Patrick Comerford
Over the years, I have visited and written about the stories of about 20 synagogues and former synagogues in Dublin, from the earliest synagogues in the city centre at Crane Lane, Marlborough Green, Stafford Street and Mary’s Abbey, and their successor on Adelaide Road, to the smaller congregations and synagogues that grew up in the ‘Little Jerusalem’ and Portobello area in the late 19th century and early 20th century, and the later synagogues that developed at Grenville Hall, and in Rathmines, Rathgar and Terenure.
Recent research has enabled me to identify yet another congregation in Dublin that was located at 32 Heytesbury Street.
The congregation in Heytesbury Street was founded in 1891 and it was one of a number of hebroth or small congregations that sprang up in the late 19th century in the ‘Little Jerusalem’ area of Dublin, in the side street around the South Circular Road, around Clanbrassil Street and Portobello.
These hebroth were established in Dublin in the 1880s and 1890s, primarily by recent immigrants from Lithuania and Poland, fleeing oppression and pogroms in parts of the Tsarist empire in Russia, Poland and the Baltics. These new arrivals were generally more strict or observant in their practice of Judaism and their liurgical traditions than the members of the existing and somewhat assimilated Jewish community in Dublin.
The main synagogue in Dublin at the time was at Mary’s Abbey, but services there were held only on Saturday mornings. Because it was two miles or more from where the newcomers lived, it was a long walk on the Sabbath.
In addition, the synagogue at Mary’s Abbey was too small to accommodate the needs of the growing community. To compound matters, the largely Yiddish-speaking newcomers found those services too formal, stern, middle class and unwelcoming.
As a result, many of the ‘foreign’ Jews in the ‘Little Jerusalem’ area responded by setting up their own hebroth or small congregations.
These new hebroth included small shuls in Saint Kevin’s Parade (1883), Oakfield Place (1885), Lennox Street (1887), Lombard Street (1893), Camden Street (1892) and Walworth Road (1912).
However, until recently, I had been unable to locate the small congregation that existed at Heytesbury Street in the 1890s, close to Saint Kevin’s Church on Harrington Street and the Meath Hospital.
Thanks to a comment by Lindy Taylor on one of my earlier postings, and a subsequent on-line conversation, I was able to visit the house where this small congregation met and which she has identified as No 32 Heytesbury Street.
When I was back in Dublin a few weeks ago, I visited 32 Heytesbury Street, where the small congregation was formed in 1891. This small congregation would have followed Ashkenazi Orthodox ritual, although the names of any ministers and readers are not known today.
It probably closed before 1895, and it does not appear in the first Jewish Year Book in 1896-1897, or any subsequent edition, according to research by JCR-UK, the genealogical and historical website covering all Jewish communities and congregations throughout Britain, Ireland and Gibraltar, both past and present.
Today, the house on Heytesbury Street is part of a terrace of residential 19th century houses, facing the junction with Grantham Street and the 1960s buildings of the Synge Street Christian Brothers’ Schools.
This former synagogue was identified for me by Lindy Taylor in a comment on my posting on the synagogue at 52 Lower Camden Street, although my first opportunity to visit it came only a few weeks ago.
From there, I went for coffee in the Bretzel on Lennox Street, which keeps alive the memory of kosher bakeries in the ‘Little Jerusalem’ and Portobello area.
Shabbat Shalom, שבת שלום
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