25 September 2020

Thoughts on Kol Nidre
on the Friday evening
in the ‘Days of Awe’

Reading from the scrolls in the synagogue … ‘Jews Praying in the Synagogue on Yom Kippur,’ Maurycy Gottlieb (1856-1879), Vienna, 1878, Tel Aviv Museum of Art

Patrick Comerford

In my Friday evening reflections, I often draw on the Authorised Daily Prayer Book, with its introduction, commentaries and notes by the former Chief Rabbi, Lord (Jonathan) Sacks, on Service of the Heart, published in London by the Union of Liberal and Progressive Synagogues in 1967, and edited by Rabbi John Rayner and Rabbi Chaim Stern, or on poetry I am reading.

But this Friday evening (25 September 2020) falls in the middle of the High Holy Days, with Rosh Hashanah last Friday evening (18 September 2020) marking the beginning of the Jewish New Year, welcoming in the year 5781. Yom Kippur 2020 begins at sunset on Sunday (27 September), when the evening service begins with Kol Nidre, and ends at nightfall on Monday (28 September).

Although celebrations are restricted this year, households will still be able to mark the start of the High Holy Days – also known as the ‘Days of Awe’ – and many synagogues will still be welcoming visitors for prayer with social-distancing in place.

Rosh Hashanah (רֹאשׁ הַשָּׁנָה‎), literally meaning the ‘head of the year,’ is a two-day celebration that took place this year from sundown last Friday (18 September) to nightfall on Sunday (20 September).

The first day of Rosh Hashanah is the beginning of ten holy days known as the High Holy days. This is a time of repentance when Jewish people reflect on their actions over the previous year. Traditional celebrations will see families and friends spend time together, pray, listen to the sound of the Shofar (the ram’s horn) and eat special food.

Yom Kippur falls on the Hebrew calendar date of 10 Tishrei. The tenth day, Yom Kippur – the Day of Atonement – begins this year at sunset on Sunday 27 September and ends at nightfall on Monday 28 September.

The central themes of this holy day are atonement and repentance, and it is observed with a 25-hour period of fasting and intensive prayer, and many Jews spend most of the day at synagogue services.

According to Jewish tradition, God writes each person’s fate for the coming year into the Book of Life on Rosh Hashanah or New Year and waits until Yom Kippur to seal the verdict. During the intervening Days of Awe, Jews seek to amend their behaviour and seek forgiveness for wrongs done against God and against other people.

The evening and day of Yom Kippur are set aside for public and private prayer and confessions of guilt.

The evening of Yom Kippur is known as Kol Nidrei night because of the Kol Nidre prayer which is charged with so many emotions and so many memories for Jews everywhere. The words are in Aramaic, not Hebrew, and it is sung to a haunting, traditional melody that has inspired many composers and singers.

There is a tradition that during the Spanish Inquisition, when the conversos or Jews who were forced to convert to Christianity under the threat of death, they remained faithful to Judaism at heart, and tried to observe Jewish practices in their homes.

These conversos would gather in the evening shortly before Yom Kippur began in their secret synagogues. Before beginning the Yom Kippur services, they would tearfully and emotionally pray to God, asking for forgiveness for all the public statements they made in the previous year which were contrary to Jewish doctrine.

This is supposedly also the reason why Kol Nidre is prefaced with the statement: ‘… by the authority of the heavenly tribunal and by the authority of the earthly tribunal, we hereby grant permission to pray with those who have transgressed.’

However, the Kol Nidre prayer predates the Inquisition by at least 500 years. It is said with great devotion as the opening prayer of the holiest day of the year and not because of its content.

Kol Nidre is an Aramaic declaration recited in the synagogue before the beginning of the evening service on every Yom Kippur. Although, strictly speaking, Kol Nidre is not a prayer, it has many emotional undertones and creates a dramatic introduction to Yom Kippur. The term Kol Nidre refers not only to the actual declaration but is also used as the name for the entire Yom Kippur service in the evening.

