Patrick Comerford
As a boy in Dublin, Clanbrassil Street and the labyrinth of streets leading off it offered a certain mystique and intrigue that stirred my youthful imagination. The area between Leonard’s Corner and Kelly’s Corner, and the streets nearby, was still known as ‘Little Jerusalem,’ and was still the heart of Dublin’s Jewish community in the 1950s and into the 1960s.
Although the drift to the southern suburbs of Terenure, Rathfarnham and Churchtown was already happening in the mid-1960s, Little Jerusalem was still an area with small kosher shops, fascia signs in mixtures of English and Hebrew lettering, and small terraced houses that included synagogues for tiny congregations even after the new synagogue opened on Rathfarnham Road, a few doors from the house where I was born.
The Levitas brothers, Max, Morry and Sol, lived on Longwood Avenue and Warren Street in Little Jerusalem Their friend Chaim Herzog lived on Bloomfield Avenue. These four boys were of my father’s generation. The Levitas brothers were the sons of Harry Levitas from the shtetl of Akmeyan in Lithuania and his wife Leah Rick from Riga in Latvia. Both parents fled the pogroms in Tsarist Russia in 1913. They met in Dublin, where both had family members, and they were married in Camden Street Synagogue in August 1914.
Harry Levitas became a prominent activist in the Amalgamated Jewish Tailors’, Machinists’ and Pressers’ Union. It was known in Dublin as ‘the Jewish Union’ and had offices in the same building as the Camden Street Synagogue, so that the house was said to have ‘Jerusalem on one floor, and the New Jerusalem on another’.
The childhood years of the Levitas brothers was marked by poverty, hardship and discrimination. From 1915 to 1927, the family lived in rooms in one house after another in Little Jerusalem: 15 Longwood Avenue (1915), 8 Warren Street (1916-1925) and one single room at 13 Saint Kevin’s Parade (1925-1927).
Max Samuel Levitas was born at 15 Longwood Avenue on 1 June 1915; his brothers, Maurice (1917-2001) and Sol (1917-2001), were born at Warren Street. Another brother Isaac, who was born at Warren Street in 1922, died as a thirteen-month-old infant in a tragic accident in the family home in March 1923. A sister Celia was born at Warren Street in 1923, and a daughter Toby was born later after the family emigrated.
During those childhood years in Little Jerusalem, the Levitas boys attended Saint Peter’s Church of Ireland National School on New Bride Street, beside the Meath Hospital. Their father struggled to earn a living, sometimes dealing in scrap metal, at other times as a travelling salesman, but more often as a tailor’s presser. But he was always an active trade unionist.
The Camden Street Synagogue closed in 1916, and the Levitas family then attended Lennox Street Synagogue, around the corner from their home on Warren Street. It was founded in 1887, and was one of the many small hebroth or shuls in the area set up by recent immigrants from Lithuania and Poland.
Late one Saturday in 1925, the synagogue almost went up in smoke. It was not, however, attempted arson. Four young boys had been anxious to bring the Sabbath to a speedy conclusion in order to go back to playing on the street. They came back into the synagogue to hastily say the final prayers, and accidentally knocked over a candle that set a cloth alight. Other versions of the incident say they knocked over a candle while trying to access the synagogue wine. Whatever the cause, the small blaze was quickly extinguished.
The four ‘culprits’ were the three Levitas brothers – Max, Maurice and Sol Levitas – and Chaim Herzog, the son of the Chief Rabbi, Dr Yitzhak Herzog. The fourth boy, Chaim Herzog (1918-1997), was born in Belfast but had moved to Dublin with his parents in 1919 and lived on Bloomfield Avenue.
Chaim Herzog later went to secondary school in Wesley College, and would become the President of Israel (1983-1993). The other three boys in the incident, the Levitas brothers, moved with their parents that year to one room in 13 Saint Kevin’s Parade. A few doors away was another small shul, the ultra-orthodox Machzikei haDas, founded at No 7 in 1883. But the Levitas family stayed there for less than two years, and eventually moved to the East End of London, where the boys would become heroes in the Battle of Cable Street.
