Patrick Comerford
Christmas and Chanukah coincide this year, and this evening is the Sabbath evening in Chanukah. The Sabbath in Chanukah is known as Shabbat Mikets. Chanukah is the Jewish festival that celebrates liberation from brutal oppression, the defeat of violent religious discrimination and putting an end to antisemitic and despotic rule.
When I visited Kenilworth Square, one of my favourite corners of Dublin, last week and met Martin and Colette Joyce in their home at No 67, I was reminded that the house was once the home of Dr Ernst Scheyer (1890-1958), a Jewish refugee who fled Nazi Germany and the Holocaust in the late 1930s.
Scheyer had been a successful lawyer in Germany and he had survived both Kristallnacht and time in Sachsenhausen, a concentration camp near Berlin. He arrived in Dublin on 14 January 1939 at the age of 48, and his family made their home at 67 Kenilworth Square. He later taught German at Saint Andrew’s College, Clyde Road, Saint Columba’s College, Rathfarnham, and Trinity College Dublin. He was a key figure in founding the Progressive Jewish Community in Dublin in 1946, and when he died in Birmingham 1958 he was buried in Woodtown, near Rathfarnham.
Ernst Scheyer lived in Ireland for almost 20 years. During those two decades, he was a pioneering figure in teaching German in Dublin, an influential figure in Jewish life in Ireland, a founding member of the Jewish progrssive Synagogue in Rathgar, and a friend of Albert Einstein.
His story has been recounted by Gisela Holfter of the University of Limerick in her paper ‘Ernst Scheyer’ in German Monitor, vol 63 (2016), ‘German-speaking Exiles in Ireland 1933-1945’ (pp 149-169), a volume she also edited. Scheyer’s grandson, Stephen Weil, supported her research and provided access to family archival material and photographs.
Ernst Scheyer was born in Oppeln in Upper Silesia on 23 November 1890. His parents owned a wholesale and retail grain business and were the first generation of Liberal Jews in the family, while he was the first in his family to go to university.
During World War I, he volunteered in the German army in 1915. He was wounded and was decorated for bravery with medals that he later brought with him to Ireland. He received his PhD in law in Breslau (Wroclaw), and became a practising lawyer and a respected member of the Jewish community in Liegnitz, Silesia, now in south-west Poland.
Scheyer married Marie Margareta (Mieze) Epstein, who was born in Breslau and who was five years younger. They were the parents of two children, Heinz (born December 1919) and Renate (born September 1925).
Scheyer has been described as a tall, broad and impressive looking man. He built a successful practice as a lawyer and notary in Liegnitz, where both Ernst and Marie were active in the liberal Jewish community, and for a time he was President of the B’nai Brith Lodge.
After the Nazis took power, Scheyer lost his status as a notary in 1935, the family lost most of their staff and had to move out of their large house, and on 1 December 1938 his accreditation in the district and the superior courts was withdrawn.
After Kristallnacht on 9 November 1938, Scheyer was rounded up and spent almost a month in Sachsenhausen, a concentration camp near Berlin, where he was prisoner number 012798 in block 14.
Their son Heinz who had received a scholarship to Trinity College Dublin and started studying medicine at TCD in September 1937, giving the family a much-needed link to Ireland. But entry to Ireland was not easy to gain, particularly for Jews, for whom access had been restricted from the beginning of the Irish Free State.
With the help of Dr Harris Tomkin, a Jewish eye doctor, Heinz obtained a one-month visa for England and Ireland for Ernst and Marie Scheyer. Tomkin was an ophthalmologist at the Royal Victoria Eye and Ear Hospital on Adelaide Road for 60 years, and was vice-chair of the Jewish Refugee Aid Committee, formed in 1938.
Ernst Scheyer was released from Sachsenhausen on 5 December 1938 and Ernst and Marie arrived in Dublin on 14 January 1939; he was 48. The Scheyer family soon made their home at 67 Kenilworth Square.
According to Heinz Scheyer, his father began working in Dublin as a travelling salesman. He also spent about four months in Northern Ireland, where he left a strong impression. Edith Jacobowitz, who escaped Berlin with her younger brother on one of the last Kindertransporte, mentions him in her memoir.
However, when a local policeman tipped off Heinz that his parents were about to be interned within 24 hours, Ernst and Marie Scheyer fled Northern Ireland. Back in Dublin, he taught German at Saint Andrew’s College, Clyde Road, Saint Columba’s College, Rathfarnham, and in TCD.
A few months after arriving in Ireland, he was stripped of his German citizenship. The doctor at the German Embassy Robert Stumpf, who was a member of the Nazi party, reported that the Scheyers lived with a Jewish eye doctor and the nothing negative was known about them. Scheyer seems to have been observed also by Irish Military Intelligence, the G2.
