As Notre Dame waits for its reopening, it is beautiful against the night sky of Paris

The West Front of Notre Dame seen at night from the Petit Pont and the Quai de Montebello (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

Patrick Comerford

While we were staying in Latin Quarter for two days, we were just a three-minute stroll from the Petit Pont and Quai de Montebello on the Left Bank of the Seine with their magnificent views of Notre Dame Cathedral, which is truly the heart and soul of Paris.

Notre Dame, the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe are the three places in Paris that are most visited by tourists. Until the devastating fire on 15 April 2019, Notre Dame was visited by over 13 million people annually. The cathedral is the Gothic masterpiece of French architecture and has stood on the Île de la Cité since the cornerstone was laid in 1163.

Since that fire five years ago, the cathedral has been closed for repairs and restoration, and renovation work began in October 2021.

The west front of Notre Dame seen from the steps of a raised platform (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

In Paris in recent days, I heard of the plans to celebrate the reopening of Notre Dame over a six-month period, beginning with the consecration of the Altar at the first Mass in the restored cathedral on the feast of the Immaculate Conception later this year (8 December 2024), and the final event on Pentecost next year (8 June 2025).

Meanwhile, tourists must content themselves with climbing the steps of a raised platform in front of the cathedral close to the Petit Pont for photographs of the west front, the towers, the Rose Window and the Gallery of Kings.

But some of the best photographs of Notre Dame are taken at night below the cathedral from the Quai de Montebello below the cathedral, on the left bank or south bank of the Seine.

Notre Dame seen from the Quai de Montebello on the Left Bank of the Seine (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

The Quai de Montebello is in the 5th arrondissement and stretches from the Petit Pont to the Pont de l’Archevêché. These evenings, when the new spire, the building works and the cranes are lit up, the Quai de Montebello offers some of the most majestic and spectacular views of Notre Dame against the dark skies.

The Quai de Montebello is one of the most picturesque riverside walks in Paris. It is a continuation of the Quai de la Tournelle to the Petit-Pont, and is 314 metres long and 15 metres wide.

The creation of a riverfront between the Quai de Miramiones, later the Quai de la Tournelle, and the Petit-Pont was first ordered in 1799. Its creation required demolishing the annex to the Hôtel-Dieu.

The Quai de la Bûcherie was renamed Quai de Montebello in 1843 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

The project was not realised and on 25 March 1811 a riverside, called Montebello, was planned between the Pont Saint-Michel and the Pont de la Tournelle. Only the part between Pont Saint-Michel and Petit-Pont was built, and this new street was named Quai Saint-Michel.

A parapet wall was built between the Rue des Grands-Degrés and the Pont au Double in 1817, and a ministerial decision in 1818 named the new riverfront Quai de la Bûcherie.

A decree in 1837 provided for extending the Quai de la Bûcherie between the Petit-Pont and the Pont au Double. A new building attached to the Hôtel-Dieu was built by Jean-Jacques-Marie Huvé in 1840 and the old building was demolished. Another decree in 1839 provided for extending the riverside along the Rue des Grands-Degrés, and the Quai de la Bûcherie was renamed Quai de Montebello in 1843.

The elegant Pont au Double, in the middle of the quay and only for use by pedestrians and cyclists, gives access the Île de la Cité. There are a number of restaurants along the quayside closest to the Latin Quarter.

Shakespeare and Company on the Rue de la Bûcherie, facing the Quai de Montebello (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

On the opposite side of the street to the Quai de Montebello, on the Rue de la Bûcherie, the English-language bookshop, Shakespeare and Company, was established in 1951. In 1964 founder George Whitman named it after Sylvia Beach’s former bookshop and publishing house near the Place de l’Odéon.

The original shop first published James Joyce’s Ulysses in 1922 and was a literary centre for English-speaking writers until it was closed in 1941 when Nazi Germany occupied France.

Beside Shakespeare and Company, the Square René Viviani-Montebello is usually known as the Square René Viviani. It is immediately north of the Church of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, a Gothic church built at the same time as Notre-Dame and so one of the oldest churches in Paris. Today, the church serves the community of the Greek Melchite Church in Paris.

The Church of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, beside the Square René Viviani-Montebello (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

The Quai de Montebello was named after Jean Lannes (1769-1809), Duke of Montebello and Napoleon’s Marshall, who died in battle at Essling on 22 May 1809.

Jean Lannes was one of Napoleon’s most daring and talented generals. In his exile on Saint Helena, Napoleon said of Lannes: ‘I found him a pygmy and left him a giant.’ Marshall Lannes was born in the small town of Lectoure, the son of a Gascon farmer. He had little education and was first apprenticed to a dyer. After enlisting in the army, he quickly rose through the ranks and is regarded as one the most able of all of Napoleon’s marshals.

Napoleon sent him to Portugal in 1801 as ambassador. Lannes bought the 17th century Château de Maisons, near Paris, in 1804 and had one of its state apartments redecorated for a visit by Napoleon.

He was named a Marshal of France in 1804, and he commanded the advanced guard of a great French army in the campaign of Austerlitz. Napoleon took him to Spain in 1808, and gave him a detached wing of the army. As a reward for his victory over Castaños at Tudela in 1808, Napoleon gave him the title of Duc de Montebello. He was sent to capture Saragossa in 1809.

After his last campaign in Spain, Montebello said: ‘This damned Bonaparte is going to get us all killed.’ He commanded the advanced guard for the last time in 1809. He took part in the engagements around Eckmühl and the advance on Vienna. With his corps he led the French army across the Danube, and bore the brunt, with Masséna, of the Battle of Aspern-Essling. He was mortally wounded on 22 May and died on 31 May 1809.

Notre Dame lit up against the night sky, seen from the Quai de Montebello (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

Montebello and his second wife, Louise Antoinette, Comtesse de Guéhéneuc (1782-1856), were the parents of five children, including Jean Ernest Lannes, Baron de Montebello (1803-1882), who married a descendant of the Comerford family of Cork and Wexford, Mary Theresa Boddington (1806-1898), elder daughter of Thomas Boddington and the Cork-born writer Mary (Comerford) Boddington (1766-1840). They were married in the British embassy in Paris on 27 April 1831.

Mary Theresa and Jean Ernest Lannes de Montebello were the parents of six children. Their eldest daughter Marie (1832-1917) married Henri O’Shea, a descendant of a Cork family of wine merchants who had once been in partnership with the Comerford family.

Their fifth child, René Lannes de Montbello (1845-1925), inherited some of the family fame and titles. In Paris in 1875, he married Princess Marie Lubmirska (1847-1930), the daughter of a celebrated Polish composer, Prince Kazimierz Anastazy Karol Lubomirski, whose family lived near Lviv in what is now Ukraine.

René was an army major and was known as Baron de Montebello. But, when his son Henry was born in Paris in 1876, he assumed the title of count. Henry died in childhood, but René and his Polish princess were the parents of four other children. He died in 1925 and Princess Marie died in 1930. One of their sons, Count André Roger Lannes de Montebello (1908-1986), was involved in the French resistance during World War II, and was the father of Count Guy Philippe Henri Lannes de Montebello, who, as Philippe de Montebello, was the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York until 2008.

The fate of André’s elder sister is distressing. Hedwige Marie Renée Lannes de Montebello (1881-1944) was born in Pau on 10 Mar 1881, and in 1910 she married in Biarritz Louis d’Ax de Vaudricourt (1879-1945), of the Château Vaudricourt.

