King George V School

In December 1907 the Aden Resident received a letter from the Anglo-Jewish Association in London to the effect that it was proposed to establish a Jewish school in Aden. The Association had already written to the leader of the Jewish community there, the 3rd President Menahem Messa (Yehouda Menahem Moshe), to find out what percentage of the running costs the Jewish community could cover. In fact Messa for the previous two years had already been active in trying to establish a school in Crater. The problem was finding a suitable location in or close to the Jewish Quarter as otherwise mothers would not take their sons to school. A possible location was on or near the site of the old slaughterhouse.

Another suggestion, from Messa, was that it could be on the site of the public latrines that needed to be moved as unfortunately they were located alongside the road to the Tawela Tanks, along which royalty and lesser visitors had to pass on their way to view this obligatory tourist attraction. In addition the authorities were not satisfied that the school would be financially viable as on Messa’s own admission there would be a significant shortfall in income.

The impasse appeared to be broken in 1911 when Messa guaranteed to meet all expenditure. He was setting up an endowment of 25,000 Rupees with which he would enter the ‘buy-to-let’ market, the income from which would cover the costs of the school. Messa’s intention was that the primary object of the school would be to impart religious teachings, with nearly all lessons being in Hebrew. This was not quite what the Resident had in mind, but as the school would not be grant-aided there was nothing much he could do about it. The authorities were also critical about the ‘guarantee’ which was not acceptable in either an official or business sense.

In the end Messa built the school himself and on Christmas Eve 1912 he informed the Residency by letter that he had built it to commemorate the visit of Their Majesties to Aden in November 1911 and that he was seeking approval for it to be named King George V School. Bombay granted permission for this in March 1913. Outline plans show King George V School as being next door to the Residency School.

In March 1920 the school was inspected by Major Meek, the Assistant Resident responsible for all schools in Aden. He found that there were 250 boys on the school roll, 90 of whom paid no fees. The school taught boys from the age or 5 to 13, with nearly all lessons in Hebrew and most on religion. No Arabic was being taught, not even the alphabet. In essence Meek found the school to be too old-fashioned in outlook, with the Jewish community making no effort to integrate or modernise. Their mind-set was defensive: the Jews of the Yemen had been down-trodden and despised for 1,300 years, the Aden Jews sharing the same fate. The latter had not made the most of the position of social tolerance that had been achieved in the previous 20 years of British administration in Aden.  

The anti-Jewish of riots of 1947 resulted in the torching of the school, amongst many other Jewish properties in Crater.

King George V Boy's School on fire

Additional note on Jewish schools in Aden

In 1921 an application to open another Jewish school was approved. In fact to re-open the school as Mori Suleman Jamal had had a school in 1913 which had 101 boys and seven girls attending it until he joined the staff of King George’s when it opened. This school was grant-aided and offered a much more rounded education than King George’s, but at a pretty basic level. Mori restarted the school with 40 pupils, with he and his son being the only teachers. As well as Mori’s school, in the 1920s there were about five other very small unofficial ‘schools’  being run from private houses. Meek inferred that some of the community wanted to modernise their way of living and it was for this reason he had noticed a growing tendency for the Aden Jew to find a wife from Palestine rather than from Aden.