Prayer shawl, tallit

This tallit, or prayer shawl, was worn by Avraham Werner, the first Rabbi of the Machzike Hadath Great Spitalfields Synagogue. Werner was born in Lithuania and became the Chief Rabbi of Finland around 1880. In the 1890s he moved to London and was in Spitalfields for the consecration of the new synagogue in 1898.

The tallit is a Jewish prayer shawl with fringes known as tzitzit tied to each of the four corners, which remind the wearer of God and his commandments. Prayer shawls are generally made of wool and are usually white with black stripes.

Spitalfields Great Synagogue was a place of worship for Orthodox Ashkenazi Jewish migrants. The building that housed the synagogue was founded by the French Huguenots in 1743 as La Neuve Église, a Protestant chapel. In 1898 it was consecrated as the Spitalfields Great Synagogue, also known as the Machzike Hadath. Machzike Hadath (‘Upholders of Faith') was a society formed in 1891 by recent Jewish immigrants primarily from Lithuania to maintain religious orthodoxy and teachings in Hebrew & Yiddish. At that time 10,000 of the 14,000 inhabitants of the parish were Jewish, largely migrants recently settled from Eastern Europe.

The opening of the synagogue in 1898 was a grand occasion. The Jewish Chronicle reported: ‘The East End was in a state of simmering excitement last Sunday […] the new spacious and lofty synagogue in Brick Lane was to be consecrated for divine service. […] A tablet on the walls bore witness in letters all of gold to the religious metamorphosis the building had undergone.’ In 1976 it became, and still is (in 2024), the Jamme Masjid (mosque), established by Bengali Muslim migrants.