The Story of a Synagogue 1919 - 1996 is an audio documentary written, edited and narrated by Rabbi Rigal. It tells the story of the Settlement Synagogue from its founding by Basil "The Gaffer" Henriques up until its merger with SWERS to form SWESRS. Completed in 1997 it captures the memories of the last generation to have known The Gaffer and attended his clubs.
The documentary exists in two forms, a cassette running to almost 90 minutes featuring interviews, narration and music from the Synagogue and its youth clubs, and a 28 page A5 booklet featuring a transcript of the interviews and narration. Both were published by The Settlement Synagogue.
We are currently in negotiation with SWESRS, who hold the copyright, for permission to republish both the booklet and the recordings here. If this is forthcoming then the booklet will need to be OCRed and the cassette will need to be digitised. The cassette suffers from wildly fluctuating sound levels and much of the source material was poorly recorded. We are confident that this can be significantly improved through digital post-production, although it is never going to sound like a professionally recorded documentary. We hope to make it available in MP3 format, broken into managable sized chunks rather than one huge podcast.
