Jewish heritage project set to tour south Wales

A project telling the history of the Welsh Jewish population will hold a series of exhibitions and talks in communities across south Wales over the next four months.

Jews have lived in south Wales for over 200 years and during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there were small Jewish communities in many of the south Wales valleys.

However, from the 1920s onwards those communities declined.

The project aims to highlight the contribution these communities made to Welsh society and includes the stories of the Sherman Brothers, whose gift enabled the founding of the Sherman Theatre in Cardiff, Jewish businesses on Treforest Trading Estate which providing employment when times were hard, and Bernice Rubens, who was the first woman to win the Booker Prize, before a new audience.

The tour, which has been made possible thanks to a grant awarded to the Jewish History Association of South Wales/Cymdeithas Hanes Iddewig De Cymru (JHASW/CHIDC), depicts the Jewish heritage of south Wales as recalled by members of the community, with banners displaying quotes from their oral histories and digitised historical images from the communities.

The exhibition is bilingual, with all titles and captions in Welsh and English.

The exhibitions and talks schedule is:
Port Talbot Library: exhibition: until 27 October.

Brynmawr Institute: exhibition: 27 October-10 November; talk: 01 November at 14:00.

Bargoed Library: exhibition: 11-21 November; talk: 11 November at 10:00.

Caerphilly Library: exhibition: 21 November-01 December; talk: 29 November at 18:00.

Treorchy Library: 01-09 December; talk: 09 December at 10:00.

Cowbridge Library: 03-17 January 2024; talk: 17 January2024 at 17:00.

The project is funded by the Catalyst Cymru Community Grant Scheme, funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, administered by the Wales Council for Voluntary Action (WCVA).