17 October 2019

The Synagogues of Dublin:
18, Rathmore Villas, Terenure

The small Machzikei Hadass synagogue is discreetly located in heart of Terenure village (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

Patrick Comerford

The small Machzikei Hadass synagogue at 18 Rathmore Villas, behind 77 Terenure Road North, is within a short walking distance of Terenure Synagogue on Rathfarnham Road – and from the house where I was born. Yet, its discreet location in the heart of Terenure village makes this one of Dublin’s least-known synagogues.

Although this synagogue was founded in 1968, its beginnings go back to the foundation of a synagogue in 1883 at Saint Kevin’s Parade, off Clanbrassil Street, in Dublin’s ‘Little Jerusalem.’

The Jewish community in Dublin numbered about 400 or 500 people in the 1880s. But the city had only one synagogue, at Saint Mary’s Abbey, off Capel Street. In the eyes of the new Jewish refugees and migrants from East Europe arriving in Dublin in the 1880s, this one synagogue was quite Anglicised, too modern and assimilated and with something of a German-Jewish character.

Following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, a large number of pogroms broke out throughout the Russian empire, leading to a large exodus of Jewish people from Russia, Poland and present-day Lithuania and Latvia.

The new arrivals in Dublin first settled mainly in the area clustered around Portobello, the South Circular Road and Clanbrassil Street that became known as ‘Little Jerusalem.’

They never felt fully at home in the synagogue at Saint Mary’s Abbey and formed ad hoc minyanim or quorums of ten adult males in private houses. These small congregations led in turn to the eventual foundation of half a dozen or more small synagogues in Little Jerusalem.

One of these small synagogues was founded in Saint Kevin’s Parade, off Clanbrassil Street, in 1883. It is was one the last of the small synagogues founded in the area at that time. The founder and first President (Parnes) of the synagogue, Reuven Bradlaw, was also involved in the foundation of the Bais Olam or Jewish burial ground in Dolphin’s Barn, where he is buried. He was one of the men who carried a Sefer Torah at the opening ceremony for the synagogue on Adelaide Road in 1892.

While most of these earlier, small synagogues in the ‘Little Jerusalem’ area came together in 1920s in the synagogue at Greenville Hall on the South Circular Road, this synagogue maintained its separate identity in the decades that followed.

By the time the congregation moved to Terenure in 1968, it was known as Machzikei Hadass (מחזיקי הדת, ‘those who reinforce the Law’). The name comes from a 19th century organisation of synagogues and yeshivas in East Europe that aimed to improve Jewish education and observance, and may have been added at the time of the move to the present site in Terenure in 1968.

Machzikei Hadass moved from Saint Kevin’s Parade to Terenure over 50 years ago (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

The Steinberg family arrived from Munkatch in Czechoslovakia in 1928. Aharon Steinberg was responsible for a regeneration of the synagogue in Saint Kevin’s Parade, and he may have given it its current name when it moved to its present site at Rathmore Villas, behind 77 Terenure Road North.

Aharon Steinberg presided over the move over half a century ago, in April 1968, not long before he died. A marble plaque commemorating the move can be seen at the entrance, beside the original foundation plaque. The Aron Kodesh or holy ark holding the Torah Scrolls is the original one from Saint Kevin’s Parade.

The name of Reuven Bradlaw’s wife, as donor, is inscribed on the silver yad or Torah pointer used to this day in the Machzikei Hadass. His name and the date 1883 are on the marble foundation plaque at the entrance to the synagogue.

The synagogue celebrated its centenary on Shabbos VaYigash, 10 December 1983, with the Chief Rabbi, Dr David Rosen, and the late Judge Wine in the box, and with over 100 people in the synagogue and at a Kiddush that lasted rather longer than usual.

When the synagogue at Greenville Hall on the South Circular Road closed in 1984, many of its members joined the observant community of Machzikei Hadass in Terenure, which offered a warm welcome to newcomers who were less observant religiously than its traditional membership.

Two of Aharon Steinberg’s sons were Presidents of the synagogue: Louis Steinberg, who died in 1980 and Jack (Yankele) Steinberg, who was President from 1983 to 1997 and who died in Manchester in 2009.

Almost all of the current regular attenders came to this synagogue in recent decades. Even though the congregation may struggle to reach a minyan of ten adult males on a Saturday, the synagogue has benefited from the trickle of immigration in recent years, and it celebrated its first Bar Mitzvahs in 18 years in 2011.

The synagogue at Saint Kevin’s Parade, off Clanbrassil Street, Dublin, was founded in 1883 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

Yesterday: 17, Terenure Synagogue, Rathfarnham Road

Tomorrow: 19, Some other buildings in Dublin.

Why the soft light at
St Ives continues to
attract creative artists

The soft light at St Ives has long drawn artists to the coastal town in Cornwall (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019; click on images for full-screen resolution)

Patrick Comerford

The soft light reflected off the turquoise water that surrounds St Ives has long drawn artists and holiday makers to this coastal town in Cornwall, with its micro-climate, many beaches and the surrounding moorland.

While I was in St Ives last week I experienced the particular quality of light that has captivated artists for centuries and how St Ives continues to inspire a thriving artistic community.

Some have said that the history of St Ives can be written as an account of the many artists who came and went in this small town, who knew whom, who drank where, and who showed at this gallery or that.

Although Virginia Woolf’s novel To The Lighthouse (1927) is set on the Isle of Skye, she was inspired by St Ives, where she had gone on holidays since her childhood. She asked in 1921: ‘Why am I so incredibly and incurably romantic about Cornwall? One’s past, I suppose; I see children running in the garden … The sound of the sea at night … almost forty years of life, all built on that, permeated by that: so much I could never explain.’

