MEMBERS of the local Jewish community joined the audience at our November meeting to hear an interesting lecture by committee member and Manchester University historian, Yaakov Wise.

Earlier this year, Mr Wise was researching local Jewish burial records for the new illustrated edition of his booklet A Brief History of the Jewish Community in Prestwich, Whitefield and Bury, when he discovered the transcript of a 1927 Manchester Appeal Court case between the Holy Law Synagogue, then on Cheetham Hill Road, and Manchester and Failsworth UDC (now part of Oldham), the local authority within whose borders Holy Law's cemetery lay.

The dispute was caused by the synagogue's claim that the cemetery was exempt from the Private Street Works Act 1892, which entitled local authorities to levy a rate on properties for road repairs and maintenance. The Act exempted churches and 'graveyards attached to a church'.

As the cemetery was owned by the Holy Law Synagogue Burial Board, its president Louis Fidler (father of the Conservative politician, the late Alderman Michael M. Fidler of Prestwich) and his fellow honorary officers argued that this meant the cemetery, although more than five miles away from the main shul building, was legally 'attached' to the shul.

The synagogue was represented by Neville Laski, elder son of Manchester Jewish community's lay leader, Nathan Laski, and Manchester city councillor, Mrs Sarah Laski. Neville Laski later became Recorder of Burnley, a Liverpool Crown Court judge and president of the Board of Deputies from 1933 to 1939. He was the father of the writer and broadcaster, Marghanita Laski.

Unusually for such a relatively minor matter, the appeal was heard by three high court judges led by Lord Hewart of Bury, the Lord Chief Justice of England, a former unsuccessful Liberal candidate for north west Manchester, who had been supported by the constituency chairman Nathan Laski, and who as Sir Gordon Hewart had been MP for Leicester, Lloyd George's Attorney General at the time of the Balfour Declaration and later one of the Cabinet ministers responsible for the creation of the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland.

Hewart, born in 1870, the son of a successful Bury draper, had been educated at Bury and Manchester Grammar schools before winning a classical scholarship to Oxford. He had been parliamentary correspondent of the Manchester Guardian before reading for the bar and joining the northern circuit in Manchester. As a senior judge, Hewart was responsible for several landmark decisions, one of which enabled the football pools industry to develop.

After hearing evidence from both sides, Lord Hewart and his fellow judges ruled that the word 'attached' in the Private Street Works Act means 'adjoining'. In other words, physically next to . . . and that a cemetery several miles away from a synagogue was therefore not exempt from local authority rates.

However, five years later, the Laski family had their revenge when Neville's younger brother, socialist politician Professor Harold Laski, was a member of a parliamentary committee investigating whether governments had too much influence over new legislation, and publicly criticised Lord Hewart's book The New Despotism, which alleged that ministers had begun to rule by executive order rather than by obtaining proper parliamentary approval.

The next meeting will be the Christmas social at St Marie's club room, Manchester Road, Bury, on Thursday, December 1. Festivities begin at 7pm.