Progressive Jewish cemetery in Rathfarnham looks out over Dublin city and bay

The Progressive Jewish community’s cemetery on Oldcourt Road, Rathfarnham, overlooks Dublin Bay (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2021)

Patrick Comerford

While I was in Dublin last week for medical check-ups, I visited the Woodtown Progressive Jewish Cemetery on Oldcourt Road, Rathfarnham, which is just a 2.5 km walk from my home.

Woodtown Cemetery is tucked away on a bend in the road on the Gunny Hill leading up to Killakee, just beyond the former Augustinian retreat centre at Orlagh. It is small and secluded, secure, untouched and often unnoticed in this quiet bend on the road. The framing of thick trees surrounding the cemetery seems to shelter the headstones.

The large gates and surrounding trees give no hint of the beautiful and sometimes dramatic views found inside the cemetery, stretching across the city below, across Dublin Bay and out to Howth Head.

Larry Elyan and Moe Spain were the prime movers in founding the Dublin Jewish Progressive Synagogue in 1946. Other founding figures included Victor Enoch, George Morris, David Finkle, Hans Borchardt, Henry Lowe, Charlie Gold, Rudi and Marianne Neuman, Ernst Scheyer, and Abraham Jacob (Con) Leventhal (1896-1979), Lecturer in French at TCD and a friend of Samuel Beckett, who interviewed James Joyce in Paris on the day of the publication of Ulysses.

Meetings were first held in a Quaker Meeting House, and the synagogue opened at 7 Leicester Avenue, Rathgar, in 1948.

Rabbi Rudolph Brasch (1912-2004), the first minister of the congregation, was born in Berlin in 1912 and fled to London in 1938. He was elected a rabbi of the North London Synagogue in 1944. Rabbi Brasch’s successor in 1948-1951 was Rabbi Jakob Jankel Kokotek (1911-1979), who was born in Bedzin, Poland, and raised in Germany. He had been a rabbi in a town in Silesia from 1934 and was forced into exile after November 1938, arriving in England as a refugee.

Bernard Spiro, a leading figure in establishing the Progressive Jewish Cemetery at Woodtown, died in 1951, before it opened in 1952 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2021)

Bernard Spiro was a leading figure in establishing the Progressive Jewish Cemetery at Woodtown. He died in 1951, before it opened in 1952, the year I was born. The beginnings of this cemetery can be traced to a court action taken by Larry Elyan against the Orthodox burial society that was refusing to allow the burial of members of the Progressive Jewish community in the Jewish cemetery in Dolphin’s Barn. Indeed, some Orthodox Jews did not recognise some of members of the Progressive community as proper Jews at all.

In the event, the Progressive Jewish Community opened its own cemetery in the foothills of the Dublin mountains in 1952. The only building in the cemetery, the Prayer House, is a small square building. On one of the outside walls of the Prayer House, a simple plaque reads ‘In Memory of Victims of the Holocaust.’

It is not surprising, then, that many people buried here escaped the Holocaust. Dr Marianne Neuman (1913-2008) of Rathmines, was born Marianne Heilfron in Berlin in 1913, the daughter of Curt Solomon Heilfron. During her medical studies in Berlin in the 1930s, it became not only difficult but dangerous to continue living in Germany as a Jew. She left in August 1936 and later arrived in London, where she married another German doctor, Dr Rudi Neuman.

Rudi travelled to Edinburgh to pass his British medical exams, with the hope of settling in Ireland. They found a large house on Upper Rathmines Road, in which they lived and practised. Both were active and committed founder members of the Dublin Jewish Progressive Congregation.

Dr Rudi Neuman died suddenly in the synagogue at the end of the Yom Kippur service in October 1965. Dr Marianne Neuman chaired the board of management of the Dublin Jewish Burial Society for many years, and was elected honorary life president on her 80th birthday in 1993.

She was a leading figure in the St John Ambulance Brigade continued to attend the RDS horse show in Dublin in her uniform into her 90s. In 2005, just days before her 92nd birthday, she was invested as a Dame of the Order of St John. She died at the age of 94 on 17 March 2008 and was buried in Woodtown. Four members of the Heilfron family who were murdered in Minsk in 1941 during the Holocaust are remembered by Stolpersteine or stumbing stones at Friedelstrasse 49 in Berlin.

