In April 2013, Nudrat Afza, a Muslim woman from Bradford, gave her 90-year-old Jewish friend Lorle Michaelis a lift to the local Orthodox synagogue. “As Lorle got out of the car, she told me it would be the last service,” Afza recalls. “There were no longer enough people to run them. I was shocked. I knew the building would be sold or demolished.”
Afza got out of the car and took a few quick photos of the synagogue’s exterior. Months later, she happened to be passing when the caretakers were coming out. “I put my foot in the doorway and took some pictures inside, to quickly record what was there,” she says. The Orthodox synagogue was sold and redeveloped in 2015. Afza didn’t know it at the time but the photos were the start of a multi-year project to document Bradford’s declining Jewish population. “I grew up looking at pictures of the 1960s civil rights movement in the US, the Vietnam war and other political struggles in Britain and south Asia,” Afza explains. “I saw the importance of documenting something before it disappears.”
