15 February 2020

The synagogues of Cork: 5,
Munster Jewish Community
‘a community without a shul’

Chanukiahs on the last night of Hanukkah in Cork on 29 December 2019

Patrick Comerford

When the Cork Hebrew Congregation closed the city’s last and only synagogue four years ago [2016], Cork was left without a synagogue for the first time in more than a century. But the city still had a Jewish community.

The Munster Jewish Community describes itself as ‘a community without a shul’ and is based in Cork, but it has a dispersed membership, scattered throughout the neighbouring counties of Clare, Kerry, Limerick, Tipperary and Waterford.

It includes a broad mix of Jews living, working, studying or visiting Munster, and was formed after the Cork Synagogue closed in 2016.

The community has a predominantly Reform flavour, but welcomes all individuals and families from any affiliation, and they hold events and services as often as they can.

The community has welcomed a number of visiting rabbis, including Rabbi Julia Neuberger, Rabbi David Kudan, and Rabbi Reena Judd from Quinnipiac University, and her husband Jim.

Baroness Neuberger, who has a house in West Cork, is a crossbench peer in the House of Lords and a former chancellor of the University of Ulster. She has been the full-time senior rabbi at the West London Synagogue since 2011, and is due to retire at the end of next month [March 2020].

Rabbi David Kudan is the spiritual leader of two congregations in Malden: the Conservative Congregation Agudas Achim - Ezrath Israel and the Reform Temple Tifereth Israel. He has served from Paris to Chicago, and at Harvard University, and is a member of the outreach faculty of the Union of Reform Judaism.

There have been celebrations of Chanukah in Cork and Sukkot in Ballineen, Rosh Hashanah in Bru Columbanus, Cork, live links for Kol Nidre and Yom Kippur with West London Synagogue, Seder nights in various homes, and Shabbat services in Bru Columbanus, Wilton and Dunmanway.

Last year, on the last night of Chanukah (29 December 2019), Councillor Dan Boyle acting on behalf of the Lord Mayor of Cork, spoke in Shalom Park, and hosted a reception in City Hall, when families lit their chanukiahs, said prayers and sang songs, the children played dreidel games and everyone listened to Klezmer music.

A first for Munster Jewish Community last year was a live ‘twinning’ link with a Reform Community in Brooklyn to celebrate Havdalah.

A community member, Aida Phelops, has spoken about the persecution and expulsion of Iraqi Jews, and about the experiences of her family at that time. An Iraqi Jew, she was born in Baghdad, brought up in Britian, lived in Israel for a while, and is now living in the Beara Peninsula, West Cork. In recent years, she became an Irish citizen and sees herself as an Irish Iraqi Jew.

Ruti Lachs, a community member, has taken her one-woman show, A different Kettle, to a variety of venues, including the Cootehill Arts Festival, Co Cavan, Midleton Arts Festival, Midleton, Co Cork, the Inkwell Theatre, the Trackton Arts Centre, Co Cork, Kanturk Arts Festival, Kanturk, Co Cork, and venues in Cork and Douglas.

Other community events have included Simon Lewis’s book launch and live poetry readings between Ireland and the US.

The community is active in the Three Faiths Forum in Cork, and took part in the Holocaust Memorial Service at Cork Unitarian Church last year.

Previous: 4, Remnant of Israel Synagogue, 24 South Terrace, Cork

The synagogues of Cork: 4,
The Remnant of Israel,
24 South Terrace

No 24 South Terrace, Cork, today … the former address of the Remnant of Israel Synagogue in the early 20th century (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2020)

Patrick Comerford

The Ashkenazi Jewish community that grew up in Cork in the late 19th century formed the Cork Hebrew Congregation in the 1880s. After meeting for some years in Eastville and then from 1884 in a temporary shul in rented rooms in Marlboro Street, the community eventually moved into a synagogue at No 10 South Terrace.

The synagogue was rebuilt in 1913-1915, to designs by the Cork-born architect Arthur Hill (1846-1921) and opened in 1915.

But there was a second synagogue on South Terrace, known as the Remnant of Israel.

This congregation was formed in the early 1880s, and eventually moved into premises at 24 South Terrace, which had been the address of the Cork Hebrew Congregation briefly before it moved to 9-10 South Terrace, on the other side of the street.

The Remnant of Israel was served by Rabbi Abraham Sheftel Birzansky (1851-1908), from Akmene in northern Lithuania. It is said that most of the Lithuanian Jews who arrived in Ireland in the last quarter of the 19th century, fleeing pogroms and persecution in Tsarist Russia, were from Akmene.

The family names from Akmene in Ireland included Mirrelson, Samuels, Abrahamson, Clein and Eppel. Indeed, it was sometimes said in Jewish circles in Dublin that ‘if you weren’t from Akmene then you weren’t in the club.’

Statistics in the Jewish Year Book show that in the first decade of the 20th century the Remnant of Israel had 35 paying members or seat holders. But soon after Rabbi Abraham Sheftel Birzansky died on 1 August 1907, the Remnant of Israel congregation merged with the Cork Hebrew Congregation on South Terrace, probably by 1910.

By 1915, there was a breakaway congregation, also calling itself the Cork Hebrew Congregation around the corner in premises at 15 Union Quay, and claiming it was the spiritual and legitimate heir to the Remnant of Israel.

However, it too appears to have closed after a short period, and there is no sign today at either 24 South Terrace or 15 Union Quay of the Remnant of Israel or the alternative Cork Hebrew Congregation that claimed its legacy.

Previous: 3, Cork Hebrew Congregation, 15 Union Quay
Next: 5, Munster Jewish Community