Destinations - Ireland

Ireland (Eire)

Trinity College, Dublin

The Annals of Innisfallen* tell us that in 1079 five Jews “arrived from over the sea”. They were believed to be merchants from Rouen. Little more is known until 1492 when it was likely others arrived following the expulsions from Portugal. Interestingly the community later grew on the back of military activities rather than merchant trading. In Holland Jacob Pereira was involved in provisioning the Dutch army. Following James II’s abdication in 1688, William and Mary became King and Queen of England, Scotland and Ireland. The Anglo-Dutch Jewish military company of Machado and Pereira was the forces’ provisioning contractors at the time of the Boyne Campaign of 1690. It established a bakery in Waringstown, Co. Down, in 1690 for their Majesties’ forces in Ireland**. After the Napoleonic wars more Jews emigrated from Central Europe. From the 1880s Jewish communities developed in Belfast, Cork, Derry, Drogheda, Dublin, Limerick, Lurgan and Waterford as a result of Eastern European pogroms

Dublin , Ireland .  Greenville Hall, formerly a synagogue and now housing a high technology corporation

In 1921 London-born Lady Eileen Desart (née Bischoffsheim, wife of an Irish Catholic aristocrat and member of the Franco-Prussian family of bankers who founded the La Banque de Paris & Pays Bas) became the first woman senator in the newly independent Irish parliament. In 1925 Isaac Herzog became the first Chief Rabbi of the Irish Free State. His son Chaim, who grew up in Dublin, became President of Israel in 1983. Robert Briscoe, the son of an immigrant from Latvia and supporter in the fight for Irish Statehood, became Lord Mayor of Dublin in 1956 - as did his son, Ben, 32 years later. But Robert was not the first – William Annyas was elected mayor of Youghal, Co. Cork in 1555.

The Irish Jewish Museum, Dublin (former Walworth Road Synagogue) flying the flag

It is perhaps with a certain amount of Irish irony that the annual celebration of the life of one of Ireland’s Jewish sons is a fictitious character! Hero of James Joyce’s Ulysses, Leopold Bloom was ‘brought up’ in Dublin’s Portobello (also known as ‘Little Jerusalem’) where The Irish Jewish Museum is situated in the former Walworth Road Synagogue.

*A chronicle of World and Irish history - produced between 950 and 1380

**The Jews in England 1485-1850. David Katz

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