The name ‘Kol Nidre’ comes from the opening words, meaning ‘all vows.’ It is a pledge that annuls any personal or religious oaths or prohibitions made to God by the person for the next year, so as to avoid the sin of breaking vows made to God that cannot be or are not upheld.

Kol Nidre was introduced into the synagogue liturgy despite the opposition of some rabbis, although it was expunged from the prayer book by many communities in western Europe in the 19th century.



Before sunset on the eve of Yom Kippur, the congregation gathers in the synagogue, the Ark is opened and two people take out two or three Torah scrolls. They then take their places, one on each side of the cantor, and the three, forming a symbolic beth din or rabbinical court, recite:

By the authority of the Court on High
and by authority of the court down here,
by the permission of One Who Is Everywhere
and by the permission of this congregation,
we hold it lawful to pray with sinners.


The last word, usually translated as sinners or transgressors, is used in the Talmud (Niddah 13b; Shabbat 40a) for apostates or renegades and in the Talmud of Jerusalem (Ketubot 7, 31c) for someone whose offences are of such magnitude that he is no longer recognised by the Jewish community.

The cantor then chants the passage beginning with the words Kol Nidre with its touching melodic phrases, and, in varying intensities, repeats twice, giving a total of three declarations, these words:

All vows we are likely to make,
all oaths and pledges we are likely to take
between this Yom Kippur and the next Yom Kippur,
we publicly renounce.
Let them all be relinquished and abandoned,
null and void,
neither firm nor established.
Let our vows, pledges and oaths
be considered neither vows nor pledges nor oaths.


The leader and the congregation then say together three times:

May all the people of Israel be forgiven,
including all the strangers who live in their midst,
for all the people are in fault.
(Numbers 15: 26)

The leader then says:

O pardon the iniquities of this people,
according to thy abundant mercy,
just as thou forgave this people
ever since they left Egypt.


The leader and the congregation say together three times:

The Lord said,
‘I pardon them according to your words.’
(Numbers 14: 20)

The Torah scrolls are then placed back in the Ark, and the customary evening service begins.

Kol Nidre is not a prayer; indeed, it makes no requests and it is not addressed to God. Instead, it is a declaration before the Yom Kippur prayers begin. It follows the juridical practice of requiring three men as a tribunal, the procedure beginning before sundown, and of the proclamation being announced three times.

It is believed that Kol Nidre was added to the liturgy of Yom Kippur 10 days after Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, because that service is much more solemn, because the Day of Atonement is attuned to the theme of repentance and remorse and because Yom Kippur services are better attended. Kol Nidre also includes an emotional expression of penitence that sets the theme for the Day of Atonement.

Rabbi Meir ben Samuel made an important change to the wording of Kol Nidre in the early 12th century, changing the original phrase ‘from the last Day of Atonement until this one’ to ‘from this Day of Atonement until the next.’

The older text is usually called the Sephardic version, but the two versions are sometimes found side by side. Because it is traditional to recite Kol Nidrei three times, some Sephardic communities and a small number of Ashkenazic communities recite both versions.

Kol Nidre is performed before Yom Kippur begins, and should be recited before sunset, since dispensation from a vow may not be granted on the Sabbath or on a feast-day, unless the vow refers to one of these days. However, Sephardic communities wait until nightfall, when Yom Kippur officially begins, before reciting Kol Nidre.

There is a tradition that makes Kol Nidre more than a technical vow-annulment procedure. Instead, by releasing these vows God is being asked to reciprocate in kind. In the event that he has pledged not to bring the redemption just yet, in the event that he made an oath to bring harsh judgments on his people in the following year, God is asked to release these vows and instead grant a year of happiness and redemption.



Market House Craftworks
bring new life to 400-year-old
site at the heart of Cappoquin

There has been a Market House in the centre of Cappoquin, Co Waterford, for almost 400 years (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2020)

Patrick Comerford

The oldest streets in Cappoquin are probably Main Street, Church Street, Castle Street and Mill Street, which all developed as the early town settlement expanded in the 1700s.

