Old Photograph Invercloy Scotland

Old photograph of cottages in Invercloy by Brodick, Island of Arran, Scotland. There was a synagogue at one time in the Invercloy Hotel. Wartime evacuees swelled the numbers of the community. There were also wartime refugees in Ayrshire, including Susanne Schaefer and Lore Zimmerman, who came on the Kindertransport and were fostered by the Hamiltons of Rozelle House. In addition there was a refugee hostel, Birkenward in Skelmorlie.There were Jewish families in Ayr from at least the early 1850s and a small but vibrant Jewish community had been formally established in the beginning of the twentieth century. The Ayrshire coast also had a number of kosher boarding houses, particularly in the 1920s and 1930s, catering principally for members of the Glasgow Jewish community, including the Invercloy Hotel in Ayr, reputedly Scotland's only kosher hotel. The Jewish reached its highest point during World War II, due in part to the influx of evacuees from Glasgow and elsewhere. Numbers began to decline following the war and the Invercloy closed, with the synagogue, in the 1970s There was also a war-time hostel for Jewish evacuee and refugee children at Birkenward in Skelmorlie, north Ayrshire from at least 1940.

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