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Another lesser schism was to afflict the community from 1855-60 when there was a dispute over the election of representatives to the Board of Deputies and the burial of a child. Despite personal intervention by the Chief Rabbi to resolve the dispute the gap could not be closed. In 1857 he was forced to allow a rival congregation to form called the Hebrew New Congregation, headed by Rabbi Elkin with Moses Solomon as President. The group rented a room at the Mitre Tavern in Kent Street for use as a synagogue. The burial dispute also led to the establishment of a new Jewish cemetery with an ohel in Kingston Cemetery in 1858, though this only ever saw two burials before it was closed and sold back in 1879. The breakaway community finally rejoined the main body in 1860 and the Kingston cemetery was to come into their control.

This cemetery was to provoke additional communal discord in 1870 due to unsavory scenes relating to the burial of a Jewish prisoner in the plot. In 1870 a Jewish prisoner died at Parkhurst Prison on the Isle of Wight. Abraham Leon Emanuel, the Honorary Prison Visitor (under the Jewish Association for the Diffusion of Religious Knowledge) was informed a Jewish prisoner had died at the prison. He proceeded to claim the body to prevent it being buried at Parkhurst with Christian rites, and was instructed to ask either Portsea or Southampton Jewish communities to bury the prisoner, if all their expenses were all met.

Both synagogues refused the duty. It may be noted that congregations were generally reluctant to accept the bodies of outsiders or felons. Emanuel proposed using the Kingston Road Cemetery at which point the Chief Rabbi intervened and asked Portsea to do their duty. They refused the Chief Rabbi saying that in fact Southampton was closer. When the Chief Rabbi contacted Southampton they gave the identical excuse! Emanuel then asked the Portsmouth community again and he got a note back saying "that the Warden had no reply to make".

At this point Emanuel and his father brought the body to Portsmouth on the Monday afternoon the prisoner having died the previous Friday. Then, however, Emanuel received a letter, written on the Sunday, from Portsmouth, offering to bury the prisoner after all. Emanuel proceeded with the burial at Kingstone Cemetery as planned since all the arrangements were made. Also as Emanuel put it so succinctly himself, "...I buried the remains of the poor convict, where he found a welcome grave, rather than inter him in a cemetery to which he had been thrice refused admission--once at the request of no less a personage than the Chief Rabbi...". Unfortunately some officials of the synagogue turned up and created some sort of unsavory "scene" at the funeral. Emanuel was publically criticised for his part in proceeding and defended his actions in the Jewish Chronicle. He was adamant that the Kingston Road burial ground did not belong to the synagogue and was not in their jurisdiction. The fact that he was able to organise the practical arrangements at the cemetery with the parish authorities but without the permission of the synagogue tends to support this claim.

The Portsmouth Congregation suffered a further damaging split in 1891. A formal dissident group formed, who it is thought styled themselves by a Hebrew title translating as the "Association Concerned with Justice in the Community". They apparently disputing the authority of the management committee and wishing to change some of the rules of the synagogue. Part of the issue may have related to the mode of synagogue offerings and the way in which seat rentals were apportioned. The sucessionalists wanted the seat rentals to be re-apportioned according to position in the synagogue. They were accused of being a "secret society" by the committee and no accommodation could be reached. They became a separate congregation in 1891 calling themselves the "Portsmouth New Hebrew Congregation". The group officially succeeded in 1892 when the Chief Rabbi allowed them their own kosher meat supply and the group were officially censured and deprived of their membership at the main synagogue.