Jewish East End Celebration Society
4A Cornwall Mews South, London, SW7 4RX
[email protected]

It will soon be time for one of the East End’s most spectacular events, the Great Yiddish parade, and you are all invited.

The date is Sunday November 19, when East End streets will echo with the sound of songs once sung there and forgotten for more than a century, as a marching band with singers and klezmer musicians bring Yiddish Victorian songs of protest back to the London of today.

The parade, part of the Being Human festival, is organised by Dr Nadia Valman, Reader in English Literature and historian of east London at Queen Mary University of London, and Yiddish historian and JEECS member Dr Vivi Lachs.

The band and singers will march along Whitechapel Road from Goulston Street to the General Booth statue, Whitechapel, setting off at 11.00 and finishing around 12.30.

“The Parade takes us back to 1889, a moment when east London was gripped with strike fever. The recession had hit hard, unemployment was high, and casualised labour and miserable working conditions were causing chronic poverty and ill health. But a new spirit of working-class defiance was rising,” says Dr Valman.

The previous year, the women of Bryant and Mays’ match factory in Bow had launched a strike demanding better conditions of employment, and their success had galvanised other trades to unite and harness the power of collective action. The Great Dock Strike was about to erupt.

In this promising political climate the East End’s sizeable Jewish immigrant population, most of them tailors employed on low wages, staged their first public protest.

“On a Saturday morning in March, a large crowd, accompanied by banners and a brass band, marched to the Great Synagogue in Aldgate and from there to Mile End Waste in Whitechapel, ‘to show the world our plight and that we will no longer be slaves’, as they put it” says Dr Valman.

The Great Yiddish Parade will recreate the Whitechapel march, using song and oratory from 1889 to evoke the fervour of political protest in the Victorian East End.

“The songs were sung in Yiddish because that was the everyday language of Jewish immigrants in Victorian London,” says Vivi, who rediscovered the songs when researching for her doctorate and established the Great Yiddish Parade with musicologist Dr Sarha Moore in 2015.

“They appeal to Jewish workers to join together with English workers to fight for better working conditions for all. Singing, chanting and marching together are very effective ways of fostering solidarity and political optimism.”

Dr Valman says Victorian protest has some surprising resonances with concerns of today. “In late 19th-century east London, campaigners and activists were questioning why so many workers were employed as casual labour. Others called on middle-class consumers to think about who made their clothes, and under what conditions.”

As part of the project, Nadia and Vivi have been working with three east London schools to produce banners and new verses to Victorian songs reflecting their own messages of protest.

Everyone is welcome to join in the Parade, but if you want to march registration is recommended. Assemble at 10.30 at the corner of Goulston Street and Whitechapel High Street, No knowledge of Yiddish or proficiency in singing is needed. Song sheets will be provided. You can find out more here.

 

Paradeweb2

Latest news

  • More emerges about H Lotery and Co

    A while back, we had a reader asking if anyone had any information about a company his mother had worked for in the East End and which she remembered as being called Lottries. The inquiry sparked some fascinating replies, which identified the company as H Lotery and Co, and we've just had a response from the grandson of the company's Read More
  • Project seeks material and memories from the legendary Yiddish poet A.N. Stencl

    Did you know or do you have material from the Polish-born Yiddish poet Avrom-Nokhem Stencl (also known as A. N. Stencl) who was once famous in east London for selling his celebrated Yiddish magazine Loshn un lebn (Language & Life), for running his Friends of Yiddish Saturday afternoon literary society and for his many acclaimed publications of Yiddish poetry? Stencl Read More
  • Two great East End events

    Two great East End related events take place next month. First, Tower Hamlets Local History Library in Bancroft Road, Mile End, has what should be a fascinating free talk on Thursday, 5 September (18.30 - 20.00hrs) entitled “The Petticoat Lane Foxtrot”. The next day, September 6, sees the opening of a great exhibition at the Brady Arts and Community Centre, 192-196 Hanbury Read More
  • East End playwright, novelist and poet Bernard Kops dies aged 97

    Bernard Kops, the great East End playwright, novelist and poet, and honorary president of JEECS, has died at the age of 97 The son of Dutch-Jewish immigrants, Bernard was born in 1926 and brought up in Stepney Green Buildings in a world whose frontier was Aldgate East tube station, a world in which clothing from the Jewish Board of Guardians Read More
  • Seeking the human being within, behind the cloak

    Bernard Kops, the great East End playwright, poet and novelist has died at the age of 97. Honorary life president of JEECS, he was an astute observer of both the old Jewish East End and the modern world. The interview below is from the JEECS magazine The Cable in 2006 and is being republished as a tribute to a great Read More
  • A fresh look at the Siege of Sydney Street

      The Siege of Sydney Street is the subject of a new book published on March 1 that provides a thrilling account of this iconic East End event. Read More
  • From Polish immigrant to East End artist: the lost Whitechapel boy

    Morris Goldstein, a near forgotten member of the remarkable group of artists and writers that flourished in the East End in the early part of the last century, deserves wider recognition. RAYMOND FRANCIS, his son, gives us a taste of his story in this extract from his book about his father's life. This article was published in JEECS's magazine The Read More
  • East End Brady days

    An exhibtion devoted to the history of the Brady Girls' Club opens in London on October 6. So it seemed a timely moment to republish these reminiscences of an iconic East End organisation originally published in our magazine The Cable in 2010. Read More
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3

For the old Jeecs site, visit www.jeecs.org.uk/archive