Praying in Lent and Easter 2021: 64, Etz Hayyim Synagogue, Chania

The bimah in the Etz Hayyim Synagogue in Chania (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

During the Season of Easter this year, I am continuing my theme from Lent, taking some time each morning to reflect in these ways:

1, photographs of a church or place of worship that has been significant in my spiritual life;

2, the day’s Gospel reading;

3, a prayer from the prayer diary of the Anglican mission agency USPG (United Society Partners in the Gospel).

This week, I am offering photographs of synagogues that have welcomed me over the years and offered a place of prayer and reflection. My photographs this morning (21 April 2021) are from the Etz Hayyim Synagogue (בית הכנסת עץ חיים‎, Tree of Life) in Chania, the only surviving synagogue in Crete.

Etz Hayyim synagogue stands in a small alley off Kondhilaki Streer in Evraiki or the former Jewish quarter in the old town where there has been a synagogue since the Middle Ages. It is in the heart of the walled maze of alleyways and narrow streets that spread out from the harbour with its mediaeval lighthouse and the port’s surviving mosque.

There were Romaniote or Greek-speaking Jews in Crete for more than 2,300 years, and they survived wave-after-wave of invaders, including Romans, Byzantines, Saracen pirates, Venetians and Ottomans.

They were strongly influenced by Sephardic intellectual traditions with the arrival of Spanish Jews in Crete in the late 14th century, and the two Jewish communities intermarried and accommodated one another.

At the beginning of the Greek-Turkish war in 1897, there were 225 Jewish families in Crete, or 1,150 people in a total population of 250,000, spread across the three cities in the island: Chania, Iraklion and Rethymnon.

Early on the morning of 9 June 1944, while the 256 remaining Jews of Crete were being sent by the Nazis to Athens for deportation to Auschwitz, the Tanais, the container ship carrying them from Chania to Athens, was torpedoed by a British submarine HMS Vivid off the coast of Santorini. In all, about 1,000 prisoners were on board, including 400 Greek hostages and 300 Italian soldiers. No one survived.

Etz Hayyim synagogue stood empty after World War II. The sleeping building was desecrated. It was used as a dump, a urinal and a kennel, damaged by earthquakes and filled with dead animals and broken glass, its mikvah or ritual bath oozing mud and muck.

The revival of the synagogue is due to the vision and hard work of Nicholas Stavroulakis who grew up in Britain, the son of a Turkish Jewish mother and a Greek Orthodox father from Crete. His family ties inspired many visits to Crete. He returned in 1995, set about restoring the synagogue, and Etz Hayyim reopened in 1999.

Today, barely more than a dozen Jews live in Crete, and Evraiki, the former Jewish quarter, is now crammed with tavernas, cafés and souvenir shops. Etz Hayyim holds weekly Shabbat services in Hebrew, Greek, and English, and is home to a research library with 4,000 volumes. Rabbi Gabriel Negrin, who was once a student in Crete, regularly comes to Chania from Athens to help with the services on days such as Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

Etz Hayyim Synagogue stands in a small alley off Kondhilaki Streer in Evraiki or the former Jewish quarter in the old town of Chania (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

John 6: 35-40 (NRSVA):

35 Jesus said to them, ‘I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty. 36 But I said to you that you have seen me and yet do not believe. 37 Everything that the Father gives me will come to me, and anyone who comes to me I will never drive away; 38 for I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me. 39 And this is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day. 40 This is indeed the will of my Father, that all who see the Son and believe in him may have eternal life; and I will raise them up on the last day.’

The courtyard of the Etz Hayyim Synagogue in Chania … there have been Jews in Crete for over 2,300 years (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Prayer in the USPG Prayer Diary:

The Prayer in the USPG Prayer Diary today (21 April 2021) invites us to pray:

Let us pray for schools in the Oxford Diocese, who have recently started a School Twinning Programme with the Church of South India. May friendships be fostered and skills developed.

Yesterday’s reflection

Continued tomorrow

Chief Rabbi Gabriel Negrin places candles in the Holocaust memorial in the Etz Hayyim Synagogue (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicised Edition copyright © 1989, 1995, National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. http://nrsvbibles.org

How a new church in Harold’s Cross replaced an old ‘Little Tin Church’

The Rosary Church in Harold’s Cross … the parish dates from 1935 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2021)

Patrick Comerford

I was writing yesterday (19 April 2021) about the former Church of Ireland parish church in Harold’s Cross, how it began as a trustee church in the 1830s, and how it is now a parish church of the Russian Orthodox Church.