Like her brother, Hedwige was involved in the French resistance. She was captured, and on 7 April 1944, named simply as Hedwig Ax, she was sent on a train from Gare de l’Est in Paris to the transit camp at Neue Bremm in Saarbrücken, Germany. She was moved to the women’s concentration camp in Ravensbrück, where her unique number was 47135. She died in Ravensbrück on 19 November 1944. Her husband, named simply in his deportation papers as Louis Ax, died in the concentration camp in Dachau in January 1945.

The Rose Window and the Gallery of the Kings on the West Front of Notre Dame (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)

Mary Comerford Boddington,a Cork-born travel writer, and her descendants who died in the Holocaust

The snow-capped peaks of the Pyrenees … Mary Comerford Boddington wrote two volumes of travel books on the Pyrenees (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

I was writing late last week about four brothers – Alexander, Arthur, Patrick and Robert Law – who were prominent in cricket and in the theatre in the late Victorian era, and their Comerford family connections.

Their grandmother, Belinda Comerford, was a sister of Mary Teresa (Comerford) Boddington (1776-1840) was an Irish-born writer and traveller and the author of many volumes of travel literature, fiction and poetry.

Mary was born in Cork in 1776. Her father, Patrick Comerford of George’s Quay, Cork, and Summerville, Co Cork, was a wine merchant in Cork in partnership with his father John Comerford, who was directly descended from the Comerford family of Co Wexford. His mother Elizabeth Hennessy was a member of the well-known Hennessy family of Cognac fame.

Patrick Comerford married Anne (Teresa) Gleadowe in Bath in 1770. She was a daughter of Thomas Gleadowe (1700-1766) of Castle Street, Dublin, and a sister of the banker Sir William Gleadowe-Newcomen (1730-1806), of Killester, Co Dublin.

The couple returned to live in Cork, and their younger surviving daughter, Belinda Isabella Comerford, married the Revd Francis Law (1768-1807), Vicar of Attanagh in the Diocese of Ossory and Rector of Cork. They are part of the Comerford family stories. Many of Belinda’s descendants kept the Comerford family name, including her son, the Revd Patrick Comerford Law.

Belinda’s elder sister, the writer Mary (Comerford) Boddington, was born in Cork in 1776. She wrote verse frequently for papers and literary magazines in Cork before she left for London in 1803. Two years later, she married Thomas Boddington (1774-1862), a West Indian merchant, whose lucrative business was centred there.

Mary Comerford and Thomas Boddington were married on 16 April 1805, in Saint George’s Church, Hanover Square, London, then as now a fashionable church for weddings. There the architect Henry Holland married Capability Brown’s daughter Bridget in 1773, the architect John Nash married Mary Ann Bradley in 1798, and much later 28-year-old Theodore Roosevelt, the future US President, married Edith Carow (25) in 1886.

In the musical My Fair Lady, Alfred Doolittle (Stanley Holloway), having just been provided with an inheritance and having to move into ‘middle-class morality,’ invites his daughter Eliza Doolittle (Audrey Hepburn) to his wedding at this church, leading to the song, ‘Get Me to the Church on Time.’

Mary toured continental Europe after 1815. Her first book, Slight Reminiscences of the Rhine, Switzerland and a corner of Italy (1834), was published in London in two volumes. This was followed by a two-volume collection of short stories, The Gossip’s Week (1836), James Hamilton and other tales (two volumes, Philadelphia, 1837), a second travel book, Sketches in the Pyrenees, with some remarks on Languedoc, Provence and the Cornice (two volumes, 1837), and a collection of poems, called simply Poems (1839).

Most of her books were published by Longman. Some of her songs were written to Irish airs, but while she and her husband Thomas Boddington are referred to frequently in Thomas Moore’s Diary, her poetry is now regarded as vain doggerel, remembered only because of her prolific output and because she was a woman writer who managed to publish so much at a time when men dominated the world of literature and publishing.

Mary died in 1840, and the popularity of her poetry and her travel writing faded soon after her death.

Mary and Thomas Boddington were the parents of two daughters and a son:

1, Mary Theresa (1806-1898).
2, Thomas Boddington (1807-1881).
3, Harriet Olivia (1809-1877).

Their elder daughter, Mary Theresa (1806-1898), was born in London on 13 January 1806. She moved to France and at the age of 25 she married Jean Ernest Lannes de Montebello (1803-1882), Baron de Montebello, in the British embassy in Paris on 27 April 1831. Jean Ernest was born on 20 July 1803 in Lisbon, where his father was Napoleon’s ambassador to Portugal. He died on 24 November 1882 in Pau, France, and Mary died there on 15 May 1898.

There the memories of their side of the Comerford family might have died out in the narratives of the Comerford genealogies if I had not decided in some idle moment many years ago to explore what had happened to Mary Comerford’s daughter and her descendants.

When Mary Boddington married Jean Ernest, he was chef de cabinet at the French Foreign Ministry and a chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur. His father, Jean Lannes, 1st Duc de Montebello (1769-1809), was a Marshal of the French Empire. He was one of Napoleon’s most daring and talented generals. In his exile on Saint Helena, Napoleon said of Lannes: ‘I found him a pygmy and left him a giant.’

Marshall Lannes was born on 10 April 1769 in the small town of Lectoure, in the Gers department in the south of France, the son of a Gascon farmer. He had little education and was first apprenticed to a dyer. But after enlisting in the army he quickly rose through the ranks and alongside Louis Nicolas Davout and André Masséna he is regarded as one the ablest of all of Napoleon’s marshals.

Napoleon sent him as ambassador to Portugal in 1801. Lannes bought the 17th century Château de Maisons, near Paris, in 1804, and had one of its state apartments redecorated for a visit by Napoleon.

When the French empire was founded, he was named a Marshal of France (1804), and he commanded the advanced guard of a great French army in the campaign of Austerlitz. Napoleon took him to Spain in 1808, and gave him a detached wing of the army, with which he won a victory over Castaños at Tudela. As a reward, Napoleon gave him the title of Duc de Montebello in 1808.

He was sent to capture Saragossa in 1809. After his last campaign in Spain, he said: ‘This damned Bonaparte is going to get us all killed.’ That year, for the last time, he had command of the advanced guard. He took part in the engagements around Eckmühl and the advance on Vienna. With his corps he led the French army across the Danube, and bore the brunt, with Masséna, of the terrible battle of Aspern-Essling. He received a mortal wound on 22 May and died on 31 May 1809.

Marshall Lannes and his second wife, Louise Antoinette, Comtesse de Guéhéneuc (1782-1856), had five children, including Jean Ernest Lannes, Baron de Montebello (1803-1882), who married Mary (Comerford) Boddington’s daughter, Mary Theresa.

Mary Theresa and Jean Ernest Lannes de Montebello were the parents of six children:

1, Marie (1832-1917), who married Henri O’Shea, a descendant of the family of wine merchants who had once been in partnership with the Comerford family in Cork.
2, Eveline (1837-1868), a nun in the Sisters of Saint Vincent de Paul.
3, Berthe (1838-1893), who married Auguste Guillemin.
4, Jean Gaston Lannes de Montebello (1840-1926), 2nd Baron de Montebello, an artillery officer and a chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur.
5, René Lannes de Montebello (1845-1925), whose story continues this exploration of Comerford family connections.
6, Roger Lannes de Montebello (1850-1878), who died in Paris.

René Lannes de Montbello (1845-1925) was born in Gelos on 13 September 1845, and inherited some of the family fame and titles. He married Princess Marie Lubmirska (1847-1930) in Paris on 4 November 1875. She was the daughter of a celebrated Polish composer, Prince Kazimierz Anastazy Karol Lubomirski (1813-1871), whose family lived near Lviv in what is now Ukraine.

René was an army major and was known by the courtesy title of Baron de Montebello. But, when his son Henry was born in Paris in 1876, he assumed the title of count. Henry died in childhood, but René and his Polish princess were the parents of four other children. He died on 27 December 1925, and Princess Marie died on 18 May 1930.

