Resources
The main drive in Discovering and Documenting England’s Lost Jews is the discovery of undiscovered histories within the Jewish narrative of English history. We are finding buried histories scattered in a variety of archives and also within the transmitted memories of those who ended up on this island. Some date back to the seventeenth and spill over into the twentieth.
These diverse stories are being documented in a number of ways.
Our Education Department is designing and delivering drama workshops to creatively examine different aspects of Sephardi history. In early 2019, it held a series of free open-access drama workshops at Bevis Marks synagogue exploring the hidden worlds of Crypto Jews and the lives of the Sephardim buried at the Novo Cemetery. This acknowledges and chronicles of a partially buried history.
As part of this programme of informing new audiences about this legacy, we continue to deliver free drama workshops in a range of community settings and schools all over London. These will be delivered to children and young people, and also to intergenerational groups. Theatre techniques are used to animate previously unknown aspects of Sephardi Jewish history in an accessible way that is interactive. The workshops will be practical and fun. They are socially engaging and offer new opportunities to become involved in future elements of the Lost Jews project.
If you would like to host a workshop, please contact Del Taylor on education@lostjews.org.uk
We will also be making workshop material available to download. Make sure you bookmark this page or subscribe to our mailing list to be kept up to date.
We will be interviewing a number of Sephardim and Jews from other diasporas to capture their oral histories, stories and memories. The recordings will be made available to listen to and read on the website. The information collected will then go on to inform our site-specific performance, One Lost Stone, at Novo Cemetery on Sunday 5th July 2020. If you have stories to tell, if you would like to collect the oral histories, or if you would like to participate in One Lost Stone, please look at our Get Involved page.
Our Film Department will be recording highlights on video and taking photographs throughout the project. They are also working with Oscar Kraft who was a trainee in Pascal Theatre Company’s 2015 Spectrum film workshops and who has now graduated as a film editor. You can look at his work here, and the team’s current film record of our project on our Gallery page and on our YouTube channel. At the end of the project our Film Department will be presenting a film documenting the project in its entirety.
On our Useful Links page you will find a list of sources that have excited, fascinated and informed us. We are always looking for new material, so please leave us recommendations in the comments below. If you would like to personally help us add to this list, we are also looking for research volunteers.