Dr Ernst Scheyer (1890-1958) was born in Oppeln in Upper Silesia in 1890, was decorated for his bravery in the Germany army in World War I, and later earned a PhD in Breslau (Wroclaw). Later, he was a practising lawyer and a respected member of the Jewish community in Liegnitz, Silesia. He married Marie Margareta (Mieze) Epstein, who was five years younger than him and was born in Breslau.

He was rounded up after Krtistallnacht, and spent almost a month in Sachsenhausen, a concentration camp near Berlin. He arrived in Dublin on 14 January 1939, and the Scheyer family made their home at 67 Kenilworth Square. He later taught German at Saint Columba’s College, Rathfarnham, and in Trinity College Dublin. When he died in 1958, he was buried in Woodtown.

Their daughter Renate married another refugee, Robert Weil (1924-1989), in 1948. It was the first wedding in the newly-established Progressive Jewish Synagogue. Robert Weil had arrived in Ireland in 1939 as a young Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany. He went to school at Newtown in Waterford, studied at TCD, and became a teacher of modern languages, especially German, in Belfast.

In her biography, Renate Weil recalls that both sides of her family had been non-Orthodox Jews for generations but remained Jewish. ‘Our family proved that assimilation did not mean the loss of Judaism. We were German Jews and proud of it.’

Hans Borchardt was the son of a Jewish dentist in Berlin Charlottenburg. He was working with a business specialising in surgical and dental instruments when it was ‘Aryanised’ in 1934. He fled to England in September 1934, became a British citizen, and was an agent for a firm importing gloves from Ireland when he chose to make his home in Ireland in 1939.

Two headstones opposite each other tell the tragic story of Jeremy and Bertrand (‘Randy’) White, who died in a car crash in Ethiopia on 12 May 1975 at the age of 29 and 30.

Donal Lionel Seligman (1928-2015) and his wife Barbara (née Levine) were barristers and she was a renowned international bridge player.

Joan Finkel (1932-2017), born Rhoda Joan Morris, was the daughter of George R Morris and Julia (Spiro). For most of her adult life, Joan was deeply involved in the Progressive Jewish Synagogue in Rathgar. At different times, she held all the offices and represented the congregation at international meetings of Progressive Judaism. She was also involved in the inter-faith fellowship in Rathgar.

John and Joan Finkel lived in the Rathdown area of Terenure until they moved to Wales in 2016. Their daughter-in-law is Rabbi Monique Mayer of the Bristol and West Progressive Jewish Congregation.

The entrance gates at the cemetery were erected in memory of Richard Hitchman, who died in 1953 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2021)

Other founding members of the Progressive community buried in Woodtown include: Charles George Boas (1881-1955), Johanna Boas, Annerose and Ottilie Heitler, Else and Emile Hirsch, Irma, Fritz, Richard and Paul Hitchman, and Fred and Stefka Schmolka.

Here too is the grave of the artist Estella Frances Solomons (1882-1968), wife of Dr James Sullivan Starkey (1879-1958). She was the daughter of the poet Rosa Jane Jacobs (1843-1926) and Maurice Solomons (1832-1922), whose optician’s practice at 19 Nassau Street, Dublin, is mentioned by James Joyce in Ulysses. Her brother Bethel Solomons (1885-1965), Master of the Rotunda Hospital and an Irish international rugby player, is mentioned by Joyce in Finnegans Wake, and was a founding member and the first president of the Progressive Synagogue.

Estelle married the poet and publisher Seumas O’Sullivan, real name James Sullivan Starkey. Her parents opposed the relationship because O’Sullivan was not Jewish, and they married in 1929 after her parents had died.

Jacqueline Solomon, a founder member of the synagogue in Rathgar, celebrated her bat mitzvah in 2008 at the age of 82, when the service was led by Rabbi Charles Middleburgh. Jacqueline Helena (née Coplin Cowan) Solomon, formerly Wine, died on 2 January 2020 in her 94th year and was buried in Woodtown Cemetery.