One of their sons, Count André Roger Lannes de Montebello (1908-1986), was involved in the French resistance during World War II. He was the father of Count Guy Philippe Henri Lannes de Montebello, who, as plain Philippe de Montebello, was the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York until he retired 2008.

But it is the fate of André’s elder sister that I have found distressing. Hedwige Marie Renée Lannes de Montebello (1881-1944), was born in Pau on 10 Mar 1881, and on 17 September 1910 she married in Biarritz Louis d’Ax de Vaudricourt (1879-1945), of the Château Vaudricourt, who was born on 20 May 1879.

Like her brother, Hedwige was involved in the French resistance. She was captured, and on 7 April 1944, named simply as Hedwig Ax, she was sent on a train from Gare de l’Est in Paris to the transit camp at Neue Bremm in Saarbrücken, Germany. She was moved to the women’s concentration camp in Ravensbrück, where her unique number was 47135. She died in Ravensbrück on 19 November 1944.

Her husband, named simply in his deportation papers as Louis Ax, died in the concentration camp in Dachau in January 1945.

Although I first came across her story more than ten years ago, I know no more than this about Hedwige Marie Renée Lannes de Montebello and her husband. They may seem like very distant twigs on a distant branch of the Comerford family tree. But if we fail to claim them as part of the family, they stop being part of ‘us’ and part being part of ‘them.’ And therein lies the beginning of all the dangerous thoughts that lead to racism and violent racism.

Hedwige Marie Renée Lannes de Montebello (1881-1944), a direct descendant of Mary Comerford Boddington – and through her of the Comerfords of Wexford and Cork – died in Ravensbrück on 19 November 1944. Later this month, Holocaust Memorial Day on Saturday 27 January 2024 recalls the 79th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps. The rise of the far-right across Europe and Holocaust Memorial Day later this month are stark reminders of the need to keep these stories alive, and to respect and honour the memories of the dead.

Daily prayers in Advent with Leonard Cohen and USPG: (11) 13 December 2023

‘For you / I will be a ghetto jew’ (Leonard Cohen) … stereotype figurines in a shopfront in the Jewish Quarter of Josefov in Prague (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2023)

Patrick Comerford

We are in the countdown to Christmas in the Church, with just 12 days to go to Christmas. Sunday was the Second Sunday of Advent (10 December 2023), and we are almost half-way through Advent.

Today (13 December), the Calendar of the Church of England in Common Worship remembers the lives of Saint Lucy (304), Martyr at Syracuse, and Samuel Johnson (1784), Moralist. Later today, I have a meeting at Saint Mary’s Church, Church Green End, Bletchley, and I hope to be part of a choir carols rehearsal in the evening in All Saints’ Church, Calverton. But, before the day begins, I am taking some time for prayer and reflection this morning.

Throughout Advent this year, my reflections each day include a poem or song by Leonard Cohen. These Advent reflections are following this pattern:

1, A reflection on a poem or song by Leonard Cohen;

2, the Gospel reading of the day in the Church of England lectionary;

3, a prayer from the USPG prayer diary.

‘For you / I will be a banker jew’ (Leonard Cohen) … a statue of Salomon Mayer von Rothschild (1774-1855) in the Jewish Museum in Vienna (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

The Songs and Poems of Leonard Cohen: 11, ‘The Genius’:

Leonard Cohen’s second book, The Spice-Box of Earth, was published in 1961, when he was 27. It became the most popular and commercially successful of his early books, established his reputation as a poet in Canada, and brought him early literary acclaim.

I was recalling on Monday morning that my copy of this book, to paraphrase a line in another Leonard Cohen song, ‘has grown old and weary.’ Or, rather, it is long battered, stained and dog-eared. As I read through it, I still recall the poems I selected for poetry readings in Wexford in the early and mid-1970s, including ‘I have not lingered in European monasteries’ and ‘The Genius.’

On Monday, I was discussing ‘I have not lingered in European monasteries.’ That other poem, ‘The Genius,’ is often misread yet is both enigmatic and disturbing.

There are some echoes in ‘The Genius’ of Leonard Cohen’s later ‘I’m Your Man’, written and first recorded in 1987 as the title track for his eight album. In that song, the singer pleads he is willing to be a lover, a partner, a boxer, a doctor, a river, to be struck down in anger, to crawl, fall, howl, steer, disappear, to wear a mask, to ‘claw at your heart, and … tear at your sheet’ and to ‘walk … a while across the sand.’

But ‘The Genius’ is a poem not about how Cohen is willing to do almost anything imaginable for the love he seeks of a woman, or perhaps even to realise the love of God.

Instead, this is a poem about the stereotypes projected in antisemitic hatred and racist vitriol down through time, belittling Jews across the centuries – even his use of the lower case ‘j’ for the word ‘jew’ rather a capital ‘J’ for ‘Jew’ indicates that this poem is about belittling and demeaning projections.

In six stanzas, Cohen repeats are six tropes that have been used to confront and debase Jews for generations. The first five are: the ghetto Jew who dresses differently and poisons the town wells; the ‘converso’ Jew who secretly maintains his religious beliefs but is confronted by the Inquisition and accused of ‘blood libel’; the banker Jew who secretly seeks to make and break world powers; the entertainer Jew who is basically dishonest; and the doctor Jew who is a danger to children.

This language begins with low-level hate speech that eventually reaches its climax. When society turns a blind eye to these libels, the inevitable consequence is reached in the sixth stanza: the deportations, the concentration camps and the ovens of the Holocaust.

These antisemitic tropes continue to be used on the far-right today: they target George Soros and his ‘networks’, the ‘Elders of Zion’ have been replaced by ‘globalists’ and ‘cultural Marxists, blood libel has been replaced with QAnon, and instead of accusations of deicide there are accusations of ‘white genocide.’

‘Cultural Marxism’ was used earlier this year as a term of abuse in a speech by the Conservative MP Miriam Cates. The phrase has its origins in a conspiracy theory that Marxist scholars of the Frankfurt school in interwar Germany, many of whom were Jewish, devised a programme of progressive politics intended to undermine western democracies.

Suella Braverman, who resigned recently as Home Secretary, used the phrase in 2019, and 26 Tory MPs signed a joint letter to the Daily Telegraph in 2020 accusing the National Trust of being beset by ‘cultural Marxist dogma’.

‘Globalist’ is used as cheap shorthand to allege left-leaning institutions and banks are seeking to take over the world. The phrase is often connected to antisemitic conspiracy theories, especially when tied to people such as the Jewish financier George Soros. The former Ukip leader Nigel Farage has pioneered the use of much of the populist-nationalist language now being employed by some Conservatives, and has been criticised by the Board of Deputies of British Jews, among others, for using Soros as a central trope in theories about globalists.

But some people on the left too fall into the trap of using similar tropes. On marches protesting about the present violence in Gaza, Israel and the West Bank, some of the slogans and placards have projected the policies of the present Netanyahu government onto every Israeli and even onto every Jew.

The New Stateman spoke last month of ‘the return of the longest hatred’ (24 November 2023), reporting that antisemitism is surging across the world and that Jewish people are once again living in fear. The following edition took as its cover theme ‘Being Jewish now’ (1 December 2023). With antisemitism rising and divisions on the left over the Gaza war, several writers reflected on being Jewish now.

In this poem, Leonard Cohen deals with ‘the longest hatred’ and in each stanza dramatically presents a different Jewish stereotype, a role projected onto Jews in antisemitic attacks that reach their eventual climax with the deportation of Jews to the concentration camps and the Holocaust.

