On a chilly afternoon in February this year, members of Chatham Memorial Synagogue and patrons of the Ship Inn, Kent’s oldest LGBTQ+ pub, prepared to welcome guests to an event commemorating the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. The event, “A Memorial To Those Who Wore The Pink Triangle”, was the most recent collaboration between Medway’s Jewish and LGBTQ+ communities, and the third in a series of Holocaust Memorial Day events co-organised by the synagogue and other groups. Inside, Jewish and LGBTQ+ speakers reflected on their shared history during the Holocaust and in Medway. The two groups have gathered directly opposite each other on the Intra High Street since the 18th century. 

This show of solidarity between communities is not unusual in Medway. For decades, its Jewish population has worked to create relationships with different religious, ethnic, and cultural groups in the wider area. Beyond collaborating on Holocaust Memorial Day events which intentionally commemorate all victims of genocides around the world, reflect on the meaning of “Never Again” in the present, and emphasise the necessity of standing together, Medway Jews regularly participate in local events like the Medway Walk For Peace and Medway Pride. Synagogue members co-founded the Community and Faith Forum, and are active participants in Medway Inter-Faith Action (MIFA) – an organisation designed to build lasting relationships between Medway’s diverse faith communities.

As a small minority living in a heartland of the British far-right, Medway’s Jews have developed this approach out of necessity. The last twenty years have seen the synagogue attacked countless times. Swastikas and antisemitic slurs are regularly painted on the doors, headstones in the historic Jewish cemetery have been smashed, pig’s trotters have been left on the steps, and congregants have been physically assaulted on the street, prompting the synagogue to upgrade its security system and hire a security guard, all at great cost. But attacks on the Jewish community – in the 2010s, and in earlier periods of heightened far-right activity, particularly the 1930s and the 1970s – have risen in tandem with the targeting of Medway’s other religious and ethnic minorities, making the phrase ‘none of us are free until all of us are free’ not simply a slogan, but a lived reality. 

Rather than isolate themselves or leave, Medway’s Jews have defended their existence through coalition-building and communal care. That makes this tiny community of under one thousand Jews a holdout for the Jewish diasporist practices that once flourished across Europe.

The diasporist politics of the Jewish Labour Bund

In 1897, amid rising European antisemitism, two radically different Jewish movements were formalised, with opposing views on the route to Jewish safety. In Basel, Switzerland, Zionists argued that Jewish life in the diaspora was untenable, and announced plans to build a Jewish homeland abroad. In Vilnius, Lithuania, Jewish socialists gathered from across the Pale of Settlement to form the Jewish Labour Bund (Algemeyner Yidisher Arbeter Bund in Lite, Poyln un Rusland), united in their belief that antisemitism was inseparable from other injustices. Determined to remain in Europe and protect diasporic Jewish life, the Bund denounced Zionism as “bourgeois and reactionary” and proposed an alternative: that Jews create “indisoluble bonds” with workers’ movements to ameliorate the political conditions of all, as part of a shared struggle. The Bundist philosophy was encapsulated by one word, doikayt (Yiddish: “hereness”), which emphasised the importance of fostering Jewish culture wherever Jews lived, grounded in an “appreciation of the place Jews occupied in a culturally diverse world”.

Once one of the largest Jewish movements in Europe, the postwar period saw the gradual marginalisation of Bundism among world Jewry. The Holocaust had decimated much of the Bund’s support base, with many survivors in eastern Europe separated from global Bundist networks by the Iron Curtain. While Jewish migrants in the USA, South America, Palestine, and Australia established Bund organisations in their new homes, they faced significant challenges integrating into local Jewish and socialist settings. In Australia, Victoria’s Board of Deputies denied the Melbourne Bund affiliation; in Argentina, the alignment of Jewish communal institutions with Zionism and the Perón dictatorship made leftist Jews uniquely vulnerable to political repression; and in the United States, where a “flourishing Yiddish socialist scene” had become the home of exiled Polish Bund leaders in 1941, the anti-communist political environment of the Cold War and the entanglement of Israeli and American Jewish institutions led to the blacklisting and ostracisation of radical American Jews. In a short period, Jewish institutions around the world came to view support for Israel as a central component of their mission. Outside of small networks of Jewish radicals, the Bund and its ideals were relegated to history. Yet here, in Medway, that radically local Jewish way of being continues to take shape.