When Harry Levitas was blacklisted by employers for his union activism, the family was forced to move to Glasgow in 1927. In 1930, they moved to Whitechapel in the East End of London, where Harry had two sisters. As teenagers in the East End, the three Levitas boys from Dublin became active in politics. At 19, Max became an East End hero when he was arrested with Jack Clifford for daubing anti-Fascist slogans on Nelson’s Column in 1934.
When Oswald Mosley tried marching through the largely Jewish East End with his blackshirts in 1936, the Levitas brothers resisted and took part in the Battle of Cable Street. By then Max was 21, working as a tailor’s presser in a small workshop in Commercial Street, but Maurice and Sol were still in their teens.
Maurice ‘Morry’ Levitas joined the Connolly Column of the International Brigade in 1937 to fight against Franco in the Spanish Civil War. He spent eleven months in jail, where he suffered violent interrogations, arbitrary beatings, and mock executions before he was released in a prisoner exchange in 1939. During the Second World War, he served in India and Burma with the Royal Army Medical Corps. He later worked as a plumber, teacher and lecturer.
Max led a twenty-one-week rent strike in Whitechapel in 1939, and in September 1940 he led the occupation of the Savoy Hotel’s deep bomb shelters that were reserved for Savoy patrons. The protest forced the authorities to open up Underground stations as bomb shelters for the rest of World War II. Max was elected as a Communist borough councillor in Stepney in the East End in 1945, and he held his seat for a further seventeen years.
Members of the extended Levitas family suffered the fate of many Jews during the Holocaust. Their aunt Sara was burnt to death along with fellow-villagers in the synagogue of Akmeyan; their aunt Rachel was killed with her family by the Nazis in Riga; an uncle was murdered in Paris by the Gestapo.
Max and Maurice Levitas frequently returned to the Dublin of their childhood. Maurice was honoured with Spanish citizenship in 1996 and was among the surviving veterans of the International Brigade who received a civic reception in the Mansion House in 1997. He died in 2001.
Max was in Ireland for the last time in 2015 to re-visit Little Jerusalem, the houses that had been childhood homes, and the former synagogue on Lennox Street. He too received a civic reception in the Mansion House. Max celebrated his 100th birthday in Whitechapel in 2015, when he received personal greetings from President Michael D. Higgins. He died on 2 November 2018. A block of flats on Jubilee Street in Stepney was named Levitas House in 2020 in his honour.
As for the former synagogue that almost burned down 100 years ago, it closed its doors in 1974 and the congregation moved to Stratford College on Zion Road, Rathgar, where it continued to worship until 1981.
Further reading:
Nick Harris, Dublin’s Little Jerusalem (Dublin, 2002).
Cormac Ó Gráda, Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce: A Socioeconomic History (Princeton NJ and Oxford, 2006).
Manus O’Riordan, ‘Citizens of the Republic, Jewish History in Ireland,’ Dublin Review of Books, 2007, avaiable at: https://drb.ie/articles/citizens-of-the-republic-jewish-history-in-ireland/ (accessed 15 September 2025).
‘So Long, Max Levitas’, Spitalfields Life (4 November 2018), available at: https://spitalfieldslife.com/2018/11/04/so-long-max-levitas/ (accessed 15 September 2025)
This essay was published as ‘Four Boys Growing up in Dublin’s ‘Little Jerusalem’ and a Synagogue Fire’, pp 153-156, Chapter 36 in Childhood and the Irish, A miscellany, ed Salvador Ryan (Dublin: Wordwell, 2025), xviii + 344 pp, ISBN: 978-1-916742-19-2, lauched at the Royal Irish Academy, Dublin, last Monday (1 December 2025)
Biographical note (p 340):
Patrick Comerford is an Anglican priest and a former professor in Trinity College Dublin and the Church of Ireland Theological Institute. He lives in retirement in Milton Keynes