Perhaps Leonard Cohen is addressing everyone, challenging hidden antisemitism throughout the world. But the ‘you’ he addresses may also be God. Perhaps the poet is also saying that no matter how others in the world find him or belittle him, no matter what the consequences are of the belittlement and hatred he meets in the world, no matter how heavy the burden or the yoke is, he remains a Jew, and he remains faithful to God.

‘For you /> I will be a Dachau jew / and lie down in lime’ (Leonard Cohen) … ‘Arbeit Mach Frei’ the slogan on the gates of Dachau

Leonard Cohen, The Genius:

For you
I will be a ghetto jew
and dance
and put white stockings
on my twisted limbs
and poison wells
across the town

For you
I will be an apostate jew
and tell the Spanish priest
of the blood vow
in the Talmud
and where the bones
of the child are hid

For you
I will be a banker jew
and bring to ruin
a proud old hunting king
and end his line

For you
I will be a Broadway jew
and cry in theatres
for my mother
and sell bargain goods
beneath the counter

For you
I will be a doctor jew
and search
in all the garbage cans for foreskins
to sew back again

For you
I will be a Dachau jew
and lie down in lime
with twisted limbs
and bloated pain
no mind can understand

‘For you / I will be a Broadway jew / and cry in theatres’ (Leonard Cohen) … ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ first opened on Broadway in 1964

Matthew 11: 28-30 (NRSVA):

[Jesus said:] 28 ‘Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. 29 Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. 30 For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.’

‘For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light’(Matthew 11: 30) … Station 3 in the Stations of the Cross in the Church of the Annunciation, Clonard, Wexford (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2022)

Today’s Prayers (Wednesday 13 December 2023):

The theme this week in the new edition of ‘Pray With the World Church,’ the Prayer Diary of the Anglican mission agency USPG (United Society Partners in the Gospel), is ‘The Faith of Advent.’ This theme was introduced on Sunday.

The USPG Prayer Diary today (13 December 2023) invites us to pray in these words:

Heavenly Father, as we prepare our hearts to celebrate the birth of your Son joyfully, we thank you for the example of faith we have in Mary.

12 Christmas wreaths on front doors in Beacon Street, Lichfield … there are 12 days to go to Christmas (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2023)

The Collect:

God our redeemer,
who gave light to the world that was in darkness
by the healing power of the Saviour’s cross:
shed that light on us, we pray,
that with your martyr Lucy
we may, by the purity of our lives,
reflect the light of Christ
and, by the merits of his passion,
come to the light of everlasting life;
through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

The Post-Communion Prayer:

God our redeemer,
whose Church was strengthened by the blood of your martyr Lucy:
so bind us, in life and death, to Christ’s sacrifice
that our lives, broken and offered with his,
may carry his death and proclaim his resurrection in the world;
through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Yesterday’s Reflection

Continued Tomorrow

Reading ‘The Genius’ by Leonard Cohen (The Spice-Box of Earth)

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

Recent editions of the New Statesman have discussed ‘the return of the longest hatred’ and ‘Being Jewish Now’

‘Who knows Dora, knows what love means’: finding a story of Kafka and love in Prague

The statue of Franz Kafka Street beside the Spanish Synagogue in Prague (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2023)

Patrick Comerford

This is our last day in Prague during a very short mid-week visit to Prague. Charlotte and I have been visiting Prague Castle, the Charles Bridge, the Old Town and its old churches, the Jewish Quarter or Josefov and some of its many synagogues, and searching for sites associated with Franz Kafka. Although the synagogues in Prague were closed yesterday on the last day of Passover, we managed to visit many of them today before Shabbat began this evening.

Franz Kafka (1883-1924) is, perhaps, the best-known literary figure of the 20th century associated with the Czech capital. He was born in Prague, and when he died near Vienna he was buried in Prague. One of his best-known novels is The Metamorphosis (1915), which I discussed yesterday (13 April 2023). But many of his other acclaimed books were not published until after he died, including The Trial (1925), The Castle (1926) and America (1927).

In Prague, we saw Kafka’s statue in Dusni Street beside the ‘Spanish Synagogue’ and the streets named after him. There is a collection of items associated with Kafka in the Spanish Synagogue, close to where he was born.

We were also reminded of the story, ‘Kafka and the Travelling Doll,’ written by the Catalan children’s writer Jordi Sierra i Fabra. This story is a story of unconditional love, based on a real-life event in the life of Kafka, based on the memoirs of Dora Diamant. She had lived with Kafka in Berlin, and he died in her arms.

There is a wonderful adaptation of the story for RTÉ by Caitríona Ní Mhurchú from a few years ago:

One year before his death, Franz Kafka is in one of Berlin’s parks, Steglitz City Park, where he sees a girl who is crying because she has lost her doll.

The writer calms her down by telling her that her doll had gone on a trip and that he, a doll postman, would take her a letter the next day.

Over 13 days, he brought a letter to the park every day in which the doll tells of her adventures, which he himself had written the night before.

‘Your doll has gone off on a trip,’ he said. ‘How do you know that?’ the girl asks.

‘Because she’s written me a letter,’ Kafka says.

The girl seems suspicious. ‘Do you have it on you?’ she asks.

‘No, I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I left it at home by mistake, but I’ll bring it with me tomorrow.’

He’s so convincing, the girl doesn’t know what to think anymore. Can it be possible that this mysterious man is telling the truth?

The next day, Kafka rushes back to the park with the letter. The little girl is waiting for him, and since she hasn’t learned how to read yet, he reads the letter out loud to her.

The doll is very sorry, but she’s grown tired of living with the same people all the time. She needs to get out and see the world, to make new friends. It’s not that she doesn’t love the little girl, but she longs for a change of scenery, and therefore they must separate for a while. The doll then promises to write to the girl every day and keep her abreast of her activities.

‘Please do not mourn me, I have gone on a trip to see the world. I will write you of my adventures.

After a few days, the girl had forgotten about the real toy that she’d lost, and she was only thinking about the fiction that she’d been offered as a replacement.

Kafka wrote every sentence of this story in such detail, and with such humorous precision, that it made the doll’s situation completely understandable: the doll had grown up, gone to school, met other people.

She always reassured the child of her love, but made reference to the complications of her life, her other obligations and interests that prevented her from returning to their shared life right now. She asked the little girl to think about this, and in doing so she prepared her for the inevitable, for doing without her.

By that point, of course, the girl no longer misses the doll. Kafka has given her something else instead, and by the time those two weeks are up, the letters have cured her of her unhappiness. She has the story, and when a person is lucky enough to live inside a story, to live inside an imaginary world, the pains of this world disappear.

For as long as the story goes on, reality no longer exists.

One day the girl got her doll back. It was a different doll of course, bought by Kafka as a last gift for her.

An attached letter explained, ‘My travels have changed me.’

Many years later, long after Kafka’s death, the now grown girl found a letter stuffed into an unnoticed crevice in the cherished replacement doll.

In summary it said:

‘Everything that you love, you will eventually lose, but in the end, love will return in a different form.’

In the end, love will return.

The story of Dora Diamant and her tragic life is as intriguing and captivating as any story that Kafka has written (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2023)

The story is based on the memoirs of Dora Diamant, who lived with Kafka in Berlin. Kafka died in her arms in Vienna in 1924 and was buried in Prague, where he had been born in 1883.

Dora Diamant (1898-1952) is best remembered as Kafka’s lover and the woman who kept some of his last writings until they were confiscated by the Gestapo in 1933. She kept his papers against the wishes of Kafka, who had asked shortly before his death that they be destroyed.

The story of Dora Diamant and her tragic life is as intriguing and captivating as any story that Kafka could have written.