The Dublin Progressive Jewish Synagogue on Leicester Avenue, Rathgar (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2021)

All Saints’, Stradbally, a Co Limerick church in the Diocese of Killaloe

All Saints’ Church, Stradbally, Co Limerick … a Co Limerick church in the Diocese of Killaloe (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2020)

Patrick Comerford

Before the lockdown brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic became so severe, and before I became semi-cocooned in the Rectory in Askeaton because of my pulmonary sarcoidosis, I spent a few hours on a Saturday afternoon in March by the banks of the River Shannon in Castleconnell and neighbouring Stradbally in Co Limerick.

This is one of the few, if not the only, Church of Ireland parish in Co Limerick that is in the Diocese of Killaloe – although the county and diocesan boundaries in Co Limerick are not always the same, so that some old parishes in Co Limerick are in the Diocese of Emly, and some old parishes in the Co Clare are in the Diocese of Limerick.

Castleconnell and Stradbally form one village and one parish on the banks of the River Shannon, and local lore claims a small church was built here as early as the sixth century. By the eighth century, however, Stradbally or Stráid Bháile (‘the town of one street’) was attacked by the Vikings, and the little church was looted and burned it in their wake.

The present church, All Saints’ Church, is a gable-fronted Board of First Fruits style church that was built in 1809, enlarged to the north in 1826 and 1844 by James Pain, with a chancel modified by Welland and Gillespie in 1863.

The church contains a number of interesting monuments, including one designed by Pain for Anne Fitzgibbon, Countess of Clare, and a burial vault designed by Pain for General Sir Richard Bourke of Thornfield House, Lisnagry.

The ruins of the 15th century church behind the present church (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2020)

Behind the present church stand the walls of an older church that may date back to the church built in Stradbally ca 1400-1410, when Dermit O’Hanrachayn was living in the parish. However, he was forced to vacate the Vicarage of Stradbally in 1411 because he had not been ordained priest within a year, and he was followed by Donald O’Mulluyn, who remained there until ca 1436.

The church and the parish were ‘vacant’ in 1615. By 1618 the vicar was the Revd William Jannes who remained until 1621. The church was destroyed in the war of 1641 and was rebuilt. By 1765, however, the rector, churchwardens and parishioners agreed that the church had become unusable.

The Revd John Murray was the Vicar of Stradbally in 1777-1789. In 1787, the vestry notes record that ‘the Parish Church of Castleconnell is at present in so ruinous a situation that it is with danger the congregation do assemble to divine service.’

Murray, who was educated at Queen’s College, Cambridge, married Lady Elizabeth Murray, a daughter of William Murray, 4th Earl of Dunmore. He became Dean of Killaloe in 1789, but died on 25 June 1790.

All Saints’ Church, Stradbally, was designed by the architect James Pain (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2020)

The parish of All Saints’, Stradbally, was united to Killeenagarriff in 1803, forming part of the Union of Castleconnell in the Diocese of Killaloe. But by then the church was in such disrepair that it had been abandoned as a place of worship and the Revd Josiah Crampton held services in the ‘ballroom of the widow Mulloughny,’ the local ballroom at the Spa, later Hartigan’s Hall.

While Crampton was in the parish, the present All Saints’ Church was built beside the ruined old church. There is a memorial plaque to Crampton behind the pulpit, recalling that he lived in the parish until he died on 2 April 1842, although he is said to have antagonised some local families, including the Richardson, Graham, Frewen, and Benn families.

The church was built in 1809 with the aid of a grant of £250 from the Board of First Fruits. It was greatly enlarged in 1830, and by then had a cruciform shape and a ‘lofty octagonal spire.’ The Tudor-style house in the churchyard was built as the sexton’s lodge.

The door into All Saints’ Church, Stradbally (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2020)

All Saints’ Church was designed by the architect James Pain (1779-1877), who was commissioned by the Board of First Fruits to design churches and glebe houses throughout Ireland. The church was consecrated in 1809 by the Bishop of Killaloe and Kilfenora, Robert Ponsonby Tottenham (previously Robert Ponsonby Loftus), a younger son of Charles Loftus, 1st Marquis of Ely.

