Listen: Alex Moss, Jack Kaye, Bill Fishman
Nos 86-88 Brick Lane were once the location of 'Schewzik's Russian Vapour Baths named after their owner Benjamin Schewzik and located opposite the Great Spitalfields Synagogue.'1 According to the Jewish Museum, London: 'The steam baths were an important part of social and religious life and were mostly used by men following work on a Friday evening at the beginning of the Jewish Sabbath, before they went to synagogue for prayers.'2
The interior of the baths became the subject of a famous abstract painting by David Bomberg called The Mud Bath. Bomberg, one of the Whitechapel Boys, moved with his family to Whitechapel in 1895 and spent his childhood growing up in the Jewish East End.
Jewish Chronicle June 10th 1898, p. 3.
By the time Jerry White was writing his history of the Rothschild Buildings in the 1970s, he found that aside from the other options of public baths or 'a wash down in front of the fire', many of his interviewees indicated the centrality of vapour baths in Jewish religious life for men as well as for women.3
The historian Bill Fishman recalled the site of the Russian Vapour Baths: 'I can see them now,' he said, 'the devout men with their sidelocks and long beards, freshly scrubbed, with towels round their necks, and the women in heavy skirts and wigs, lined up waiting to get into the mikvah. '4
'Sara remembered Shevshik's, the Russian Vapour Baths, opposite. 'They'd sit there all day,' she said, 'the Orthodox, they'd take sandwiches in and it was nicknamed the "Shvitz". They would thrash leaves over your back to increase the circulation of your blood and then after the steam you took a cold dip.'
Lichtenstein, R. On Brick Lane, a chronicle of changes in the East End. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2007, p. 237.
-
His death was considered notable enough to warrant an obituary in the Jewish Chronicle : 'a notable figure has been removed from the East End. Mr Schewzik, who was sixty-two years of age, was both Rabbi and communal worker… In London he built the now popular Russian vapour baths in Brick Lane, Whitechapel.' Jewish Chronicle , April 30th 1915, p. 13. ↩
-
https://jewishmuseum.org.uk/50-objects/2002-27/ accessed 4/12/19. ↩
-
White, J. Rothschild Buildings Life in an East End Tenement Block 1887-1920 , London: Routledge, History Workshop Series, 1980, p. 49. ↩
-
Lichtenstein, R. On Brick Lane, a chronicle of changes in the East End. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2007, p. 32. ↩
Cite This Article
Shewzik's Russian Vapour Baths, jewisheastendmemorymap.org?feature_type=polygon&id=50, accessed May 2025.