Criminal
10-11-2003, 05:41 PM
http://www.newindpress.com/Newsitems.asp?ID=IE420030317011353&Title=Features+-+People+%26+Lifestyle&rLink=0
Irish Jews -- Sitting Shiva on a dying way?
Reuters
CORK: Fred Rosehill stood in the 120-year-old Jewish cemetery overlooking the River Lee in Cork and wondered whether it would have to close, with so few Jews left in the southern Irish city.
"I don't want to be the one to blow out the candle," said the 75-year-old retired haberdasher, pointing to graves where Jewish victims of the sinking of the liner Lusitania, torpedoed off the Irish coast in 1915, as well as his friends and family, lie buried.
The demise of Ireland's Jewish community, which gave Israel its sixth president, Chaim Herzog, and Dublin a two-time Lord Mayor, Robert Briscoe, has been forecast for years.
A plummeting Jewish population, from some 5,500 just after World War II to about 1,100 today in this staunchly Roman Catholic country of 3.9 million, seems to bear that out.
The Cork synagogue, once the place of worship for a thriving community of some 300, has not had a presiding rabbi for 39 years and has only a couple of services a year.
Dublin, which once boasted seven synagogues, has just one Orthodox and one progressive, or "reformed" in U.S. terms.
Some say it is time to sit shiva -- the Jewish fashion of mourning -- for a community with links in Ireland dating back to the 11th century.
"It's the demise of what we would normally call the traditional, Orthodox northern European Jew who came in the 1880s to flee persecution," Rosehill said.
But if so, how can one explain the buzz in the Terenure Hebrew Congregation temple in Dublin at a recent Saturday service as men warmly greeted each other and conversed -- an atmosphere one member likened to "a pub, but without the beer?"
Or the 25 youngsters between the ages of 6 and 14 who show up on Sunday mornings at the Dublin Jewish Progressive Congregation for Hebrew class?
Or the packed Jewish singles social in Dublin and the 100 adults and children attending a Hannukah party in Cork?
NOT DYING, BUT EVOLVING
In this land of contradictions and paradoxes, it would seem that reports of the death of Ireland's Jewish community are premature -- but then again not far off the mark.
"You ask me is there a future here?" Carl Nelkin, 41, a lawyer who negotiates aviation finance deals, contemplated over a cappuccino in one of Dublin's growing number of coffee bars.
"I would say there could well be but it will be different to the experience we've had up until now. I think we have to look at the community not as dying, but evolving."
What has gone are the kosher butcher and Jewish shops on Clanbrassil Street, once the Jewish section of town.
The small red-brick Adelaide Road synagogue, which looks like a typical eastern European Jewish temple, has been converted to offices and has a "to let" sign out front.
The traditional community of Irish Jews, many of them descendants of immigrants who fled the Kovno Gubernia province of Lithuania during pogroms there in the late 19th century, is indeed dying out.
Many of the faces in the Orthodox Terenure synagogue are in their 50s and 60s, and younger people are in scarce supply.
IRISH IMMIGRATION POLICY BLAMED
Some say Ireland, where incidents of overt anti-Semitism are few and far between, lost its chance to stem that decline in the years immediately preceding and following World War II, when 6 million Jews were killed in the Nazi Holocaust.
When Ireland held its first Holocaust Memorial day earlier this year, Justice Minister Michael McDowell apologized for official policy which was inspired by "a culture of muted anti-Semitism in Ireland," that discouraged immigration by Europe's shattered Jews.
"At an official level the Irish state was at best coldly polite and behind closed doors antipathetic, hostile and unfeeling toward the Jews," McDowell said.
By some estimates, only 30 Jews were given asylum before the war, none during it, only a handful afterwards.
It has also never been fully explained why Eamon De Valera, president during World War II when Ireland remained neutral but implicitly backed the Allies, signed the condolence book at the German Embassy after Hitler committed suicide.
Raphael Siev, who runs the Jewish Museum in Dublin and believes that immigrant Jewish glassmakers may well have introduced the art of crystal glassmaking to Ireland, said the apology was welcome, but the damage done was irreparable.
He said his father was denied permission to bring his own brother to Ireland before the war, even though he was ready to make all the necessary guarantees.
Some Jews, he said, were let in if they converted to Roman Catholicism beforehand, but after the war the clampdown continued.
"It (the community) needed a spark," Siev said in the hallway of the small museum filled with memorabilia from closed Dublin synagogues and of a Jewish lifestyle that is no more.