She was born Dwojra Diament in Pabianice, Poland, on 4 March 1898. Her father, Herschel Dymant, was a successful small businessman and a devout follower of the Ger Hasidic dynasty from Góra Kalwaria, once the largest and most influential Hasidic group in Poland.

When Dora’s mother died in 1912, her father moved with the family to Będzin, near the German border.

At the end of World War I, after helping to raise her 10 siblings, Dora refused to marry and was sent to Kraków to study to be a kindergarten teacher. But she ran away to Berlin, where she worked in the Jewish community as a teacher and as a seamstress in an orphanage. There she changed the spelling of her name to Diamant.

Dora Diamant … when she met Franz Kafka, it was love at first sight

She was working as a kitchen volunteer in a children’s summer camp run by the Berlin Jewish Peoples’ Homes at the seaside resort of Graal-Müritz on the Baltic Sea in July 1923. There she met Kafka, who years before had commended this work to his first fiancée Felice Bauer.

Dora told Kafka she was 19, but she was 25; he was 40 and suffering from tuberculosis. It was love at first sight, and they spent every day of the next three weeks together, making plans to live together in Berlin.

He had just resigned from his post at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute in Prague, his writing career was shaky and his health was precarious. After returning briefly to Prague that September, Kafka moved to Berlin, where he and Dora shared three different flats, living through alarming inflation and material hardship.

Their means were minimal: they had no money for newspapers, at the worst of times they used kerosene lamps for lighting as they could not afford electricity, and the food they ate was often sent by his family in Prague. They used candle stubs to heat their meal on New Year’s Eve 1924. But still they had dreams: they thought of emigrating to Palestine, and opening a restaurant in Tel Aviv; she was to be the cook and he the waiter.

They continued to live together until tuberculosis of the larynx meant he had to receive hospital care. Dora stayed with him, and she moved in with him at the sanatorium in Kierling near Klosterneuburg, outside Vienna.

At the point of death, Kafka asked Dora’s father for permission to marry her. However, on the advice of the local rabbi, her father refused. Dora remained with Kafka to the end, making sure he had everything he needed. Franz died in Dora’s arms on 3 June 1924.

In a letter to Kafka’s parents, describing their son’s last hours, Dr Robert Klopstock wrote, ‘Who knows Dora, only he can know what love means.’

Dora Diamant first met Kafka’s parents at his funeral in the New Jewish Cemetery in Prague. As at his coffin was lowered into the grave, she let out an unearthly wail, and lay lifeless on the ground. Kafka’s father turned his back on her, disdainfully. No one dared to move and help her up.

The Old Jewish cemetery in Prague (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2023)

After Kafka’s death, Dora was blamed for burning Kafka’s papers under his gaze and at his request during the last months of his life. But she also kept some of his journals and 36 of his letters to her.

Despite Max Brod’s request that she turn over to him all the Kafka papers she held, Dora kept the letters Franz had written to her.

Max Brod and many others who held letters and writings by Kafka also chose not to comply with his dying wishes that all his writings should be destroyed. Dora also secretly held on to many of Kafka’s notebooks, keeping them until they were stolen from her apartment, along with her other papers, in a Gestapo raid in 1933.

Max Brod and the German Kafka scholar Klaus Wagenbach searched widely for these papers in the 1950s, and since the 1990s they have been sought by the Kafka Project at San Diego State University in California.

Franz Kafka on the cover of a book in an exhibition in the Spanish Synagogue in Prague (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

After Kafka’s death, Dora studied theatre at the Dumont Drama Academy in Düsseldorf in the late 1920s and then worked as a professional actress. She joined the Communist Party of Germany in the 1930s as an agitprop actress. She married the Jewish writer Ludwig ‘Lutz’ Lask (1903-1973), editor of Die Rote Fahne, the Communist party newspaper. She gave birth to a daughter on 1 March 1934, and named her Franziska Marianne after Franz Kafka, who remained the love of her life.

Dora escaped from Germany with her daughter in 1936, joining her husband in Soviet Russia. But Lutz Lask was arrested and sent to the Far East during Stalin’s purges in 1937. Dora then left the Soviet Union, travelling across Europe to safety in England just a week before the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939.

Dora and her daughter were first jailed in Holloway and then interned as enemy aliens at the Women’s Detention Camp in Port Erin on the Isle of Man. When she was released in 1941, she returned to London and helped to found the Friends of Yiddish, working to keep the Yiddish language and culture alive. She realised a dream she once shared with Kafka when she visited Israel in 1950. In Tel Aviv, she visited her brother David and sister Sarah, the only survivors of the 11 Dymant siblings. The others, like Kafka’s three sisters, were murdered during the Holocaust.

Dora lived in impoverished circumstances in Whitechapel in the East End of London, devoting herself to the dissemination and preservation of Hasidic culture and the Yiddish language. She organised discussions, theatrical performances and recitals, in which she acted, recited and sang. Sadly, she never spoke about Kafka except on one occasion, nor did she publish anything about him, although she left numerous notes behind.

Dora died at Plaistow Hospital in east London on 15 August 1952. She was 53 and she was buried in an unmarked grave in the United Synagogue Cemetery on Marlowe Road in East Ham.

Her daughter Marianne was later diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. Police, alerted by concerned neighbours, broke into her Muswell Hill bedsit in 1982 and found her dead. She had starved herself to death. She was 48.

Dora had been shunned by Kafka’s family and was all but forgotten until her living relatives from Israel and Germany – including her only living nephew Zvi Diamant, who was born in 1947 in the release camp at Dachau – gathered at her grave in East Ham for a stone-setting 24 years ago in August 1999.

Her headstone reads ‘Who knows Dora, knows what love means.’

May her memory be a blessing.

Shabbat Shalom

‘Who knows Dora, knows what love means’ … Dora Diamant was forgotten until 20 years ago (Photograph: Geoffrey Gillon / Find a Grave)

‘They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain’

Patrick Comerford

On the holiest days of the year, Jews pray for a time when humanity will live in harmony, everyone will recognize God’s greatness, and loving kindness will fill the world.

Maimonides explains that world peace is the natural corollary of belief and knowledge of God. The reason is clear. Anyone who recognises that everyone is created equal will see the senselessness of initiating violence against others; for we are all children of the same God.

Judaism teaches with optimism that one day everyone will understand this. This connection between belief in God and peace on earth was expressed by the Prophet Isaiah: ‘They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain; for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea’ (Isaiah 11: 9, quoted in Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed, 3: 11).

The most famous war-time truce was the Christmas Truce during World War I in 1914, and it is described by Malcolm Brown and Shirley Seaton in their book Christmas Truce (1981) and in their BBC documentary Peace in No Man’s Land (1984).

But there was also another, Easter Truce, in which a young Jewish doctor, Fredrick (Fritz) Kohn (1892-1984), played a key role.

Fritz Kohn was born on 22 May 1892 in Chomutov (Komotau) in north-west Bohemia, north-west of Prague and close to the border with Germany. He was educated at the local gymnasium (grammar school), where he was taught by Cistercian monks. He went to Prague in 1910 for medical studies at the Karl Ferdinand University and qualified in 1915. After six months post-graduate work in Prague, he was commissioned into the Austro-Hungarian army as a lieutenant, was sent to the Eastern Front.

Kohn was a medical officer in a Hungarian regiment in Galicia, when 20 Russian soldiers emerged from their trenches at 5 a.m. on Easter morning, waving white flags and asking for a truce.

The opposing armies shared food and drink, and when the young Jewish doctor complained of shrapnel attacks on his first aid post, the Russian colonel, who spoke perfect German and had once lived in Vienna, promised that so long as he was in command, the doctor would be safe.