In the decades leading up to World War II, St Ives become home to some of the world’s leading modern artists. They included some of the leading modern artists of their time, and they represented Britain’s contribution to an international search for an art that respected modernism’s abstract values and was suited to the post-war, post-Holocaust world.

St Ives provided a safe haven where the values of international modernism might be protected. The critic Lawrence Alloway said the post-war generation of artists ‘could neither start again, nor stay as it was, as if nothing had happened.’ It was a generation ‘torn by conflicts of pre-war formality and post-war directness.’

The art of St Ives was set apart from the neo-romanticism of Henry Moore and Graham Sutherland that had become the dominant form of modern art in 1940s Britain.

The Penwith Gallery in St Ives (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

The St Ives phenomenon started with the migration there at the beginning of World War II of Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson and Naum Gabo. The painter Alfred Wallis and the potter Bernard Leach were at also the heart of this group of artists.

Patrick Heron referred those artists who developed their careers after the war as the ‘middle generation,’ for they were in the middle between the pre-war modernists and younger painters who were influenced by American abstract expressionists.

The most internationally artist working in St Ives at this time was by Barbara Hepworth, a sculptor of the older generation. In the early 1960s, she returned to some of her earlier ideas, realising realised that the ideals of the 1930s still had value. It was, after all, veterans of the ideological battles of the 1930s who founded the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and other peace organisations.

Barbara Hepworth and her husband Ben Nicholson made extensive visits to Cornwall and further afield in Europe. She visited the studios of Pablo Picasso, Constantin Brancusi, and Jean Arp, and became acquainted with the artists Georges Braque and Piet Mondrian. These visits were hugely influential, and Barbara Hepworth took back many radical ideas and techniques to her studio in Cornwall, changing the course of her sculptural practice.

Ben Nicholson had his beach-front studio at Porthmeor, and over the years he and Barbara Hepworth were joined at St Ives by other artists. Patrick Heron, Peter Lanyon and Wilhelmina Barns-Graham all worked there, and Francis Bacon took over Studio 3 for six months in 1959, with Terry Frost in the neighbouring studio.

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, a significant figure in the St Ives story, moved to St Ives in 1940. Her abstract landscapes are important examples of the visual language she pioneered alongside artists such as William Scott and Roger Hilton.

Bernard Leach had already settled in St Ives in 1920, and had founded his pottery with his Japanese friend Shoji Hamada. Leach remains one of the most influential figures in British ceramics.

When word spread about this creative hub on the Cornish coast, many European and American artists visited St Ives.

The Penwith Society of Arts was formed at a meeting in the Castle Inn 70 years ago in 1949 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

The Penwith Society of Arts was formed in St Ives in early 1949 by abstract artists who broke away from the more conservative St Ives Society of Artists. After a town meeting in the Castle Inn, a dissident group set up shop in Fore Street, St Ives, 70 years ago in 1949.

The new society was originally led by Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson, with members of the Crypt Group of the St Ives Society, including Peter Lanyon and Sven Berlin. Other early members included Leonard Fuller, Isobel Heath, Alexander Mackenzie, John Wells, Bryan Wynter, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, David Haughton, Denis Mitchell, and the printer Guido Morris. Herbert Read was invited to become the first president and Henry Moore was an honorary member.

After this acrimonious split, the new group bought fishing lofts along Porthmeor Beach to use as artists’ studios. Barbara Hepworth raised funds to convert adjacent buildings into studios for craft and sculpture as well as painting, and the project expanded further at Back Road in St Ives.

I spent some time last week in the Penwith Gallery, the home of the Penwith Society of Arts. The gallery is a remarkable complex of buildings, with three public galleries, a sculpture courtyard, a print workshop, a shop and archives. This allows for a varied and interesting series of changing exhibitions throughout the year.

‘Façade’ (edition of 3), bronze, by Philip Wakeham, in the Studio Gallery in in the Penwith Gallery (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

The current exhibition in the Main Gallery, the Members’ Autumn Exhibition, opened on 30 August and continues until 2 November. A separate exhibition in the Studio Gallery includes sculptures by Philip Wakeham and etchings by Sally Spens.

Philip Wakeham and Sally Spens both work from a foundation of drawing and regard the manual transformation of materials as an essential part of the creative process. Philip Wakeham works exclusively in bronze, which he learnt to cast at the Royal Academy; Sally Spens studied at Goldsmiths and now works predominantly with copper plate etching.

Philip Wakeham’s sculpture is infused with the poetry of human imagination and expression. He sculpts from life in clay, capturing the subtle realities, before casting in bronze. Seemingly disparate natural and man-made elements combine to produce resonant three-dimensional images linked by the human form.

Philip Wakeham says: ‘I believe it is the job of the artist to produce symbols of non-verbal understanding, the visual has a direct path to our minds and hearts.’

‘The Architect,’ bronze, by Philip Wakeham, in the Studio Gallery in in the Penwith Gallery (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

In her exhibits, Saly Spens looks at Venice as a city of artisans, from the viewpoint of her background in the applied arts. Thinking about the way that equivalent imagery is used in design for theatre and the relationship between nature and artistry, labour and extravagance. Her etchings seek to link ideas with images that give a sense of hand and eye in the history of Venice.

With exhibitions such as these, the Penwith Gallery continues to be at the forefront of presenting contemporary work of quality. The Penwith Society of Arts retains a unique place in British art history.

St Ives continues to inspire a thriving artistic community (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019; click on images for full-screen resolution)