Pain was responsible for enlarging the north transept and porch, converting the transept into the nave and re-siting the chancel in 1826. He was commissioned in 1844 to design a sarcophagus for Anne Fitzgibbon, Countess of Clare, and in 1855 he designed the vault for General Sir Richard Bourke of Thornfield, Lisnagry who died while he was at church.

The architects William Joseph Welland and William Gillespie carried out extensive works in the church around 1863, including re-siting the chancel at the east end of original nave and the reseating the entire church in 1863.

The panelling in the chancel came from Saint John’s Church, Newport, and was placed in All Saints’ Church by Canon James Pennefather.

The set of eight bells, from Saint Mary’s Church, Ovens, Co Cork, was cast by Barrington’s of Coventry.

The baptismal font is ‘in memory of Alice Mary Bourke born 1877 died 1880, of such is the kingdom of heaven.’ The pulpit is in memory of John Ulick Bourke of Thornfields, who died on 17 May 1910.

The stained-glass East Window, depicting the Ascension, was dedicated in 1877 to the memory of Crofton Moore Vandeleur.

The Tudor-style house in the churchyard was built as the sexton’s lodge (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2020)

The memorials and plaques on the walls remember many local families, including the Massy, Bourke, Fitzgibbon and Vandeleur families.

The Fitzgibbon family memorials include one recalling Anne Fitzgibbon, Countess of Clare, widow of John Fitzgibbon, 1st Earl of Clare, known as ‘Black Jack Fitzgibbon’; and John Fitzgibbon, 2nd Earl of Clare a Governor of Bombay.

The Fitzgibbon family lived at Mountshannon House in Lisnagry and Belmont House, now Rosary Hill Nursing Home. The title Earl of Clare became extinct at the death of Richard Fitzgibbon, 3rd Earl of Clare, in 1864. His only son and John Charles Henry Fitzgibbon (1829-1854), Viscount Fitzgibbon, was a lieutenant in the 8th Hussars, and died leading the charge of the light brigade at the battle of Balaclava in the Crimean War on 25 October 1854. Mount Shannon was inherited by his daughter, Lady Louisa who owned an estate of over 10,000 acres in Co Limerick and over 3,000 acres in Co Tipperary.

However, although Fitzgibbon was reported ‘missing presumed dead,’ his body was never found and a story persisted that he had married Frances Murphy in 1854 in a clandestine marriage and that they had a posthumous son, William John Gerald FitzGibbon, born in 1855. One story claimed in 1877 that he had been taken prisoner, and that later, for an assault on a Russian officer, he had been sent to Siberia. The stories claimed he later returned to England, and visited Hounslow Barracks, where the 8th Hussars were stationed. There, it was said, he was identified by Colonel Mussenden and Quartermaster-Sergeant-Major Hefferon, who had been Fitzgibbon’s servant.

Mussenden and Hefferon later denied the reports. Despite appeals in newspapers, no-one came forward to claim the title of Earl of Clare which had died with his father over a decade earlier in 1864.

A similar story gained currency 25 years after the Charge of the Light Brigade. During the second Afghan War (1878-1880), Fitzgibbon’s regiment, the 8th Hussars, were stationed near the North-West frontier. One night a dishevelled looking man who spoke English, but seemed unaccustomed to doing so, was brought into the officers’ mess. He was invited to stay for dinner, where he surprised all by having an uncannily good knowledge of the regimental customs, indicating he was an ex-officer of the regiment. He was not asked to identify himself, but on examining the regimental records it was discovered that the only ex-officer whose whereabouts had not been positively accounted for was Viscount Fitzgibbon.

Rudyard Kipling was intrigued by the story and it provided the basis for his short story The Man Who Was (1888), in which a man arrested for gun-stealing and believed to be an Afghan turns out to be an ex-officer who has been a Russian prisoner for many years before escaping and finding his way back to his regiment.

There are several memorials in the church to members of the Bourke family, including General Sir Richard Bourke (1778-1855) of Thornfields, Governor of Cape Colony in South Africa and Governor of New South Wales, and a kinsman of Edmund Burke.

The Massy family once owned over 30,000 acres, including The Hermitage, Castleconnell. A succession of members of the Massy family sat as MPs in the Irish House of Commons in the 17th and 18th centuries.

