Religious life

Scotland's first synagogue was founded in Edinburgh in 1817, in a small lane off Richmond Street on the south side of the city, and by the mid-1920s the city was also home to several other houses of worship. Since 1931, the Edinburgh Hebrew Congregation has come together at the Salisbury Road Synagogue, with a Liberal Jewish community formed in 2004. The Glasgow Hebrew Congregation was established about 1821, and throughout the middle of the nineteenth century Glasgow's Jews worshipped at a number of small city-centre synagogues. 1879 saw the consecration of Glasgow's impressive Garnethill Synagogue, Scotland's first purpose-built synagogue. South of the River Clyde, Glasgow's Gorbals district had had its own houses of worship since 1880 and in 1901, responding to the large amount of recent Eastern European Jewish immigrants, the Great Synagogue was opened in South Portland Street. The largest synagogue in Glasgow, it finally closed in 1974. As Glasgow's Jews moved outwards from the city centre and the Gorbals in the first half of the twentieth century, Orthodox and Reform synagogues were established in the growing Jewish communities to the south of the city, such as Giffnock and Newton Mearns.