About the Film

This community archive documentary was commissioned by Tyne & Wear Archives to document the Unlocking North East Jewish Heritage project, an effort to uncover, preserve and make publicly accessible the history of Jewish communities that once thrived across the North East of England.

The Archive

The film opens inside the archive itself, where boxes of documents, photographs, periodicals and oral histories are being carefully sorted and catalogued. For decades, much of this material was at risk of being lost. As synagogues across the North East closed, important records were often discarded. The project exists to prevent that from happening, and to make what survives findable and usable by researchers, families and anyone with an interest in the region’s Jewish history.

One of the central aims of the project is digitisation. By building a growing digital archive, the team is making it possible for people anywhere in the world to access historical records without needing to travel or book appointments. As one contributor puts it in the film: in the old days, you had to request a document you could not take away. Now, anyone can search by name, location or theme, and find things that were once effectively hidden.

Memory and Community

Alongside the formal records, the project has collected oral histories. Stories of how Jewish families arrived in the region, where they settled, the businesses they ran, and the part they played in local life. One moment in the film captures this well: a passer-by standing in front of a building in Newcastle recalls, that is where I got my first suit, from Jackson the tailor. These are the kinds of details that do not survive in official records, and that community archive documentary work is particularly well placed to preserve.

The film also addresses something difficult. In Newcastle, the youngest active member of the Jewish community is in their seventies. Within a generation, the community will likely no longer exist in any formal sense. That has already happened in South Shields, Sunderland and Whitley Bay. The archive does not try to reverse that, but it does ensure that the stories and impact of these communities do not disappear with them.

When you are younger, you are not particularly interested. And when you become interested, the people you want to ask are no longer there.

That awareness drives the project’s mission: to preserve memory before it slips away, and to create a resource that future generations can still use to ask questions and find answers. It is the kind of work that makes community archive documentary filmmaking feel genuinely necessary.

My Approach to Archive and Heritage Film

Films like this one sit at the heart of what I do. I am drawn to projects where the subject matter is fragile, where the people involved understand that what they are preserving matters and where the act of filming is itself a form of care. Working with archives, oral histories and community memory requires a particular kind of attentiveness. You are not just documenting a process. You are helping to hold something in place that might otherwise be gone.