Stamford Hill is an area in Inner London, England, located about 5.5 miles north-east of Charing Cross. The neighbourhood is a sub-district of Hackney, the major component of the London Borough of Hackney, and is known for its Hasidic community, the largest concentration of Hasidic Jews in Europe. The district takes its name from the eponymous hill, which reaches a height of 33m AOD, and the originally Roman A10 also takes the name “Stamford Hill”, as it makes its way through the area.
The hill is believed to be named after the ford where the A10 crossed the Hackney Brook on the southern edge of the hill. Sanford and Saundfordhill are referred to in documents from the 1200s, and mean “sand Ford”. Roque’s map of 1745 shows a bridge, which replaced the ford, referred to as “Stamford Bridge”. The hill rises gently from the former course of the Hackney Brook to the south, and its steeper northern slope provided a natural boundary for the traditional (parish and borough) extent of Hackney, and now does so for the wider modern borough.
Stamford Hill is at the centre of an Ashkenazistrictly-Orthodox Jewish, and predominantly Hasidic, community estimated to be some 15,000 strong, and growing at a rate of around 5% each year. It is the largest Hasidic community in Europe, and referred to as a square mile of piety, reflecting the many Jewish men seen walking in their distinctive clothes on their way to and from worship. The congregations often represent historical links with particular areas of Eastern Europe in their dress and their worship. Many also retain links with congregations around the world. The largest of these congregations is the Satmar dynasty, which has five directly associated synagogues; Belz is another large community, with several synagogues. As well as Stamford Hill’s own Jewish population, there are also many observant Jews in neighbouring Upper Clapton, West Hackney, Stoke Newington, and Tottenham; there may be as many as 50 synagogues in this wider area. A volunteer emergency response first-aid service called Hatzola (the Hebrew word for rescue) and a volunteer community watch group called Shomrim (the Hebrew word for watchmen) are run by, and largely for, the Jewish community.
The strictly Orthodox Jewish community relies mostly on private education for schooling, with almost all Jewish children attending private, single-sex Jewish schools. In 2005, the Stamford Hill Yesodey Hatorah Senior Girls’ School achieved voluntary-aided status. In 2014, the Oxford, Cambridge, and RSA (OCR) Exam board, having conducted an investigation into alleged exam malpractice, concluded that the school had redacted questions involving the evolution of species on GCSE science exam questions. Ofqual subsequently ruled that blocking out exam questions is malpractice, and, accordingly, not permissible. The same year, it was reported by the BBC that many of the yeshivas in the area “usually don’t provide any maths, English or science” classes and were operating “without the most basic health, safety, and child welfare checks”. In an article on Stamford Hill yeshivas, The Telegraph cited government documents obtained by Channel 4’s Dispatches and the Jewish Chronicle as saying that between 800 and 1000 boys aged between 13 and 16 are “missing” from the school system in the borough of Hackney alone.
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