For the next 14 days, Dr Kohn’s first aid post was left alone until the Russian commander sent across a rocket, signalling that his unit was leaving and the doctor should be on his guard. Apparently, there were no more major attacks on the post and Dr Kohn survived the ensuing Brusilov offensive in May that year, and survived World War I.

He was called up to the Czechoslovakian Army in 1938 for a short time until the Sudetenland was invaded by Nazi Germany. He was arrested and imprisoned, and spent some time in Dachau before being released as a result of intervention by British Quakers.

Having escaped the Holocaust, he became a house surgeon at Saint Martin’s Hospital, Bath, during World War II. He remained on the hospital staff as a consultant surgeon until 1957. He died on 18 December 1984, aged 92.

In a letter to Brown and Seaton before he died, Dr Kohn wrote: ‘I have seen demonstrated in front of my own eyes that suddenly people who are trying to kill each other, and will try to kill again when the day is over, are still able to sit together and talk to each other.’

Sometimes, in our world of brutal conflict, peaceful gestures seem remote, but Judaism teaches us to savour each instance. That is why the restful peace of Shabbat is called ‘a taste of the World to Come,’ inspiring a weekly day of tranquillity as a model for the future. All can look forward expectantly to the fulfilment of the Rosh Hashanah prayer that ‘wickedness will fade away like smoke and God sweeps the rule of arrogance from the earth.’

Rabbi Daniel B Groper of Community Synagogue of Rye, New York, offers this ‘Blessing for Sharing Christmas Dinner with Family or Friends’:

‘Blessed are You, Eternal our God, who brings Your children together from different faiths to share a meal together on this night, sacred to so many around this table and around the world. May the spirit of generosity that characterizes the Christmas season inspire all in our country to work more fervently for justice. May this day be filled with joy and blessing.

‘We are conscious of the many times in history when Jews and other minorities were persecuted and separated from the majority culture, and of the places in our world today where minorities are still persecuted for their beliefs. So, we give thanks especially tonight for two blessings of living in an open and cosmopolitan society: the blessing that our right to follow our own traditions is secure, and the blessing of knowing that our differences need not separate us from each other. May this meal be a tribute to our right to be true to ourselves, and our delight in sharing in each other’s cultures.’

Rabbi Beth Kalisch of the Beth David Reform Congregation, Philadelphia, offers this ‘Blessing for Sharing Christmas Dinner with Family or Friends’:

Blessed are You, Eternal our God, who brings your children together from different faiths to share a meal together on this night, sacred to so many around this table and around the world. May the spirit of generosity that characterises the Christmas season inspire all in our country to work more fervently for justice. May this day be filled with joy and blessing.

We are conscious of the many times in history when Jews and other minorities were persecuted and separated from the majority culture, and of the places in our world today where minorities are still persecuted for their beliefs. So, we give thanks especially tonight for two blessings of living in an open and cosmopolitan society: the blessing that our right to follow our own traditions is secure, and the blessing of knowing that our differences need not separate us from each other.

May this meal be a tribute both to our right to be faithful to our own traditions, and to our delight in sharing in each other’s cultures.

בָּרוּךְ אַתָה, יְיָ, שׁוֹמֵר אֶת-כָּל-אֹהֲבָיו.
Baruch Atah Adonai, Shomer et kol ohavav.
Blessed are You, Eternal our God, Guardian of all who love You.

Shabbat Shalom

When memories of the Holocaust haunt the extended family

A group Jewish prisoners released from Ravensbrück when it was liberated on 30 April 1945

Patrick Comerford

Today marks the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camp at Ravensbrück on 30 April 1945. The end of the Holocaust and of World War II 75 years ago has brought a number of anniversaries and commemorations this year, including the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps at Auschwitz and Birkenau (27 January), Buchenwald (11 April), Bergen-Belsen (15 April), Sachsenhausen (22 April), Dachau (29 April), Ravensbrück (30 April), Mauthausen (5 May) and Theresienstadt (8 May).

About 130,000 women and girls from about 20 different countries ended up at Ravensbrück. Their stories have been told by the British journalist Sarah Helm, whose meticulous research and thorough analysis of survivors' stories has been published in her books, Ravensbrück: Life and Death in Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women and If this is a woman: Inside Ravensbrück – Hitler’s Concentration Camp for Women. In a feature in the Sunday Times Magazine last Sunday (26 April 2020), she told how her research continues, and how the full story of Ravensbrück has not yet been uncovered.

Some years ago, I was chilled when I realised that a direct descendant of the Comerford family of Cork, and through that line a descendant of the Comerfords of Co Wexford, suffered horribly with her husband after the German invasion of France and that both died in the Holocaust – one in Ravensbrück and the other in Dachau.

Hedwige Marie Renée Lannes de Montebello (1881-1944) and her husband, Louis d’Ax de Vaudricourt (1879-1945) of Château Vaudricourt, were French aristocrats and did not bear the Comerford family name. Nevertheless, they are part of my own family tree, no matter how distant a branch. Their fate brought home to me how even today we are all close to the evils of racism and its destructive force across Europe and in North America, and we must never forget that.

Mary Teresa Comerford (1776-1840) was a little-known poet and author in the early 19th century who wrote under the name Mary Boddington. Some of her songs were written to Irish airs, but while she and her husband Thomas Boddington are referred to frequently in Thomas Moore’s Diary, her poetry is now regarded as vain doggerel, remembered only because of her prolific output and because she was a woman writer who managed to publish so much at a time when men dominated the world of literature and publishing.

Mary was born in Cork in 1776, the daughter of Patrick Comerford (d. 1796), of George’s Quay, Cork, and Summerville, Co Cork. He was a wine merchant in Cork in partnership with his father John Comerford, who was directly descended from the Comerford family of Co Wexford, while his mother Elizabeth Hennessy was a member of the well-known Hennessy family of Cognac fame.

In Bath in 1770, Patrick Comerford married Anne (Teresa), daughter of Thomas Gleadowe (1700-1766) of Castle Street, Dublin, and sister of Sir William Gleadowe-Newcomen (1730-1806), the banker, of Killester, Co Dublin.

Patrick’s younger surviving daughter, Belinda Isabella, married the Revd Francis Law (1768-1807), Vicar of Attanagh in the Diocese of Ossory and Rector of Cork, and they are part of the Comerford family stories.

Many of Belinda’s descendants kept the Comerford family name, including her son, the Revd Patrick Comerford Law. There were interesting family connections with clerical families, with Lewis Carroll, the creator of Alice in Wonderland, and with Sir Edward Fitzgerald Law (1846-1908) of Athens, who was involved in reforming the Greek economy in the 1890s and in the negotiations leading to the eventual restoration of Crete to the Greek state.

Belinda (Comerford) Law’s elder sister, Mary (Comerford) Boddington, wrote verse frequently for the Cork papers before she left Cork for London in 1803. On 16 April 1805, she was married in the fashionable at Saint George’s Church, Hanover Square, London, to Thomas Boddington (1774-1862), a wealthy West Indies merchant of Upper Brooke Street, London, and Marylebone.

Saint George’s was a fashionable church for weddings at the time. There the architect Henry Holland married Capability Brown’s daughter Bridget in 1773, the architect John Nash married Mary Ann Bradley in 1798, and a century later Theodore Roosevelt, the future US President, married Edith Carow (25), in 1886. In the musical My Fair Lady, Alfred Doolittle (Stanley Holloway), having just received an inheritance and having to move into ‘middle-class morality,’ invites his daughter Eliza Doolittle (Audrey Hepburn) to his wedding at this church, leading to the song, Get Me to the Church on Time.