"It's a dying community simply because of the very strict restrictions on admission," he said.
Irish Jews -- Sitting Shiva on a dying way?
Reuters
CORK: Fred Rosehill stood in the 120-year-old Jewish cemetery overlooking the River Lee in Cork and wondered whether it would have to close, with so few Jews left in the southern Irish city.
"I don't want to be the one to blow out the candle," said the 75-year-old retired haberdasher, pointing to graves where Jewish victims of the sinking of the liner Lusitania, torpedoed off the Irish coast in 1915, as well as his friends and family, lie buried.
The demise of Ireland's Jewish community, which gave Israel its sixth president, Chaim Herzog, and Dublin a two-time Lord Mayor, Robert Briscoe, has been forecast for years.
A plummeting Jewish population, from some 5,500 just after World War II to about 1,100 today in this staunchly Roman Catholic country of 3.9 million, seems to bear that out.
The Cork synagogue, once the place of worship for a thriving community of some 300, has not had a presiding rabbi for 39 years and has only a couple of services a year.
Dublin, which once boasted seven synagogues, has just one Orthodox and one progressive, or "reformed" in U.S. terms.
Some say it is time to sit shiva -- the Jewish fashion of mourning -- for a community with links in Ireland dating back to the 11th century.
"It's the demise of what we would normally call the traditional, Orthodox northern European Jew who came in the 1880s to flee persecution," Rosehill said.
But if so, how can one explain the buzz in the Terenure Hebrew Congregation temple in Dublin at a recent Saturday service as men warmly greeted each other and conversed -- an atmosphere one member likened to "a pub, but without the beer?"
Or the 25 youngsters between the ages of 6 and 14 who show up on Sunday mornings at the Dublin Jewish Progressive Congregation for Hebrew class?
Or the packed Jewish singles social in Dublin and the 100 adults and children attending a Hannukah party in Cork?
NOT DYING, BUT EVOLVING
In this land of contradictions and paradoxes, it would seem that reports of the death of Ireland's Jewish community are premature -- but then again not far off the mark.
"You ask me is there a future here?" Carl Nelkin, 41, a lawyer who negotiates aviation finance deals, contemplated over a cappuccino in one of Dublin's growing number of coffee bars.
"I would say there could well be but it will be different to the experience we've had up until now. I think we have to look at the community not as dying, but evolving."
What has gone are the kosher butcher and Jewish shops on Clanbrassil Street, once the Jewish section of town.
The small red-brick Adelaide Road synagogue, which looks like a typical eastern European Jewish temple, has been converted to offices and has a "to let" sign out front.
The traditional community of Irish Jews, many of them descendants of immigrants who fled the Kovno Gubernia province of Lithuania during pogroms there in the late 19th century, is indeed dying out.
Many of the faces in the Orthodox Terenure synagogue are in their 50s and 60s, and younger people are in scarce supply.
IRISH IMMIGRATION POLICY BLAMED
Some say Ireland, where incidents of overt anti-Semitism are few and far between, lost its chance to stem that decline in the years immediately preceding and following World War II, when 6 million Jews were killed in the Nazi Holocaust.
When Ireland held its first Holocaust Memorial day earlier this year, Justice Minister Michael McDowell apologized for official policy which was inspired by "a culture of muted anti-Semitism in Ireland," that discouraged immigration by Europe's shattered Jews.
"At an official level the Irish state was at best coldly polite and behind closed doors antipathetic, hostile and unfeeling toward the Jews," McDowell said.
By some estimates, only 30 Jews were given asylum before the war, none during it, only a handful afterwards.
It has also never been fully explained why Eamon De Valera, president during World War II when Ireland remained neutral but implicitly backed the Allies, signed the condolence book at the German Embassy after Hitler committed suicide.
Raphael Siev, who runs the Jewish Museum in Dublin and believes that immigrant Jewish glassmakers may well have introduced the art of crystal glassmaking to Ireland, said the apology was welcome, but the damage done was irreparable.
He said his father was denied permission to bring his own brother to Ireland before the war, even though he was ready to make all the necessary guarantees.
Some Jews, he said, were let in if they converted to Roman Catholicism beforehand, but after the war the clampdown continued.
"It (the community) needed a spark," Siev said in the hallway of the small museum filled with memorabilia from closed Dublin synagogues and of a Jewish lifestyle that is no more.
"It's a dying community simply because of the very strict restrictions on admission," he said.