Patrick Comerford
To coincide with these High Holy Days in the Jewish Calendar, I have been tracing a number of synagogues and former synagogues that have existed in Dublin for more than 3½ centuries, beginning with the small synagogue in upstairs rooms in Crane Lane, off Dame Street, to the small Machzikei Hadass synagogue at 18 Rathmore Villas, behind 77 Terenure Road North.
This series has looked at the great synagogues at Adelaide Road, Greenville Hall on the South Circular Road, and on Rathfarnham Road in Terenure. It has included the lost synagogues at Saint Mary’s Abbey and Stafford Street, the Progressive Synagogue at Leicester Avenue in Rathgar, the temporary synagogues in rented room in Grosvenor Place and on Grosvenor Road, the once humble synagogues squeezed into the side streets of ‘Little Jerusalem’ between Clanbrassil Street, the South Circular Road and Portobello, and the synagogue on Walworth Road that has found new life as the Irish Jewish Museum.
But I have missed many smaller synagogues that were short-lived but played roles in the spiritual life of the Jewish community in Dublin.
For some years, there was a Talmud Torah at No 43 Bloomfield Avenue until around the 1930s, and a room upstairs continued to be reserved as a small synagogue and for meetings of the Board of Guardians into the 1940s.
No 33 Bloomfield Avenue was the home to successive Chief Rabbis of Ireland, and Chaim Herzog (1918-1997), sixth President of Israel (1983-1993), grew up in this house. His father, Dr Isaac Herzog (1888-1959), a renowned Talmudic scholar, was the first Chief Rabbi of Ireland (1921-1936), and later the Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Palestine and Israel (1936-1959).
The story is often told that after World War II, Rabbi Isaac Herzog set out on a mission to bring lost children back to Jewish homes. As he went from orphanage to orphanage and convent to convent across Europe, he had no documentation to prove children were Jewish. Yet he had heard the stories and deep down knew there had to be hundreds, if not thousands, of missing children still in orphanages and convents.
One day, he devised a plan. He walked into orphanages and spoke out loud, Shema Yisrael Hashem Elokeinu Hashem Echad. Instinctively, many of the children raised their right hands to cover their eyes, showing their undoubted Jewish origins. And so, Rabbi Herzog saved 500 children and brought them home.
There was no Chief Rabbi of Ireland from 1937 1948. Dr Immanuel Jakobovits (1921-1999), later Lord Jakobovits, also lived at 33 Bloomfield Avenue while he was Chief Rabbi of Ireland (1948-1958).
The Jewish National Schools on Bloomfield Avenue, dated from 1932-1934, when they were built in the Queen Anne style to designs by the architect Rupert Jones (1883-1950). Jones moved from Tipperary to Dublin around 1921, and worked with the Office of Public Works until 1932, when he began his own practice at D’Olier Chambers on D’Olier Street. He later worked from the Estate Office at Mount Merrion Park, and offices in South Anne Street.
The schools were built by the builders John Kenny & Son of Harcourt Street.
The foundation of the school was prompted when both Saint Andrew’s College and the Christian Brothers School on Synge Street introduced Saturday morning classes in 1924-1925 and refused to exempt Jewish boys.
The headmaster was Joe Barron, a founder figure in Seán MacBride’s Clann na Poblachta. The teachers included Maeve Binchy, before she became an Irish Times writer, and Frank Edwards (1907-1983), a prominent Communist from Waterford, who lost his job at Mount Sion School and was blacklisted from teaching in Catholic-run schools because of his role in the Connolly Column in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939).
The Zion Schools opened on Bloomfield Avenue in March 1934, and continued until 1980, when Zion Schools merged with the preparatory section of Stratford College on Zion Road in Rathgar, which was founded in 1953.
When the synagogue at Lennox Street closed in 1976, the congregation was amalgamated with the small congregation that used rooms in Stratford College at Zion Road in Rathgar, where it continued to worship until 1981.
