East Ham Jewish Cemetery

Until the C20th swathes of land in in this area were almost entirely unbuilt over, largely comprising fields and marshland, a few settlements and the Northern Outfall Sewer, now known as The Greenway (q.v.) cutting across from west to east (see OS 25 ins Essex 1st Edition map LXXIII.16).

East Ham Jewish Cemetery was established here in 1919 by the United Synagogue Burial Society, a charity serving the British Jewish community that was created by Act of Parliament in 1870, but whose roots go back to 1690 when the Great Synagogue was founded in Duke's Place, which was destroyed in 1941 by bombing in the Blitz. The United Synagogue brought together five synagogues: the Great, Hambro, New, Central and Bayswater Synagogues, and its first joint burial ground to be established was Willesden Jewish Cemetery (q.v.) in 1873. East Ham Cemetery remains one of the 20 cemeteries maintained by the United Synagogue Burial Society today.

Also known as Marlow Road Cemetery, the cemetery is surrounded by a brick boundary wall; inside the main entrance is a small area of flowering shrubs, and there are pollarded limes along the two main axes, but otherwise the whole area is laid out symmetrically with tarmac paths and gravestones set in gravel. There are some traditional classical funerary monuments. In the centre of the cemetery is a white painted brick prayer hall or Ohel with cloister /colonnades designed by H W Ford in 1924, which is described by Meller as 'architecturally more suited to a Mediterranean seaside resort than a cemetery'. Next to the prayer hall is a hedged war memorial of gravestones set in grass. The cemetery entrance on Marlow Road had brick gate piers topped with stone and iron gates with the United Synagogue insignia.

Those buried in the cemetery include the founder of the London Jewish Hospital, Isidore Berliner (d.1925), and Solomon Mendeloff (d.1970) who as Ted 'Kid' Lewis was the world welter-weight boxing champion in 1915. Also buried here is 11 year-old Mark Rothstein, among the 134 victims of the Hughes Mansions disaster in Vallance Road, Stepney, the majority of whom were Jews, killed on 27 March 1945 by the last V2 rocket to fall on London at the end of World War II.

East Ham Cemetery is one of three Jewish cemeteries that were established in Newham, and the only cemetery that remains open, the others being West Ham Jewish Cemetery (1858-1965) in Buckingham Road, Forest Lane, and Plashet Cemetery, dating from 1896, closed by 2010.