Patrick Comerford
In my walk around Rathmines and Harold’s Cross last week, during my short return visit to Dublin, I spent a morning strolling around Leinster Road, Harold’s Cross Road and Leinster Road West.
Between these two streets, I went in search of the site of the former Jewish Home on Denmark Hill, which was founded in 1950. The home had its own synagogue until it closed and was moved to the Quaker-run Bloomfield Care Centre in Rathfarnham.
The private synagogue was in what was formally known as the Home of Aged and Infirm Jews Synagogue on Denmark Hill, part of Le Bas Terrace running between Leinster Road and the junction of Leinster Road West and Effra Road.
The home, later known from about 1974 as the Jewish Home of Ireland, was founded in 1950 after Rifka and Zalman Potashnick made a deed of gift, giving their home on Castlewood Avenue, Rathmines, to the Board of Guardians of the Jewish community for the establishment of a ‘real Jewish home’ for the Jewish elderly ‘not blessed with children or other relations who can lovingly care for them.’
The couple were known locally as ‘Mr and Mrs Solomon’. Rifka Potashnick was moved to set up this charitable foundation after she befriended the widowed Rabbi Brown. He had been reduced to poverty, and she found him living in circumstances that made him dependent on community welfare. He wore many layers of clothes to keep himself warm and he moved from one household to the next, relying on the meals each family offered him.
When he failed to turn up at her home for a few days, Rifka went in search of the impoverished rabbi, and found him in Saint Kevin’s Hospital. When he died there, she was disturbed by the circumstances. She talked about her plans for a new home with her son-in-law Maurice Wine and, to help establish the new home, Rifka and Zalman ‘downsized’ and moved to a smaller home in Neville Road, Rathgar.
However, the Potashnick home was not suitable for communal living. It was sold to provide the initial funds towards buying the premises on Denmark Hill, close to the synagogue at 52 Grosvenor Road.
The architect of the new home was Norman Douglas Good, the eldest son of Dr Douglas Good and Ada Baillie Good of Appian Way, Dublin. He trained in a Dublin architect’s office, the school of architecture at University College Dublin, and the Architectural Association in London, in the 1920s. He worked in partnership with the architect Michael Scott as Scott & Good from 1931 to 1936, and then continued to practise from 36 Frederick Street.
The home was first listed in the Jewish Year Book in 1951. The synagogue followed Ashkenazi Orthodox ritual, and may have relied for spiritual leadership on the various Chief Rabbis of Ireland and Dublin’s communal rabbis, as well as readers from the various Dublin synagogues.
The home was supported by the Jewish communities in Dublin, Belfast and Cork, and was open to any Jewish applicant, anywhere in Ireland, subject only to medical condition and the availability of a bed.
The first trustees of the home included Maurice Wine, Gerald Gilbert, Solomon Verby, and Maurice Baum. They bought the home of Hanchen and Louis Wine. The acclaimed violinist and musician Erwin Goldwater was the first chairman of the committee. He was President of the Rathmines Hebrew Congregation, which then had its synagogue nearby at 52 Grosvenor Road, Rathgar.
At the opening ceremony, Erwin Goldwater expressed the hope that ‘never again will any of our poor and aged end their days in surroundings that are strange.’ It is said no-one was ever turned away for lack of funds.
The original synagogue in the home was a replica of a synagogue in Abraham Isaac Cohen’s antique shop on Lower Ormond Quay. Until his death in 1985, Abraham Cohen’s son, Louis Cohen, took personal responsibility for this synagogue. As Ray Rivlin has recalled in Jewish Ireland – a social history (2011), it attracted a regular Shabbat minyan, even from members of others shuls, and Louis Cohen hosted a Kiddush at the home every Sabbath and Festival.
The home was provided with a beautiful new synagogue in 1991, dedicated to the Revd Abraham Gittleson (1915-1983). He was born and raised in Dublin and studied at Gateshead yeshiva. He returned to Dublin and from the early 1940s for over 40 years he served many congregational roles in Dublin as a mohel, shochet and teacher.
He served at the Lennox Street Synagogue in the 1940s. He became second reader of the Dublin United Hebrew Congregation at Greenville Hall on the South Circular Road ca 1948, and served that synagogue as second and then first reader until he died in 1983.
The new synagogue in the home was named in his memory in 1991cand a scholarship fund in his name was established to support the education of Jewish children in Dublin.
When the home closed in 2005, the 18 residents were moved, two at a time, to the Quaker-run Bloomfield Care Centre on Stocking Lane in Rathfarnham, with a separate wing, its own prayer room and a kosher kitchen under kashrut supervision. Today, the Bloomfield Care Centre works in conjunction with the Jewish Representative Council to help members of the Jewish community to continue a Jewish lifestyle while in assisted living.
Initially, the home on Denmark Hill was converted into two student houses, one male and one female. But in recent years the site has since been developed into mixed housing.
Shabbat Shalom
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