In what became known as the 'immigrant districts' - Red Bank, Strangeways and Lower Broughton - the Eastern Europeans developed a way of life that, to start with, was very similar to life in the homelands. They spoke Yiddish, read Yiddish newspapers and books, and worshipped in small stiebls, in which sermons were delivered in Yiddish by rabbis who had come to Manchester from Eastern Europe.

The stiebls, of which there were at least 20 in Manchester by 1900, served also as a source of material and social support to new arrivals. Though never entirely cut off from their Christian neighbours, Jewish workers at first knew little or nothing of such regular pastimes of working-class Manchester as football and cricket.

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