“I came purely as a visitor at first,” says Seona Macfarlane. “And I had this overwhelming experience.” For the past year, she’s been a volunteer in the recently award-winning cafe at the Manchester Jewish Museum in Cheetham Hill.
But in all, she’s been part of the fabric of the museum for more than 30 years. She knows all of the past CEOs and curators - “All the staff here, I would say without exception, are really lovely people,” she says - and has worked as an experienced and dedicated guide for many of those years, as well as a fundraiser. She knows every inch of the place and talks about it passionately.
Seona, a former nurse, midwife, and in later years, magistrate, goes on: “I’d had something similar before, when I’d first gone into the hospital in Halifax, of being in the right place. I walked in here, and I thought ‘my goodness me, this is where I should be’.”
So she converted in 1991, the Hebrew year 5752, because of this place. “I wasn’t born Jewish. I’m a Jew by choice, and it takes over your life. I’d been to a lot of cathedrals and duomos in Europe as a younger person, but I had never experienced what I experienced walking into that sanctuary.”
She points to the synagogue across from us, the outside wall of which is now enveloped by the new, beautifully designed glass and metal wing of the museum, which was completed last summer, including a full restoration of the synagogue itself. In conversation, she often refers to it as simply ‘the sanctuary’.
You don’t have to have religion in your own life to feel quite moved by something like that. The museum, which underwent its £9 million redevelopment after closing in 2019, is on the site of the synagogue built for the Sephardi Jews, those who migrated to Manchester from Spain and Portugal.
It began construction in 1872, overseen by the architect Edward Salomons in Gothic and Italianate style. He had built the stunning Reform Club on Spring Gardens the previous year. The synagogue opened two years later in May of 1874 to serve the thriving Sephardi community.
But as the Jewish community changed in Manchester, so too did the synagogue, and over the next hundred years, more and more moved out to the suburbs, with new synagogues being built across the city. As membership slowly waned, the idea to turn the site into a museum was floated in 1976, and it opened to the public eventually in 1984.
It now holds 31,000 items in its magnificent archive collection, treasures of history which document the triumphs and tragedies of the Jewish diaspora’s migration to Manchester, everything from emotional diaries from the Kindertransport and the recovered belongings of Holocaust survivors to programmes from Manchester’s Jewish Lads Brigade at the turn of the last century. There are also 700 hours of priceless interviews and testimonies from survivors and refugees.
But since reopening, food now feels somehow central to what goes on here. When the new development was planned, a ‘learning kitchen’ and studio was factored into the designs, on the site of the synagogue’s old ‘succah’ building, a temporary hut constructed in 1919 for use during the Jewish festival of Sukkot. School visits are pretty much daily, booked up at least to the end of the year, accompanied by the clamour of children filing in to make challa, the plaited Ashkenazi loaves. They love it, of course.
Last month, the museum’s catering team won Cafe or Restaurant of the Year at the Museum and Heritage Awards. It is not hard to see why. It is a tranquil oasis amid the continuum of Cheetham Hill Road. The menu, devised by head of commercial operations Rachel Hall, is ‘kosher style’, and vegetarian, in order to simplify the issues of keeping meat and dairy products separate, as required by Jewish law. Cutting that out of the equation also means there is also no supervision from Manchester’s Beth Din, the rabbinical body.
So the food here instead cleverly adapts some of those classical dishes from the Jewish culinary canon. Their ‘It’s Not A Salmon and Cream Cheese Bagel’ is layered strips of carrot instead of salmon, with vegan cream cheese, tomato, red onion and capers, and it’s a triumph of a sandwich. The ‘Not Quite Traditional Chicken Soup’, served on Saturdays, the Jewish sabbath, may be missing the poultry, but it’s a gutsy vegetarian broth with mushrooms and those all-important floating matzo balls.
The cholent, usually made with beef brisket and barley for sabbath lunch, is a rich vegetable stew served with challah, and the lentil and spinach soup comes with warm pita and zesty lemon oil. There is a generous falafel plate too, with homemade hummus, tahini and zhug, the spicy Levantine sauce made with coriander and chillies.
“The feedback we get is really positive,” says the museum’s Kate Vandoor. “And thanks to the learning kitchen, the museum smells like fresh baked challah in the afternoons, which is really evocative! We work on the menu in consultation with our volunteers, and we’re really open to feedback, and asking people to share what they think. We want to make sure that everything we’re doing feels right.”
The programming team also coordinates volunteer group meetings at the museum, holding monthly cooking mornings. They recently got together to make traditional cheesecakes. They’re also planning ‘immersive food experiences’, in which the public will be invited to try the foods from the many Jewish festivals, with a kind of guided tour element involved too.
Salford-born Lisa Everingham is the cafe's co-team leader. She’s done lots of large scale catering work throughout her career - for everyone from Burger King to Whitbread. But this job is different.
“It’s a great place,” she says. “And it's amazing to have been part of the journey. We get a lot of people coming in and asking for the bagel. It’s just delightful, and delightful to look at too. And we do eat with our eyes.”
She goes on: “When I started here, Alex, our curator, took me for a guided tour, just on my own with her. I was crying when we’d finished, though she had warned me to take tissues. I was so touched by everything up there. It was pretty spectacular.”
And is food key to what happens here? “My word, yes, it’s all part of the museum, part of the Sephardi and Ashkenazi background, to keep that tradition. It’s great to be part of something like this, something so inclusive and diverse. It’s good for the soul.”
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