The Bimah Restoration Appeal opens — a small fund for an old piece of timber.

The bimah is the raised platform at the centre of the synagogue from which the Torah is read. It is the heart of the room and, on Catherine Street, it is also one of its oldest pieces of furniture. The carcase of the bimah — the four-sided timber framework that holds the platform up — was put together by a carpenter in 1761 or 1762, in time for the consecration of the building on the twenty-sixth of August of that year. It has held up for two and a half centuries. It is now beginning, very gently, to give way.

The quinquennial inspection report from our appointed architect, dated 14 November 2025, identified two related problems. The first is a slow loss of structural integrity in the south-eastern leg of the bimah, where a long-standing damp issue from below the floorboards has caused soft rot in the lower portion of the timber. The second is a more general loosening of the mortise-and-tenon joints at the level of the platform deck — the kind of thing that happens to any piece of furniture in continuous use for as many generations as this one has been. Neither problem is urgent in the dramatic sense. Neither is going to fail next week. But neither will heal itself, and both will get worse if they are left.

After a long meeting at Gray's Inn on the twenty-eighth of April, the trustees agreed to open a small named appeal under the Catherine Street Fabric Fund. The working target is £6,000, against an estimate of £5,400 from the joiner who has agreed to carry out the work. The remaining £600 we have set aside as a small contingency, which is, in our experience, never quite enough on a piece of work like this one.

A bimah does its work in inches. Two and a half centuries of inches has begun to add up.

The work itself will be done by Asher Cohen, a Plymouth-trained joiner who has worked on the building before — most recently on the ladder up to the women's gallery, in 2022. Asher is a member of the congregation. He has agreed to do the work at materials cost plus a discounted day rate. The joinery, we expect, will take about four and a half weeks, spread over the late summer and early autumn of 2026, in a sequence that allows the building to remain open for Friday-evening services throughout. There will be one weekend, in early September, on which the prayer hall will not be usable; Shabbat that weekend will be held in the adjoining school room. We have not, before this, had to move a service for a piece of carpentry, and we will not, we hope, have to again for some years.

What a £25 gift pays for.

The smallest amount we have suggested for the appeal is £25. That is, in round numbers, what it costs to commission a single small mortise repair — to replace one loose oak peg, plane back to soundness, and re-set the joint. There are roughly forty-eight such repairs needed across the four legs of the bimah. A £100 gift pays for, in effect, four of them. The Trust has already committed £1,500 from its general reserves toward the work; we are asking the wider readership of this site, and the congregation's friends in Plymouth and beyond, to help us raise the balance.

We will, as we always do, report on every pound spent in the next annual report. If we raise more than we need, the surplus will be added to the Fabric Fund's reserves against the next piece of work the building tells us it needs — which, we expect, will not be long in coming. If we raise less than we need, the trustees have agreed to make up the shortfall from the endowment's annual income. The work will be done either way. We are simply asking whether anyone reading this would like to make some part of it theirs.

Why this matters, briefly.

It would be possible, at this point in the essay, to write a paragraph about the importance of Anglo-Jewish heritage, about the symbolic weight of the bimah as the place from which the words of the Torah are read, about the way a small congregation in a small city has held a small fire alight for an unaccountably long time. All of that is true. None of it is the reason we are doing this work. The reason is that the timber is failing and we have the means, with a little help, to put it right. That is enough.

How to give.

You can give online via the support page, by bank transfer (write to [email protected] for the account details), or by cheque payable to "BASH TRUST" and posted to the registered office in central London. We will acknowledge every gift personally. We will not pass your details to any other organisation. We will, with your permission, write to you once when the work is finished, with a short photograph of the completed bimah.

Thank you for reading. The room will, we hope, still be standing in 2262.

David Goldberg is the Chair of the trustees of BASH TRUST and a barrister at Gray's Inn Tax Chambers. He has served as a trustee of the charity for a number of years.