Medway and its Jewry

Spread across the banks of the River Medway in northeastern Kent, the five Medway towns of Rochester, Chatham, Strood, Gillingham, and Rainham are home to one of Britain’s oldest Jewish communities. The first recorded Jews in Medway lived in the ecclesiastical centre of Rochester in the 12th century, where they remained until the expulsion of English Jewry in 1290. When Jews were formally readmitted in the 17th century, Medway was one of the first places that Jews settled outside of London. From 1770, Jews congregated in a small synagogue with an adjoining burial ground on the Intra – a historically liminal zone between Rochester and Chatham, home to a constantly changing population of itinerant naval and dockyard workers, traders arriving from the nearby port, brewery staff, and sex workers. In 1867, a local Jewish silversmith, Simon Magnus, acquired the synagogue and Jewish cemetery and began the construction of the modern building, Chatham Memorial Synagogue, as a home for the growing Orthodox community.

By the 19th century, Medway had become one of Britain’s most important industrial and military regions. For three hundred years, Chatham Dockyard had served as the principal dockyard of the Royal Navy, during which the population rapidly expanded as hundreds of thousands of dockyard workers, military personnel, merchants, and immigrants sought work. Jews were an important part of Medway’s Victorian milieu, and were regularly referenced in the writings of Medway’s most famous author, Charles Dickens. “The children of Israel”, Dickens wrote in 1851, “were established in Chatham, as salesmen, outfitters, tailors, old clothesmen, army and navy accoutrement makers, bill discounters, and general despoilers of the Christian world in tribes rather than families.” Despite the prevailing antisemitic attitudes, Medway Jewry played a prominent role in the struggle for Jewish emancipation and were several of the first English Jews to hold political office. 

Today, Chatham Memorial Synagogue continues to serve not only Medway’s Jews but regularly draws congregations from further afield. Once the exclusive home of a strictly Orthodox community of English and Eastern European Jews, the synagogue now identifies as an “inclusive and independent traditional Jewish community” and welcomes “all Jews and their loved ones” to its services. Regular attendees include around forty families in person and, since the Covid-19 pandemic began, many more on Zoom – calling in from France, South Africa, the USA, Israel and New Zealand.

Xenophobia, fascism, and the far-right in modern Medway

In the 1890s, Medway experienced its first wave of xenophobic backlash in its modern history. Thousands of Jewish refugees fleeing pogroms in eastern Europe had arrived in London, and many were transferred onwards to Chatham, Dover, Reading, Chester, and Blackburn. Among them was a Polish Jew named Solomon Halpern – my great-great-grandfather. The first of five generations of Halperns in the Medway area, Solomon settled in Gillingham with his wife Betty in 1904, where he established a confectionery shop and joined the local synagogue. He died in 1966, aged 99, having served 25 years as Life President of Chatham Memorial Synagogue.

The influx of impoverished, Yiddish-speaking religious Jews, previously confined to the Pale of Settlement in eastern Europe, sparked new social tensions. While antisemitic attitudes remained prevalent, English-born Jews had achieved relative stability and tolerance among their neighbours. In contrast, the new arrivals were treated with suspicion and hostility. 

In the 1920s, fascist ideas began to gain traction across Britain, promising to bring discipline and order to a turbulent postwar society. The collapse of the international status quo, signified by the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and the dissolution of European empires, combined with extensive industrial layoffs, led many to search for a scapegoat. Pamphlets describing a global Jewish conspiracy were distributed across the country and played on already-present antisemitic ideas. Local Jewish communities began to be seen more widely as disloyal conspirators, undermining the British nation from within. 