In addition, there were many buildings that played an important role in the cultural life of the Jewish community in Dublin. For many Dubliners, the best-known of these is the Bretzel Bakery at 1a Lennox Street in Portobello. The Bretzel Bakery is housed in a stand-alone, three-storey, 19th century building at 1A Lennox Street, close to the former synagogue in Lennox Street and the narrow streets that make up ‘Little Jerusalem.’
This is one of Dublin’s oldest artisan bakeries, but it remains kosher certified and continues to make traditional challah bread. The business claims to date from 1870. Solomon and Malka Clein ran the bakery from the 1920s, when his family moved from Cork to Dublin. It was then run by his son-in-law, Syd Barnett, until 1936, when he sold it to Barney Stein.
Harry Cleim, who married Barney Stein’s widow Ida (née Herman), became associated with the bakery in 1948. The staff included Fred Keane, the head baker, and his assistant, Christy Hackett, neither of whom was Jewish. For some years, Sidney Benson and his brother George ran the bakery as Bensons, but when Sidney retired to Liverpool he left Christy Hackett in charge.
The bakery became a meeting place on Sunday mornings for nurses and doctors coming off night duty in the Adelaide Hospital in the 1950s and 1960s.
Christy Hackett rented the business from Ida Clein in 1964 and changed the name to the Bretzel. From 1964, this was the only kosher supplier of supervised bread and cake in Dublin. The main product was the Jewish challah or plaited bread, and the name Bretzel, from a Transylvanian bread stick in Romania, was chosen to emphasise the shop’s East European links.
His son Morgan Hackett bought the Bretzel after Ida Cleim died in 1996. A year later, both the Jewish community and the Bretzel suffered a setback when the new Chief Rabbi, Dr Gavin Broder, decreed that cakes supplied by the Bretzel could no longer be declared kosher.
William Despard from Limerick and his business partner Cormac Keenan bought the business ‘lock, stock and barrel’ from Morgan Hackett in 2000, and the Bretzel Bakery and café are now owned and managed by William Despard. Negotiations in 2003 restored the kosher status for its bread and patisserie.
Over the decades, the residents of Lennox Street included the playwright and twice Lord Mayor of Dublin John McCann, who was born at No 6 Lennox Street in 1905; the Republican revolutionary Harry Boland, who lived at No 26; and the sculptor John Hughes, who once lived at No 28.
Many of the other streets in ‘Little Jerusalem’ were built on the Emorville Estate, across the road from Portobello Gardens, which was sold and developed from the mid-1860s, and the estate is remembered in the name of Emorville Avenue, which was laid out in the 1860s.
Abraham William Briscoe, who arrived in Dublin as a pacifist Jewish refugee from Lithuania in Tsarist Russia, first lived at Emorville Avenue before the family moved to Beechwood Avenue in Ranelagh. His son, Robert Briscoe, became Dublin’s first Jewish Lord Mayor in 1956, and was Lord Mayor again in 1961-1962. His son, Ben Briscoe, became Lord Mayor in 1988.
Isaac Baker from Emorville Avenue was the secretary of the International Tailors, Machinists and Pressers’ Trade Union, which had its offices at 52 Camden Street and shared the building with synagogue that closed in 1916.
James Joyce’s parents, John Stanislaus and Mary Joyce, lived at 30 Emorville Avenue after they married in 1881. According to Joyce, the birthplace of the Leopold Bloom in Ulysses was 52 Upper Clanbrassil Street. Other streets and places in ‘Little Jerusalem’ in Ulysses include Leonard’s Corner, Longwood Avenue, Bloomfield Avenue, Synge Street, Lombard Street West, Emorville Square, and Saint Kevin’s Parade.
The artist Harry Kernoff (1900-1974), best known for his paintings and woodcuts of street life and literary figures in Dublin, lived and had his studio at Stamer Street, between Lennox Street and the South Circular Road.
As well as the prayer house at Dolphin’s Barn Cemetery, which dates from the 1890s, other Jewish buildings of note in Dublin have included the Jewish Home, Denmark Hill, off Leinster Road in Rathmines, which was founded in 1950. It had its own synagogue, and it moved in 2005 to the Quaker-run Bloomfield Care Centre in Rathfarnham.
Yesterday: 18, Machzikei Hadass, Terenure
Series Concluded
