitions.

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The Manchester Jewish Museum (MJM) first opened in 1984 in a Grade II* listed former Spanish and Portuguese synagogue, built in 1874 on Cheetham Hill, one of Manchester’s most diverse neighborhoods. Following a major redevelopment completed in 2021, the museum now features a modern exhibition gallery, vegetarian café, shop, learning studio and kitchen, alongside the beautifully restored historic synagogue as part of its permanent exhibition.

Open seven days a week, the museum offers visitors an engaging experience of Jewish history and culture. In recognition of its outstanding redevelopment, the museum’s architects, Citizens Design Bureau, received the 2023 RIBA North West Award and the RIBA North West Project Architect of the Year Award for directors Katy Marks and Candice Moore.

The Manchester Jewish Museum holds more than 31,000 objects that document the history of Jewish migration and settlement in Manchester. Its collections include over 530 oral history testimonies, featuring 138 recorded interviews with Holocaust survivors and refugees, nearly 21,000 photographs, and a wide range of historic objects, documents, and ephemera.

Collection highlights include a diary written by Kindertransport refugee girls, a Russian washboard used as a cricket bat, an English-Hebrew teapot, film footage of Oswald Mosley marching through Manchester, items made by Jewish internees on the Isle of Man, and personal belongings of a Holocaust survivor who survived by hiding in Polish graveyards, churches, and a coal cellar.

The museum’s oral histories provide valuable first-hand accounts of migration, settlement, and integration into British society, while its extensive photographic archive records the lives, communities, and buildings of one of the UK’s earliest migrant populations. Its Holocaust collection, comprising more than 700 hours of recorded testimony alongside over 1,500 photographs, objects, and archival materials, is of national and international........

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