John Thomas William Massy, 6th Baron Massy, was an Irish Representative Peer in the House of Lords. He led an extravagant lifestyle, was famous for shooting parties at Killakee and fishing parties at the Hermitage, barely paid his debts and left his heir penniless.

During his lavish parties at the Hermitage, Lord Massy brought his guests to church on Sunday. So that they would not be bored by long sermons, he erected a clock facing the pulpit so the rector would know when to stop. If the sermon went on, Massy would start to rattle his stick on the floor of the Lord’s Gallery.

After he died on 28 November 1915 at Killakee, Co Dublin, his body was brought by train from Dublin to Castleconnell for his funeral service in All Saints’ Church and burial in the Massy vault. The Massy Gallery is now boarded up but is still visible.

Other plaques and memorials remember Colonel John Vandeleur, who was present at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815; Arthur Gilley who served in the Indian Mutiny, at the Siege of Cawnpore and in the Crimean War; and the artist Edmund G Osborne, RHA, who was killed at the Battle of Maiwand in Afghanistan in 1880 during the Second Anglo-Afghan War.

All Saints’ Church serves as a cultural venue for the wider community (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2020)

Stradbally today is part of the Killaloe group of parishes, which includes Saint Flannan’s Cathedral, Killaloe, Co Clare, Saint Senan’s, Clonlara, Saint Caimin’s, Mountshannon, Co Clare, and Saint Cronan’s, Tuamgraney, which claims to be the oldest church in continuous use in Ireland. The Rector of Nenagh, Co Tipperary, the Very Revd Smyth, was recently installed as the Dean of Killaloe, and the Revd Paul Fitzpatrick is the Dean’s Vicar.

Today, All Saints’ Church is also a unique entertainment venue. It has been home to a range of concerts and events throughout the year, including the Autumn Concert Series in September, a Christmas Carol Service in December and the Saints and Singers Festival on May bank holiday weekends.

A disused Edwardian post box in the churchyard walls (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2020)

Sea and snow on a winter’s afternoon

Snow on the mountains at Kilakee this evening (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2013)

Patrick Comerford

Living so close to the M50 in South Dublin has so many advantages – close to the mountains, close to the sea, and still within easy distance of the airport and the city centre.

Early in the afternoon, two of us went down to Bray for a walk on the beach. Bray is only 20 minutes away, and on our way we could see the snow covering the Dublin and Wicklow Mountains.

Driftwood caught in the incoming tide in Bray this afternoon (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2013)

This afternoon’s walk was cold and crisp. But despite temperatures close to zero, there was a good number of walkers along the promenade and the pebbly shore.

Down on the shoreline, the waves were rolling and breaking, and while Bray Head was clear, in the distance between the gaps in the houses it was possible to glimpse some snow on the mountains.

Gusto Italiano ... a good choice for coffee in Bray this afternoon (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2013)

Bray has many good cafés and restaurants, and my favourites include Campo de Fiori on the sea front and Sapori de Campo de Fiori around the corner on Albert Road. But this afternoon for the first time I tried Gusto Italiano on Quinnsborough Road, between the Dart Station and the Main Street.

It proved to be a delightful choice. It’s a tiny place, and it was too cold to sit outside. But we got a table in the cosy balcony area above. The coffee was excellent, the attention was great, and the hand-made biscotti were a genuine treat. This was a taste of real Italy, and on a winter’s day it had me looking forward to a week in Sorrento later this summer.

A balcony view at Gusto Italiano (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2013)

We had one quick walk back along the Promenade, and on the way back decided there was still enough daylight to have a firsthand look at the snow in the mountains.

We turned off the M50 and drove up past the Hellfire Club and Forest to Kilakee Car Park on the borders of South Dublin and Co Wicklow, overlooking the city. The road further south through the mountains to Glencree and the Wicklow Gap has been closed and traffic was being diverted back down to Glencullen. But the car park was full, and in the fading light of the evening clusters of families were enjoying the snow-covered slopes and making snowmen.

Enjoying the snow at Kilkaee in the fading lights of evening (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2013)

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