Many Jewish people in St Albans are from families who came to Britain as refugees; others were born here.  These maps show where some of their family stories come from.

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Some trace their families back to the ­1600s when Oliver Cromwell allowed Jewish people to live in England, following expulsion by Edward I in the 1200s.  Some fled persecution, or pogroms, in Russia in the late ­1800s or in Nazi Germany during the Holocaust.

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Census records show Jewish people living in Fleetville, St Albans, in the early 1900s. Many came to work in the Nicholson raincoat factory in Sutton Road.  In the ­1930s several Jewish families moved to St Albans from London, and soon after established the first synagogue here.