After her marriage, Mary (Comerford) Boddington continued to write and published some entertaining volumes on her travels on the Continent of Europe from 1815 on. She died in 1840, and the popularity of her poetry and her travel writing faded soon after her death.

Mary and Thomas Boddington had a son and two daughters. Their elder daughter, Mary Theresa (1806-1898), was born in London on 13 January 1806. She moved to France and at the age of 25 she was married in the British embassy in Paris on 27 April 1831, to Jean Ernest Lannes de Montebello (1803-1882), Baron de Montebello.

Jean Ernest was born on 20 July 1803 in Lisbon, where his father was Napoleon’s ambassador to Portugal. He died on 24 November 1882 in Pau, France, and Mary died there on 15 May 1898. There the memories of their side of the family might have died out in the narratives of the Comerford genealogies if I had not decided in some idle moment to explore what had happened to Mary Comerford’s daughter and her descendants.

A pile of shoes among the personal belongings plundered from the victims of the Holocaust (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

When Mary Boddington married Jean Ernest, he was chef de cabinet at the French Foreign Ministry and a chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur. His father, Jean Lannes, 1st Duc de Montebello (1769-1809), was a Marshal of the French Empire. He was one of Napoleon’s most daring and talented generals. In his exile on Saint Helena, Napoleon said of the duke: ‘I found him a pygmy and left him a giant.’

Marshall Lannes was born on 10 April 1769 in the small town of Lectoure, in the Gers department in the south of France, the son of a Gascon farmer. He had little education and was first apprenticed to a dyer. But after enlisting in the army he quickly rose through the ranks and alongside Louis Nicolas Davout and André Masséna he is regarded as one the ablest of all of Napoleon’s marshals.

In 1801, Napoleon sent him as ambassador to Portugal. In 1804, Lannes bought the 17th century Château de Maisons, near Paris, and had one of its state apartments redecorated for a visit by Napoleon.

When the French empire was founded, he was named a Marshal of France (1804), and he commanded the advanced guard of a great French army in the campaign of Austerlitz. Napoleon took him to Spain in 1808, and gave him a detached wing of the army, with which he won a victory over Castaños at Tudela. As a reward in 1808, Napoleon gave him the title of Duc de Montebello.

He was sent to capture Saragossa in 1809. After his last campaign in Spain, he said: ‘This damned Bonaparte is going to get us all killed.’ That year, for the last time, he had command of the advanced guard. He took part in the engagements around Eckmühl and the advance on Vienna. With his corps he led the French army across the Danube, and bore the brunt, with Masséna, of the terrible battle of Aspern-Essling. He received a mortal wound on 22 May, and died on 31 May 1809.

Marshall Lannes and his second wife, Louise Antoinette, Comtesse de Guéhéneuc (1782-1856), had five children, including Jean Ernest Lannes, Baron de Montebello (1803-1882), who married Mary (Comerford) Boddington’s daughter, Mary Theresa.

Mary Theresa and Jean Ernest Lannes de Montebello were the parents of six children:

1, Marie (1832-1917), who married Henri O’Shea, a descendant of the family of wine merchants who had once been in partnership with the Comerford family in Cork.
2, Eveline (1837-1868), a nun in the Sisters of Saint Vincent de Paul.
3, Berthe (1838-1893), who married Auguste Guillemin.
4, Jean Gaston (1840-1926), 2nd Baron de Montebello, an artillery officer and a chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur.
5, René (1845-1925), whose story continues this exploration of Comerford family connections.
6, Roger (1850-1878), who died in Paris.

Marie Lannes de Montebello (1847-1930), born Princess Marie Lubmirska … mother of Hedwige Marie Renée Lannes de Montebello (1881-1944), a descendant of the Comerfords of Wexford who died in Ravensbrück (Detroit Institute of Arts)

René Lannes de Montbello (1845-1925) was born in Gelos on 13 September 1845, and inherited some of the family fame and titles. In Paris on 4 November 1875, he married Princess Marie Lubmirska (1847-1930), the daughter of a celebrated Polish composer, Prince Kazimierz Anastazy Karol Lubomirski (1813-1871), whose family lived near Lviv in what is now Ukraine.

René was an army major and was known by the courtesy title of Baron de Montebello. But, when his son Henry was born in Paris in 1876, he assumed the title of count. Henry died in childhood, but René and his Polish princess were the parents of four other children. He died on 27 December 1925, and Princess Marie died on 18 May 1930.

One of their sons, Count André Roger Lannes de Montebello (1908-1986), was involved in the French resistance during World War II, and was the father of Count Guy Philippe Henri Lannes de Montebello, who, as plain Philippe de Montebello, was the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York until 2008.

But it is the fate of André’s elder sister that I have found distressing. Hedwige Marie Renée Lannes de Montebello (1881-1944), was born in Pau on 10 Mar 1881, and on 17 September 1910 she married in Biarritz Louis d’Ax de Vaudricourt (1879-1945), of the Château Vaudricourt, who was born on 20 May 1879.

Like her brother, Hedwige was involved in the French resistance. She was captured, and on 7 April 1944, named simply as Hedwig Ax, she was sent on a train from Gare de l’Est in Paris to the transit camp at Neue Bremm in Saarbrücken, Germany. She was transferred to the women’s concentration camp in Ravensbrück, 90 km north of Berlin, where her unique number was 47135. She died in Ravensbrück on 19 November 1944.

Her husband, named simply in his deportation papers as Louis Ax, died in the concentration camp in Dachau in January 1945.

Hedwige Marie Renée Lannes de Montebello (1881-1944), a direct descendant of the Comerfords of Wexford and Cork, died in Ravensbrück on 19 November 1944

I know no more than this about Hedwige Marie Renée Lannes de Montebello and her husband. They may seem like very distant twigs on a distant branch of the Comerford family tree. But if we don’t claim them as part of the family, they stop being part of ‘us’ and part being part of ‘them.’ And therein lies the beginning of all the dangerous thoughts that lead to racism and violent racism.

Hedwige Marie Renée Lannes de Montebello (1881-1944), a direct descendant of the Comerfords of Wexford and Cork, died in Ravensbrück on 19 November 1944.

The rise of the far-right in Europe and America and this year’s 75th anniversary of the end of the Holocaust and the end of World War II are stark reminders of the need to keep these stories alive, and to respect and honour the memories of the dead. We have got to stop making some people ‘us’ and some people ‘them.’ We are all part of the one, larger family.

Arbeit Mach Frei ... the slogan on the gates of Dachau, where Louis d’Ax de Vaudricourt died in 1945

‘For those who sat in the region and shadow of death light has dawned’

Holocaust Memorial Day on 27 January 2020 marks the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

Sunday, 26 January 2020

The Third Sunday after Epiphany

9.30 a.m.: Morning Prayer, Castletown Church, Kilcornan, Co Limerick

The Readings: Isaiah 9: 1-4; Psalm 27: 1, 4-12; I Corinthians 1: 10-18; Matthew 4: 12-23.

There is a link to the readings HERE.

May I speak to you in the name of God, + Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Amen.

This morning’s Gospel reading challenges us to look at what it means to follow Christ in a new light. Are we prepared to give up our old ways, to rake the plunge, to risk all for the sake of the kingdom?

Tomorrow [27 January 2020] is Holocaust Memorial Day and also marks the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and Birkenau and the beginning of the end of the Holocaust.

To put our Gospel reading into context, we might recall that for the past two weeks we have been thinking about the Baptism of Christ by Saint John the Baptist and what it means for us.

When Christ hears about the arrest of Saint John the Baptist, he withdraws to the Wilderness, where he is tempted by the Devil. However, he refuses to use his divine powers to his own human ends.