In the Roman Catholic Church, Harold’s Cross was part of the parish of Saint Nicholas Without until 1823, when it became part of the new parish of Rathmines.

Harold’s Cross was constituted as a new parish from portions of the parishes of Rathmines, Rathgar and Terenure in 1935. Before the new parish was formed, Archbishop Edward Byrne of Dublin took initiatives to shape the parish. When the house and grounds of Mount Harold, a Georgian residence, were put on sale, he instructed the Parish Priest of Rathmines, Canon Fleming, to buy the house and the site.

The sale was completed on 11 August 1931 and the new parish was formed in 1935 with Father Percy McGough as the first parish church, although a new church was not built until 1938.

The Rosary Church in Harold’s Cross replaced an old tin church (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

At first, it was decided to erect a temporary church in Harold’s Cross. When a new church was built at Foxrock, Co Dublin, in 1935, Canon Fleming arranged to have the old timber-framed, tin church in Foxrock, dating from 1907, taken down and re-erected in the grounds of Mount Harold.

When the process of rebuilding was almost complete on 30 September 1935, Archbishop Byrne constituted Harold’s Cross as a new parish.

This temporary church was blessed by Archbishop Byrne on 24 November 1935 and the first Mass was celebrated by Canon Percy McGough, who remained Parish Priest of Harold’s Cross until he died in 1954. Harold’s Cross parish then began a new history with the ‘Little Tin Church’.

The Rosary Church in Harold’s Cross was designed by Ralph Henry Byrne in 1938 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Building work began in 1938 on the lands of Mount Harold House on a new church with the dedication of Our Lady of the Rosary.

The new church, with a capacity for 1,250-1,600 people, was designed by the architect Ralph Henry Byrne (1877-1946) and was built in 1938-1940 by Murphy Brothers of Castlewood Avenue, Rathmines.

The church is a large, granite structure, with pitched-pine flooring. The Communion rail is 116 ft long, reputedly one of the longest in Dublin, the pipe organ dates from 1947, and all the windows were plain originally. The ornate stained-glass window over the main altar, depicting Our Lady of the Rosary, is by the Abbey Stained Glass Studios and was installed in 1996.

RH Byrne, who designed the church in a classical style, was born in Largo House, 166 Lower Rathmines Road, Rathmines, on 25 April 1877, the third but second surviving son of the architect William Henry Byrne (1844-1917), who had been a pupil of JJ McCarthy. He was educated at home and at Saint George’s School, Weybridge.

In 1896, he was articled to his father for five years, and then spent six months in the Harrogate office of Thomas Edward Marshall, before joining his father’s practice as a partner in 1902.

Byrne’s father became blind in about 1913 and died on 28 April 1917. RH Byrne continued the practice under the name of William H Byrne & Son, and in 1936 his nephew by marriage, Simon Aloysius Leonard, joined the partnership.

Byrne, who worked from 20 Suffolk Street, Dublin, was elected a member of the RIAI in 1902, proposed by George Coppinger Ashlin, seconded by Thomas Drew and William Mansfield Mitchell. He was elected a fellow (FRIAI) in 1920 and was vice-president in 1938, the year he began work on his church in Harold’s Cross.

The Communion rail in the church is 116 ft long (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Byrne is known principally for the restoration of the Church of Our Lady of Refuge, Rathmines, after the disastrous fire in 1920, with a new, much higher dome (1920-1928).

His other works include the Church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, Athlone (1930-1936), the Cathedral of Christ the King, Mullingar (1931-1936), the Cathedral of Saint Patrick and Saint Felim, Cavan (1938-1943), the Church of the Four Masters, Donegal, the completion of Saint Senanus Church, Foynes, Co Limerick (1932), commenced by JJ McCarthy, rebuilding Saint Mary’s Church, Croom, Co Limerick (1929-1932), and the Church of the Most Holy Redeemer, Newport, Co Tipperary (1933-1934).

As for the original house at Mount Harold, some priests of the parish lived there until the 1970s. The ground floor of the house remains and it now serves as a Pastoral Centre.

The church was built by Murphy Brothers of Rathmines (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)