The global economic crash following the 1929 Wall Street collapse exacerbated this turn. With rising unemployment at Chatham Dockyard and a visible Jewish and immigrant community, Medway was fertile ground for far-right agitation. In January 1931, Oswald Mosley addressed a Chatham Labour Party meeting where he began gathering local support. Weeks later, he founded the New Party – a short-lived project that laid the foundations for the establishment of the British Union of Fascists (BUF) the following year. Mosley and the BUF modelled themselves explicitly on European fascist regimes, echoing Hitler and Mussolini’s rhetoric and black-shirt aesthetic. Throughout the 1930s, Mosley regularly visited Medway, inciting violence against Medway Jews “because they ha[d] opposed the interests of Fascism and the interests of Britain” to crowds of thousands at venues across Gillingham, Chatham, and Rochester. 

Fascist street violence was common – so much so that my maternal grandfather, Hilary Halpern, spent his teen years learning to box to defend himself. His was not an exceptional story. Across Medway, Jews fought to defend their place in society, forming coalitions with communists, trade unionists, and the broader anti-fascist left. The story of the Battle of Cable Street in 1936 – when antifascist Jews, communists, and workers joined ranks to push the BUF out of London’s East End – is now well known. What is less remembered is that many of the tactics and alliances that beat back the Blackshirts in London were rehearsed, on a smaller scale, in places like Medway. Four decades later, when the National Front began to take aim at Medway’s new Bangladeshi and Pakistani communities, it employed similar tactics and was met with a similar antifascist coalition – this time spearheaded by the Asian Youth Movement, composed of teens from Strood and neighbouring Gravesend. The gurdwara at Gravesend now boasts the largest Sikh community in Europe, demonstrating the indispensability of antifascist mobilisation to the community’s survival.

A living example of doikayt

A century later, Medway is one of many post-industrial regions of Britain, forgotten by almost everyone except the people living there. On 25 June 1981, the Thatcher government announced that Chatham Dockyard – the main regional employer and industry – was to be permanently closed. Some workers were relocated to other ports across the country, but for the vast majority, the closure ushered in an era of mass unemployment, governmental neglect, and the slow corrosion of local pride and communal feeling among residents.

Formerly governed as separate towns within the county of Kent, in 1998 Medway was politically restructured into a unitary authority, in recognition of the specific challenges facing the region. The creation of Medway Council – administratively independent from Kent County Council – was intended to simplify policy-making, facilitate service planning and delivery, and spearhead regeneration efforts. Yet with limited resources, the Council struggled to change the pessimistic attitude residents had developed towards the area, and the combination of costly redevelopment projects and high demand for social care services have put the Council into significant debt.

Where the Council had been unsuccessful, prominent individuals within the Jewish community were among those who sought to revive Medway’s community spirit. By then a successful architect and sculptor, Hilary Halpern was convinced of the transformative possibilities of the arts for social regeneration and the fostering of community spirit. In 2002, Hilary established the Halpern Charitable Foundation (HCF) with his daughter – my mother – Dalia. Operating out of a central building on Chatham’s then-dilapidated high street, the HCF soon began providing affordable space for artists to work and exhibit in Medway at the Nucleus Arts Centre, supporting people with disabilities, and financially supporting Chatham Memorial Synagogue, initially funded in its entirety by Hilary. Such a redistribution of capital in a time of mass redundancy and decline embodies the fundamental importance of material, cross-class solidarity to an ethic and life of doikayt. For over twenty years, the Nucleus Arts Centre has been home to artists and the wider community, and regularly hosts workshops, exhibitions, arts festivals, mental health community groups, and town forums.

Alongside the Nucleus Arts Centre, Chatham Memorial Synagogue emerged as another hub for community-building efforts. These were by no means limited to the Halpern family. With the addition of a new community centre in 1972, designed by Hilary, the synagogue began hosting large groups of visitors participating in its education and outreach programmes. Spearheaded by community members like Gabriel ‘Gay’ Lancaster, local historian Irina Fridman, and Rochester maths teacher and current lay reader Howard Soskind, the accredited education programme has reached thousands of children and adults, creating space for multi-generational cross-cultural interactions. Lancaster, a London-born Jew who lived in Rochester from 1955 until his death in 2021, saw his commitment to Medway, its Jewish community, and the eradication of racist and anti-immigration sentiment as intertwined, and served on the committees for Medway Racial Equality Council, the British Association of Racial Equality Councils, the Committee for Racial Equality, and others, alongside his tenure at the Synagogue. 

