BRADFORD'S history as a world-class industrial city owes much to the Jewish textile merchants settling here in the 19th century.

Bradford Literature Festival shines a spotlight on the city's Jewish heritage with a tour of significant places led by historian Nigel Grizzard.

"When German Jews came to Bradford from the 1820s onwards, they made an indelible mark on its industrial and cultural life, helping to develop the small town into a major commercial city," says Nigel. "At the heart of this change was Manningham."

The tour offers the chance to step back in time to the Jewish Quarter, as Manningham was known in the late 19th century, and hear tales of Bradford-born figures such as war poet Humbert Wolfe and artist Sir William Rothenstein, who painted notable people of his time, including Oscar Wilde and Albert Einstein.

Among the stops on the tour is a tree planted in honour of Anne Frank in Lister Park. The commemorative tree was planted earlier this year by the step-sister of the wartime diarist in her honour by her step-sister, Dr Eva Schloss, honorary life president of the Anne Frank Trust UK.

The chestnut tree sapling was given to Bradford Council by the Anne Frank House Amsterdam in recognition of the relationship between the Trust and the local authority. The sapling was taken from a chestnut tree behind the secret annexe where Anne and her family hid in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam. The tree was one of her only links to the outside world during the years she spent in hiding and she wrote about it in her diary on May 13, 1944: "Our chestnut tree is in full bloom. It's covered with leaves and is even more beautiful than last year."

Also on the heritage trail is a tree and plaque dedicated to Olive Messer, the first Jewish woman to become a Lord Mayor of Bradford, and the home of Jacob Moser, a former Lord Mayor and philanthropist.

Mr Grizzard will also reveal Mount Royd, the home of poet Humbert Wolfe, an Italian-born poet from a Jewish family who was brought up in Bradford and became one of the most popular British authors of the 1920s.

The tour will take in the Kidertransport Hostel, now the Carlton Hotel in Manningham, where 24 boys lived during the war, after arriving in Britain via the railway service which transported 10,000 Jewish children to safety.

The boys were brought to Bradford from a camp in Dovercourt, Kent. Their new home was the Bradford Jewish Refugee Hostel, set up by Oswald Stroud, founder of worsted manufacturers Stroud Riley Drummond on Lumb Lane. After Kristallnacht, Mr Stroud highlighted the plight of Jewish children to the Bradford Committee for German Jewry and suggested ways they could help. It was his wife who suggested a home for refugee children, and a property on Parkfield Road was bought and furnished. Mrs Stroud travelled to Dovercourt to select boys, aged 14 to 16, who went on to attend Drummond School. Most of them lost their families in the Holocaust.

The heritage trail also takes in Spring Gardens, where the city's first orthodox synagogue established in 1906, and ends at the Bradford Reform Synagogue.

* The Jewish Heritage Trail starts on the steps of Cartwright Hall on Sunday, May 17 at 2pm and finishes at the historic Bradford Synagogue at 3pm.