In this morning’s reading, Christ moves from Nazareth to Capernaum, to begin his mission. At the start of his public ministry, he calls on people to repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand.

He then calls his first four disciples: Simon Peter and his brother Andrew, and the brothers James and John, the sons of Zebedee. He invites them to follow him, and to ‘fish for people.’ They give up their trade immediately, leave their nets and their boats, and begin a radically different way of life.

We are then told how Christ continues his ministry, travelling throughout Galilee, teaching in the synagogues, and proclaiming the good news in both word and deed.

It is interesting to see how Andrew and Simon Peter are called together: two brothers, one with a very Jewish name, Simon or Shimon (שִׁמְעוֹן), and one with a very Greek name, Andrew or Andreas (Ἀνδρέας).

From the very beginning, the Church, the Body of Christ, brings us together in a new family in which there is neither Jew nor Gentile, in which all discrimination comes to an end.

The Gospel reading reminds us how ‘Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues’ (Matthew 4: 23). It is a sharp reminder that Jesus was a practicing Jew, worshipping regularly in synagogues, and it is a timely reminder just a day before Holocaust Memorial Day.

I was in London last Monday for the launch in the House of Lords of resources for use by Christians to mark Holocaust Memorial Day 2020 and prepared by the Council of Christians and Jews.

We are using some of these resources at Morning Prayer / at the Eucharist this morning.

Holocaust Memorial Day this year marks 75 years since the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, a landmark anniversary, and also marks the 25th anniversary of the Genocide in Bosnia.

The National Holocaust Memorial Day commemoration takes place in the Round Room at the Mansion House in Dublin this evening.

The Holocaust Memorial Day commemoration cherishes the memory of all who perished in the Holocaust. It recalls six million Jewish men, women and children and millions of others who were persecuted and murdered by the Nazis because of their ethnicity, disability, sexuality, political affiliations or their religious beliefs.

It is a time to remember too the millions of people murdered in more recent genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur.

This is a day to learn the lessons of the past and recognise that genocide does not just take place on its own – it is a steady process that can begin if discrimination, racism and hatred are not checked and prevented. To paraphrase the Prophet Isaiah in our first reading and quoted in the Gospel reading, the people who walked in darkness needed to see a great light.

We are fortunate here in Ireland; we are not at immediate risk of genocide. But during my recent visit to Auschwitz, I was chilled by one exhibit that shows how the Nazis plan to exterminate 11 million Jews in Europe included 4,000 Jews in Ireland.

Four Irish citizens, Ettie Steinberg and her son Leon, and Ephraim and Lena Sacks from Dublin were murdered in Auschwitz, and Isaac Shishi from Dublin and his family were murdered by the Nazis in Lithuania.

Esther, or Ettie, was one of the seven children of Aaron Hirsh Steinberg and his wife Bertha Roth. She grew up at 28 Raymond Terrace, in ‘Little Jerusalem’ off the South Circular Road in Dublin. Ettie went to school at Saint Catherine’s School, the Church of Ireland parish school on Donore Avenue, and she married Vogtjeck Gluck in the Greenville Hall Synagogue on the South Circular Road, Dublin, in 1937.

She was 22 and he was 24, and they moved to France.

When the Vichy regime began rounding up Jews, Ettie, Vogtjeck and their son Leon were arrested. Back in Dublin, her family secured visas that would allow them to travel to Northern Ireland. But when the visas arrived in Toulouse, it was too late. Ettie, Vogtjeck and Leon had been arrested the day before.

As they were being transported to the death camps, Ettie wrote a final postcard to her family and threw it out a train window. A passer-by found the postcard and it eventually reached Dublin.

The Glucks arrived in Auschwitz on 4 September 1942. It is assumed that they were put to death immediately.

Isaac Shishi, Ephraim Saks and his sister Lena, were all born in Ireland, but their families moved to Europe when they were children.

Isaac was born in Dublin on 29 January 1891, when his family was living at 36 St Alban’s Road, off the South Circular Road. Isaac, his wife Chana and their daughter Sheine were murdered by the Nazis in Vieksniai in Lithuania in 1941.

Ephraim and Lena Sacks were born in Dublin on 19 April 1915 and 2 February 1918. Ephraim was 27 when he was murdered in Auschwitz on 24 August 1942; Lena was about 24 when she was murdered there in 1942 or 1943.

Olivia Marks-Woldman of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust reminded us last Monday that as well 6 million Jews, the victims of the Nazis during the Holocaust included Gypsies, Gays, Jehovah’s Witnesses, conscientious objectors, people with disabilities, and people who joined the Resistance throughout Europe.

The Holocaust touched every family in Europe. Let’s not think for a moment that there was a family that did not lose cousins, neighbours, friends, work colleagues, school friends. In my own family, a very, very distant family member, Hedwige Marie Renée Lannes de Montebello (1881-1944), was born in Paris but was descended from the Comerford family of Wexford.

She was involved in the French resistance and was captured, and on 7 April 1944. She was sent to the women’s concentration camp in Ravensbrück, where her unique number was 47135. She died in Ravensbrück on 19 November 1944.

Her husband, Louis d’Ax de Vaudricourt (1879-1945), died in the concentration camp in Dachau two months later in January 1945.

They are very distant branches on a very extended family tree. But we have to be willing to cherish the memory of everyone who died in the Holocaust. We must refuse to distance ourselves from them, to classify these victims as ‘them.’

The Holocaust calls us to put an end to all discrimination. Christ’s call of Simon and Andrew together calls us to put an end to all discrimination.

And so, may all we think, say and do be to the praise, honour and glory of God, + Father, Son and Holy Spirit, Amen.

‘Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues’ (Matthew 4: 23) ... inside the Nuova or New Synagogue, the only surviving synagogue in Corfu (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

Matthew 4: 12-23 (NRSVA):

12 Now when Jesus heard that John had been arrested, he withdrew to Galilee. 13 He left Nazareth and made his home in Capernaum by the lake, in the territory of Zebulun and Naphtali, 14 so that what had been spoken through the prophet Isaiah might be fulfilled:

15 ‘Land of Zebulun, land of Naphtali,
on the road by the sea, across the Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles –
16 the people who sat in darkness
have seen a great light,
and for those who sat in the region and shadow of death
light has dawned.’

17 From that time Jesus began to proclaim, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.’

18 As he walked by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon, who is called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the lake – for they were fishermen. 19 And he said to them, ‘Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.’ 20 Immediately they left their nets and followed him. 21 As he went from there, he saw two other brothers, James son of Zebedee and his brother John, in the boat with their father Zebedee, mending their nets, and he called them. 22 Immediately they left the boat and their father, and followed him.

23 Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and curing every disease and every sickness among the people.

‘The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light’ (Isaiah 9: 2) ... lights at a house shrouded in darkness in Corfu (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

Liturgical Colour: White

The Collect of the Day:

Almighty God,
whose Son revealed in signs and miracles
the wonder of your saving presence:
Renew your people with your heavenly grace,
and in all our weakness
sustain us by your mighty power;
through Jesus Christ our Lord.

The Collect of the Word:

Lord God,
your loving kindness always
goes before us and follows us.
Summons us into your light,
and direct our steps in the ways of goodness
that come through the cross of your Son,
Jesus Christ, our Saviour and Lord.

The fence at Auschwitz-Birkenau (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Hymns:

52, Christ, whose glory fills the skies (CD 4)
584, Jesus calls us! O’er the tumult (CD 33)
593, O Jesus, I have promised (CD 34)

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

Material from the Book of Common Prayer is copyright © 2004, Representative Body of the Church of Ireland.

‘Immediately they left the boat … and followed him’ (Matthew 4: 22) … small boats in the small harbour of Gaios on the Greek island of Paxos (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)