The town developed earlier below the slopes of Cappoquin Castle, in the previous century. A bridge across the Blackwater made Cappoquin accessible to shipping from the 1620s because the Blackwater was tidal well beyond Cappoquin and it lay on the road network connecting west Waterford, south Tipperary and east Cork, an area I seemed to traverse constantly during this year’s summer ‘Road Trip.’

When Richard Boyle (1566-1643), the ‘Great Earl of Cork,’ took possession of the area around modern Cappoquin, he transformed the settlement into a town. Boyle had acquired Lismore Castle and larges tracts of land in West Waterford from Sir Walter Raleigh in 1602, following the Plantation of Munster. His son, Robert Boyle (1627-1691), is considered the father of modern chemistry.

Although Cappoquin was never a walled town, Boyle certainly recorded the existence of an earthen rampart running south of the town, probably at the south end of Castle Street. He built an iron works and a wooden bridge at the bend on the Blackwater, and leased the rights to hold fairs and markets in the area to Hugh Croker. He recorded in his diary on 3 April 1628 that, as part of this 21-year lease, Croker was to build ‘a fair market house with a prison, with lime and stone, and a sesssions [court] house over the market place, slated towards which building he is to have the whole benefit of my fairs and markets, free for the first five years and afterwards during the remain of his lease.’

Croker’s Market House is probably the oldest building in Cappoquin, dating in its original form from 1628. The Market House became the centre of commercial life in 17th century Cappoquin, and as the town grew and developed, the focal point of much of town became the area around the Square. This is the point where Castle Street, once the original route to Cappoquin Castle, meets the Square, Main Street, Green Street and Cooke Street.

The rampart mentioned by Boyle was breached on several occasions during the wars of the 1640s, with many skirmishes and civilian casualties at the time. The records show that seven people were killed at the Market House during those turbulent years.

A later, three-bay two-storey market house was built on the corner site ca 1775, with a round-headed arcade that was originally open on the ground floor, and with single-bay two-storey side elevations.

The Market House stands on a corner site, with the front or north-west elevation facing the Square, and a side elevation on the north-east facing onto Main Street.

The upper floor also served as a courthouse until the early 1970s, just as it had in Boyle’s days. A 17th century well was uncovered during building work nearby in the 1980s.

The Market House was extensively renovated ca 2000, when the openings were remodelled for commercial use on the ground floor, with residential accommodation above. After laying empty for many years, it was brought back to life by Market House Craftworks.

Market House Craftworks is a collective of three craftspeople – Joan Casey, Jane Jermyn and Len Canton – who use traditional methods to create contemporary craft objects in ceramic, leather, mosaic and felt in a studio and gallery setting in the heart of Cappoquin.

Joan Casey, a native of Waterford City, has been had-making felt for over 20 years, and has also developed a practice in mosaic-making. Len Canton, who is from Cork, has been working in leather for over 40 years. He and Joan live in the countryside near Lismore.

Jane Jermyn has been living in Lismore since 2003 and received an MA in ceramics from the National College of Art in 2009. Her work has been exhibited or displayed from Cuba to Siberia, from Britain to South Africa, and in India, Japan and South Korea.

These three set up the Lismore Craft Collective in 2014, and in 2019 moved to the Market House, which had been empty for seven years.

Downstairs they have an open studio space and retail area, and upstairs they have opened a beautiful gallery space with exhibitions each month.

This is an appealing well-proportioned building that is of significance as the earliest surviving purpose-built market house in Cappoquin. Despite the recent renovations, the building still looks like a traditional market house in an Irish market town, with its characteristic arcade on the ground floor.

As far as anyone can tell, this has been a continuous trading centre in the town for almost four centuries. If so, local people claim, this may well be one of the oldest shop-sites in Ireland.

The Market House continues to have an emotional and cultural space in the life of Cappoquin, and the Market House and Square are the traditional departure points for all Cappoquin sports teams.

The Square remains at the heart of economic, social and sporting life in Cappoquin (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2020)