For this community, inclusion, pragmatism and adaptability are understood as essential to the survival of Jewish life outside urban communities in places like London and Manchester. The synagogue has not had a formal rabbi since the Second World War; instead, lay readers – some with rabbinical training, some self-taught – lead services and mentor others to take their place. In 2001, in the face of significant architectural repairs and a changing local Jewish community, the synagogue reaffirmed its relevance, resolving to become the centre for Jewish life in North Kent. Upon voting, the committee unanimously decided to open membership to all Jews who wished to join – regardless of denomination, origin, family makeup, religiosity, or address – and dedicated their 2001 Kol Nidre appeal to the community’s longevity. The decision to begin and continue hybrid services, including on Shabbat, is another example of the community’s pragmatic approach to survival. Unlike London or Manchester, where Jews have many synagogues to choose between, Medway Jewry cannot afford to exclude anyone. If strict adherence to Jewish law means that a Jew who wants community cannot participate – if they’re housebound, lacking transport, or abroad, for example – their inclusion becomes a matter of survival for the community as a whole.

This is what doikayt looks like in practice. In a region hollowed out by economic collapse and political neglect, the decision to remain rooted and to build bridges between disenfranchised and disconnected communities is essential. The sustained investment of capital, resources, and time, is a solidarity deeply fundamental to and rooted in a commitment to a vibrant diasporic Jewish life, whatever the cost.

Fighting the far-right in 2025

Medway returned to the national conversation in 2014, when the MP for Rochester and Strood, Mark Reckless, defected from the Conservative Party to UKIP. The towns made headlines as the site of a fierce by-election campaign, which ultimately saw Reckless win and become UKIP’s second parliamentarian. Throughout the campaign, the streets of Rochester were regularly packed with far-right protestors, expressing support for Britain First and UKIP, and with the large crowds of antifascist counter-protestors who came to meet them. While he only held his seat for a few months – losing to the new Conservative candidate, Kelly Tolhurst, in the 2015 General Election – Reckless’s win for UKIP was the culmination of decades of far-right organising, which filled the vacuum left by the Dockyard’s closure. This growing far-right movement once again scapegoated refugees and immigrants, and, though new arrivals were the primary focus, long-established minorities including Medway Jewry remained constant targets. 

Still, Medway’s Jews have not retreated. They have continued to strengthen their connections with the wider community, expressing clear solidarity when other religious groups are attacked. Dalia Halpern-Matthews, a Trustee for Chatham Memorial Synagogue regularly speaks with local media to discuss the importance of collective solidarity, and has been Master of Ceremonies for the Dialogue Society’s iftar three times.

The fallout of October 7 and Israel’s war on Gaza tested these solidarity networks, but have failed to break them. Chatham Memorial Synagogue swiftly put out a statement affirming the right of “all people, regardless of religion, race, ethnicity, nationality” to a peaceful existence with equal rights. Though the community itself contains views across the political spectrum, the synagogue committee meticulously separates Jewish religious practice and culture from Zionism wherever possible.

In 2025, a new generation of British Jews are reckoning with their identity as they witness the global rise of the far-right, the weaponisation of allegations of antisemitism to suppress criticism of Israel, and the alignment of major British-Jewish communal institutions with reactionary and Islamophobic actors. As many grow disillusioned with a Jewish establishment that conflates safety with isolation and survival with Zionism, Medway offers a different vision of Jewish life. This vision – rooted in a politic of solidarity and inclusion, and grounded in a local history of Jewish antifascist activism – is a living example of doikayt for the modern age. Medway’s Jews know that solidarity is the only route to true safety, and indeed, to freedom. ▼

Ella Halpern-Matthews is a historian and researcher whose work explores (settler-)colonialism, discourses of rights, belonging, and exclusion, and the politics of space in Palestine, Israel, and Egypt. She also writes on diasporic Jewish identity, antisemitism, and antifascism in the British context, grounded in her own experience as a Jew from Kent.