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A quite remembrance day in Dublin

Tuesday, 29 April 2008

A small pocket of South Dublin city, where Victorian splendour intertwines with spicy aromas from Muslim corner stores, used to be home to hundreds of Jewish families. What happened to them?
Friday, May 2 - Holocaust Remembrance Day - will be quiet in Dublin. The many synagogues, schools and private houses once occupied by Jews have long gone and Clanbrassil Street holds no trace of the 23 kosher shops it used to be home to.
Although the main influx of Jews arrived in Ireland between 1880 and 1910, the 1940s saw a flourishing community thrive in the Clanbrassil Street, Portobello and South Circular Road areas, at the time dubbed ‘Little Jerusalem’.
Raphael Siev, curator at Dublin’s Irish Jewish Museum in Portobello, believes it was initially by accident that this area was chosen as home for so many.
Ships carrying Jewish families journeying from central Europe to America stopped in Irish ports for supplies and, according to Rapheal, “some were probably deceived into getting off the boat by unscrupulous shipmasters, so they could sell a ticket to Irish people wanting to get to America”.
“There were some who actually mistook their destination,” he further reveals. “there are stories of ‘Cork’ being mistaken for ‘New York’ and ‘das is Irland’ (‘that is your destination’ in Yiddish) when they meant Ireland.”
Opened in June 1985 the Irish Jewish Museum once housed a synagogue and contains a substantial collection of memorabilia of Irish Jewish life including photographs, paintings, testimonials and even a kitchen depicting a typical Sabbath meal setting from the late 19th century.

Raphael’s crooked black cap and tumbling sideburns compliment an accent that, unbelievably, has no trace of Irish after a lifetime here, as he recalls attending the museum’s synagogue as a child.
“It was pretty full,” he remembers. “There were lots of Jewish people in displaced person’s camps throughout Europe after the Second World War. They had been in concentration camps and had been displaced. The Americans sent a team of meat slaughterers to kill cattle so the meat could be packaged and kosher meat could be sent to the Jewish people at the displaced person’s camp. And I remember the workers coming to the synagogue at the weekend at the end of the prayer service.”
Author of ‘Shalom Ireland: A Social History of Jews in Modern Ireland’, Ray Rivlin also recalls the Jewish neighbourhood.
“I have memories of shopping with my mother in Clanbrassil Street, attending Greenville Hall Synagogue, the games of rummy that used to be played in the afternoons with a horde of visiting cousins and an enormous cupboard in the kitchen filled from top to bottom with sponge cakes for Passover.”
Born in Harrington Street, Rivlin attended the Zion Schools in Bloomfield Avenue when Dublin’s Jewish population peaked at just under 5,000. However, the end of the Second World War marked the beginning of the decline in population, with Irish census figures showing a decrease between 1946-61 of 16.7 per cent, increasing to 19.1 per cent in the 10 years to 1971 and a staggering 44.9 per cent in the two decades to 1991.
What drove them away? At ceremonies for Ireland’s first Holocaust Memorial Day in 2003, then Justice Minister Michael McDowell apologised for “a culture of muted anti-Semitism” which saw Ireland refuse entry to thousands of desperate Jews before and during the Second World War, squandering hope of expanding the Jewish population here.
Intermarriage was another factor as young Jews began socialising and eventually marrying into the local population. With marriage laws then requiring conversion to Catholicism, the ‘Jewish gene’ - passed through the mother – effectively stopped in some cases with that generation.
When writing Shalom Ireland, Ray Rivlin had “high hopes the community would be revived” but now accepts that “we may never become quite extinct but we will only survive as dwindling numbers in small pockets”.
Raphael is equally pessimistic. He says: “The area has ceased to be Jewish. They’ve all moved out to the suburbs of Dublin. Those who didn’t want to move – the very old people – they stayed on until they died, and of course now, it ceases to be a Jewish area,” he pauses, “completely.”

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