Renate Scheyer joined her parents and her brother in Dublin in June 1940, having stayed in the same boarding school as her brother in England. She was just 16, and started studying Modern Languages at TCD the following autumn. She later married another refugee, Robert Weil.
After the war, Ernst and Marie Scheyer became Irish citizens. He was also active in Jewish community life in Dublin and was and involved in founding the Progressive Jewish Synagogue, which would be built on Leicester Avenue, around the corner from his home on Kenilworth Square.
Over 500 people attended he meeting in Dublin on 30 January 1946 to form a Progressive Synagogue. Bethel Solomons, the first president, was a doctor and former rugby player for Ireland. The Dublin Liberal Congregation was formed with Rabbi Brasch as the minister. Scheyer was one of the council members, and with his legal background may have written the constitution.
The wedding of Ernst and Marie Scheyer’s daughter Renate and Robert Weil on 14 July 1948 was the first wedding in the Progressive Jewish community in Dublin. Scheyer may have arrange Leo Baeck’s visit to the Progressive Jewish Community in 1949 in Dublin as Scheyer was bar mitzvah under him in Oppeln.
The first meetings of this congregation were held in a Quaker meeting house until 1952, when the foundation stone of the new synagogue on Leicester Avenue, Rathgar, was consecrated.
Scheyer is listed in the Calendar of TCD from 1947 to 1958 as an Assistant in German. He took over this position from Hans Reiss (1922-2020), another refugee who later became professor of German in Bristol. His students included Bill Watts, a former Provost of TCD, and his wife Geraldine.
In a letter to Albert Einstein, Scheyer described how he set students tasks of preparing presentations on literature, philosophy, psychology and ethics. He wrote an eight-page letter to Einstein in April 1950 after Einstein had warned about the great dangers of annihilation of life on earth with the development of the hydrogen bomb.
Scheyer presented 19 radio broadcasts for the ‘Europäische Stunde’ of the RIAS Berlin, between 23 October 1955 and 16 February 1958. He reported on politics, elections, cultural festivals such as ‘An Tostal’, the death of Jack B Yeats and the problems with the ownership of the Hugh Lane collection. Robert Briscoe, Dublin’s first Jewish lord mayor, features in at least four of his broadcasts, and Scheyer describes Briscoe’s visit to the US.
He loved and inspired love among his students for German literature and German culture, and organised a Goethe celebration on his bicentenary. With his son-in-law Robert Weil he published A Book of German Idioms in 1955. He visited Germany at least once after World War II, when he went to a spa. But, while he holidayed in German-speaking Switzerland, he never spent a holiday in Germany.
Ernst Scheyer died on 9 March 1958 while visiting his son Heinz, who had become a GP in Birmingham. His heart attack seems to have been connected with the damage to his health during his time in the concentration camp. He was buried in the Progressive Jewish cemetery in Woodtown, Rathfarnham.
Two years after his death, the Ernst Scheyer Prize was founded in his memory in 1960. Two prizes are awarded annually to students in German at TCD.
His widow moved to live with their daughter and son-in-law, Renate and Robert Weil, in Belfast in 1963. She later moved to live with her son, Dr Heinz Shire, in Birmingham, and died there in 1987. She too is buried in Woodtown in Rathfarnham, Dublin.
Although Ernst Scheyer’s name does not appear in the register in Dermot Keogh’s Jews in Twentieth Century Ireland (1998), Nick Harris’s Dublin’s Little Jerusalem (2002) nor in Ray Rivlin’s Shalom Ireland (2003), he is remembered today for his teaching and enthusiasm for German language and literature.
Another German Jewish refugee who was Scheyer’s near neighbour briefly on Kenilworth Square was Professor Ludwig Hopf (1884-1939). He lived briefly at No 65. He was appointed a lecturer in TCD but had died at the end of 1939, soon after Ernst Scheyer arrived in Dublin.
Hopf was a theoretical physicist and a friend of Albert Einstein, Erwin Schrödinger and Carl Jung – he had been the first assistant to Albert Einstein and introduced Einstein to the psychoanalyst Carl Jung.
Hopf regarded Dublin as expensive to live in and estimated that everything cost 50% more than in Cambridge. Writing to friends in Germany, he describes living in ‘a very beautiful, very famous and very expensive corner of Europe.’
However, shortly after taking up his post at TCD, Hopf became seriously ill with a previously undiagnosed thyroid failure. He died at 65 Kenilworth Square on the evening of 21 December 1939.
Chag Chanukah Sameach, חַג חֲנוּכָּה שַׂמֵחַ
Shabbat Shalom, שבת שלום
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