Tayside & Fife Jewish community
(formerly Dundee)

From about 1840, Jewish agents from Hamburg and elsewhere in Germany were arriving in Dundee to purchase cheap linens and packing cloths. By the 1850s, Jewish firms in Hamburg were sending representatives to Dundee and the first Jews to settle in the city were flax, linen and jute merchants. However they quickly integrated and assimilated, and there was no organised Jewish community in Dundee until about 1878, when the first synagogue was opened in Murraygate.

The 1901 Jewish Year Book indicates that there were 127 Jews in Dundee, and that the synagogue had 30 seatholders and an income in 1899 of £131. The synagogue Hebrew School (established in 1893) had in 1901 29 scholars: 22 boys, 2 girls and 5 infants. By 1911, there were around 95 Jews in the city.

In 1920, the synagogue was moved to 13 Meadow Street. The premises, which accommodated 70-100 people, were gifted by Sir Maurice Bloch. The future Prime Minister Winston Churchill, then a Dundee MP, had been one of the contributors to the Synagogue Building Fund in 1919.

By 1970, there were only thirty to forty individual Jews. The synagogue was demolished in 1973 because of the redevelopment of that area of the city centre, and the city council paid for the  erection of a new building, opened in 1978, which served the community until its closure in 2019.

The Jewish cemetery in Dundee contains 163 burials since 1889.

In 2019, due to falling numbers over the years, the community in this area moved to St. Andrews, where there are a number of Jewish staff and students. The community has been rebranded as the Tayside & Fife Jewish Community, with a website at: https://www.scojec.org/communities/tfjc/index.html .