12 PORTS: LONDON – THE CANVEY ISLAND CHAREDIM

When Canvey Island first began to be mentioned in connection with a potential new community of strictly orthodox Jews, more than a few eyebrows were raised.

The challenges seemed considerable. For one thing, there was no extant pre-existing Jewish infrastructure – no synagogue, no mikvah [ritual immersion bath] and no easy access to kosher food.

Another thought which may have crossed a few people’s minds was the area’s political geography. Canvey is the hardest of hard Brexit country – with some of the pro-Brexit rhetoric about foreigners coming to Britain, what would the reaction be to a sudden influx of people whose dress and adherence to strict religious rules is decidedly “foreign”?

But according to Joel Friedman, a spokesperson for the Canvey Orthodox community, the three years since the community was established have been “brilliant – we’ve had very few problems.”

As he put it, “there are always going to be haters, but we try to make the average Joe Bloggs on the street aware of who and what we are. We understand we look different, sometimes speak a different language [Yiddish] but we are trying to reassure them that we are not here to take them over. If they have any questions, they can come up and ask, and many of them do.

“If there’s any problem, we will always try to nip it in the bud and always look for ways we can integrate. I tell them, ‘there’s many things we can’t do, but there’s so many more things we can do together’.”

Chris Fenwick, “born and bred” on Canvey, runs an inn on the island. The avuncular gentleman, who featured prominently in a BBC documentary last year about the arrival of the strictly Orthodox in the area, has become an unofficial intermediary between the Jewish newcomers and the other islanders.

“There’s one thing I’ve learned about the people of Canvey Island – they are welcoming of strangers”, he says.

As he points out, Canvey is far less homogeneous than people might think.

“When I was here born sixty five years ago, there were eight thousand people living there, now there are 45,000. The majority have come down in waves, eighty percent of them from the east of London. So our community there is made up of east and north Londoners.

“We’ve got different groups, we’ve got Muslim groups that have been on Canvey for decades, for many years we’ve had a lot of Czechoslovakian doctors. We have got quite a big Romanian community – and if you walk into the local supermarket, it’s not unusual to hear Russian or Lithuanian spoken.”

Therefore, he said, when he first heard about the plans to set up an Orthodox Jewish community in the area, “my instinct was that it could work – they can only actually enhance the place.”

The last few years have not been totally devoid of incidents. In one case, a youth performed a Nazi salute in front of an Orthodox Jewish family. In another, a boy started mocking their mode of dress in front of them.

It’s a problem all around the Home Counties, says Chris. “Youths cycling around bored, looking for trouble, fairly uneducated, unfortunately.”

But on both occasions, says Chris, it was local people from Canvey who intervened and “straightened them out”. In the former instance the police were involved in “re-educating” the boy involved.

Social media has also been a key tool in attempts to directly address concerns from local residents.

“There were rumours going round that we wanted to take over the area, build gates round it, that the men don’t work and they’re all on benefits – very stereotypical comments,” Mr Friedman said.

“It’s important to us to dispel those rumours and to get the truth out there, so that the normal people should understand what is going on. Let the haters hate.”

It was 2016 when six strictly orthodox Jewish families decided to take the plunge and move to the coast. The reason was simple; London’s long term housing crisis, which has affected few groups more acutely than the capital’s strictly orthodox community.

Charedim [the word, describing strictly orthodox Jews, means ‘those who tremble’ before God] tend to have far larger families than the societal norm. Statistically, this high birth-rate means that strictly orthodox Jews will make up the majority of the UK’s Jewish community before the end of the century.

When it comes to housing, however, that high birth rate can spell disaster. The largest community of Charedim in the UK – indeed, in Europe – is in Stamford Hill, a neighbourhood in North London straddling the boroughs of Hackney and Haringey. The local Jewish orthodox housing association is highly competent, extremely hardworking – and completely oversubscribed, with many hundreds of families on its waiting list. Large houses in the area can cost in the region of a million pounds – totally unaffordable for such families. There are more than 250 marriages taking place within the Stamford Hill Jewish community every year. The housing situation was – and still is – unsustainable.

“I was one of the luckier ones,” reflects Mr Friedman.

“I had rented a home, I had a three bedroom terrace house with a garden, a lot of people don’t even have that. People are holed up in flats and basements. A lot of people, even if they have their own homes or are renting, the houses aren’t necessarily the correct size for their family. People sometimes have six or seven children at home or more.”

Mr Friedman, who was in the first group to move, described how a planning committee had looked at over a dozen different options, including the Essex island – and that although cheaper – and larger – housing had been a priority, of equal importance was proximity to London.

“About an hour’s journey by car was the limit,” he said.

“There are cheaper housing options than Canvey, in both Manchester and Gateshead [where there are already sizeable strictly orthodox communities].”

The reason there has not been a full-scale move northwards is simple; “people aren’t ready to give up their family connections and move somewhere with a different mentality and different services to London.

“Canvey is looked at as a satellite community, attached to London, and that’s what people were looking for. A lot of people from the community in Canvey work in London, and vice versa, people come from London and provide services in Canvey. Manchester is obviously a completely different distance.”

Canvey is far from the first attempt to establish a new Charedi community outside London – for example, projects were launched in the past to build communities in both Hemel Hempstead and Milton Keynes. But whereas both those projects failed, Canvey appears to be succeeding.

“We did a lot of research with people involved in previous initiatives as to why they failed”, Mr Friedman said.

“But for me, it looks like the housing crisis was getting worse and worse over the years. Milton Keynes was going back almost twenty years ago – the housing crisis was bad, but wasn’t as bad as it is now, so the push [to move] wasn’t as strong then.”

Since its humble beginnings, the Canvey strictly orthodox community has grown to more than 60 families, which is, as Mr Friedman, says, a “massive increase.”

There is now a synagogue and a ritual bath, and a little kosher shop; the likelihood is that the larger the community grows, the more amenities will become available – already there is talk about the possibility of setting up a kosher bakery.

It’s a virtuous circle; the more strictly orthodox families move to Canvey, the larger the community there gets, and the more people struggling with Stamford Hill house prices begin to see moving eastwards as a viable option.

“We hope that Canvey is one of the initiatives and hopefully there will be many more in the future, because we can’t keep growing at the same percentage”, Mr Friedman says.

He also makes it clear that the Charedim are trying “to spread across Canvey, and not focus just on a single area, for two reasons. Number one, we have more choice of houses coming up for sale, the wider the area we go – but also to make it less threatening for the locals. We don’t want any ‘taking over the area’ comments, we’re trying to integrate into the local community, and [if] we spread out, it makes it easier.”

What has become clear is that though the local Canvey residents have doubtless had to become used to Charedim, the Charedim have also had to adapt, and work more closely with their non-Jewish neighbours.

“In London where [Orthodox] people have such a self-sustaining community, they are often not forced to think outside the box, whereas in a smaller community, we have to think of others”, Mr Friedman says.

“We always have to think of others, but here it is even more important.”

Meanwhile, Mr Fenwick says that his involvement with the Charedim has been “a real education. Their commitment to family... quite frankly, they’ve strengthened my faith in humankind.

“Canvey is trying to be a model of coexistence, of human brotherhood. In this day and age, with everything going on in the world, we’ve all got to try and get on.”