Film-maker Simon Glass explores the ‘lost world’ of the Jews in Yorkshire in the early 20th century in a documentary on BBC Four tonight.
A very British History: Jews of Leeds airs at 9pm and will look at the hundreds of thousands of Jewish migrants and refugees who travelled from the Baltic states of Russia to British ports between 1880 to 1920.
Many who were fleeing poverty and persecution settled in Leeds, often living in a notorious run-down area known as the Leylands. They arrived with little money, but hoped and dreamed of a brighter future.
One of them was Glass’s great-grandmother and the film-maker finds out what life would have been like for her when she came to Yorkshire and settled in Leeds.
Glass discovers stories of hardship, welfare, anti-Semitism and the rise of Fascism and the Black Shirts. However, he also hears of success and progress as people moved out to the more affluent suburbs before the ‘slums’ of the Leylands were demolished.
Glass travels to Lithuania and Belarus to find out more about his family roots, and what happened to those who did not make the journey to Leeds.
