Rashida Jones goes down memory lane in search of her Irish Jewish ancestors in Dublin’s ‘Little Jerusalem’

The Irish Jewish Museum is housed in the former synagogue on Walworth Road in Dublin’s ‘Little Jerusalem’ (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

Patrick Comerford

Earlier this month, during a family visit to Dublin, I was staying in Rathmines, close to Portobello and the Grand Canal, and I took time each day to stroll through the streets of ‘Little Jerusalem’, between the South Circular Road and the Canal, between Kelly’s Corner and Clanbrassil Street.

I was looking for streets and houses where many members of the extended Comerford family – cousins of my grandfather and my father – had lived in the first half of the last century, searching out the family home of artists like Harry Kernoff, and reminiscing and recalling memories of the Bretzel, the last kosher bakery on Lennox Street, and the small synagogues of ‘Little Jerusalem’ that I remember from the days when I played in these street as a schoolboy in the early 1960s, including the small and pious shuls on Lennox Street, Walworth Road and Saint Kevin’s Parade.

The combination of family history, Jewish history, genealogy, childhood memories and local history that are brought together in this one small area are a heady mixture that I find stimulating and exciting.

But, in the days that followed, I soon found myself stumbling across an old edition of the American version of the television series Who Do You Think You Are?, tracing the ancestors of the writer and actor Rashida Jones who had also lived in the streets of ‘Little Jerusalem’.

Her father was the songwriting legend Quincy Jones; her mother was the actor Peggy Lipton, who died after the programme was made. The programme concentrated on Peggy Lipton’s ancestors and brought together many of the memories that I face when I return to ‘Little Jerusalem’.

The programme was first broadcast in the US on 4 May 2012, but I had never seen it before, and I had never thought of Rashida Jones as having Irish ancestors or Jewish ancestors, still less of her having Irish Jewish ancestors who lived in ‘Little Jerusalem’.

I took part in one programme in the BBC version of Who Do You Think You Are? back in 2010, introducing the actor Dervla Kirwan to her Jewish ancestors in Dublin. Her great-grandfather, Henry Kahn, who ran a shop in Capel Street and who inspired an incident in James Joyce’s Ulysses.

That programme has been repeated and rebroadcast many times, much to my amusement. But working on the research and production, it also made me aware of the limitations of trying to encapsulate genealogical research into the short time a programme like this allows.

In the programme made for the US version of Who Do You Think You Are?, Rashida Jones learned about her Latvian-Jewish ancestors who changed their name to Benson. Initially, the programme seemed to suggest the name Benson was chosen to disguise the family’s Jewish heritage. But this was not so, and the name Benson was part of the story of her Jewish ancestors in ‘Little Jerusalem’, bringing her to the Irish Jewish Museum in the former synagogue on Walworth Road.

Rashida Jones is known for her roles in Parks and Recreation and The Social Network. She is the daughter of Quincy Jones, the renowned music producer, and Peggy Lipton, the actor known for The Mod Squad, who had already researched his family stories. But Rashida Jomes knew very little about her Jewish heritage on her mother’s side of the family.

Peggy Lipton (1946-2019) was born into a Jewish family in New York, the daughter of the artist Rita Benson and a corporate lawyer Harold Lipton (1911-1990), who married in 1941. Harold Lipton’s parents, Max Lipschitz and Alice ‘Gussie’ Goldfarb, were Jewish immigrants from Belarus, who changed their name to Lipton in the 1930s; Rita Benson was born in Dublin to Jewish parents from Latvia.



Rita Hettie Rosenberg, who later became Rita Benson, was born at 15 Victoria Street, Dublin, on 30 May 1912, the daughter of Hyman Rosenberg and Jenny Benson. Her great-great-grandparents, Benjamin Benson and Sophia Weinstein, had arrived in Ireland from Latvia, which was then in the Russian Empire.

Rita left Dublin with her sister Pearl as teenagers in 1926. The sisters who were just 13 and 18 years old. They made the journey from Ireland on their own and first stayed in New York with their uncle Elliot Benson.

Rita was still using her full name in 1936, but by 1939, when she became a US citizen, she changed her name to Rita Benson as part of the naturalisation process, and she married Harold Lipton in 1941.

Rashida visited Dublin and the Irish Jewish Museum, where the genealogist Stuart Rosenblatt, who spent decades compiling Jewish records in Ireland, presented her with her grandmother’s birth certificate, showing Rita was born on 15 May 1912 to Hyman and Jeannie Rosenberg.

At the time of the 1911 census, Hyman Rosenberg was 29, a tailor, who was born in Russia, Jeannie was 26, and they were living on Dufferin Avenue, with a son and daughter, Pearl (3) and Harold (2).

Jeannie Benson and Hyman Rosenberg were married Hyman in Dublin in 1906. Jeannie was born in Manchester. Her parents – Rashida’s great-great-grandparents – were Sophia Weinstein and Benjamin Benson. Benjamin was born in the Russian Empire ca 1839, settled in Ireland and worked as a Hebrew teacher.

Sophia and Benjamin Benson appear in the 1911 Irish census, living with Sophia in Peyton’s Cottages, Dublin, and they are recorded as speaking Hebrew. He was 72 and a Hebrew teacher, she was 67. They had been married for 53 years, and they were the parents of nine children, four of whom were still living. A photograph of Benjamin Benson in the archives show him in formal dress, complete with a top hat.

Rashida’s journey continued from Dublin to Latvia in search of Benjamin Benson’s family. Latvian military enlistment records from 1871 show Benjamin’s father, Shlomo, lived in Hasenpoth, now Aizpute, a small town in western Latvia that was then part of the Russian Empire.

The Latvian records include a residence permit from 1834 for Shlomo even before he had a surname. At the time, Jews were being forced by law to accept fixed surnames, and so Benson became the official family name.

Tragically, those family members who stayed behind in Latvia faced a much darker fate and were murdered in the Holocaust. Ghetto housing lists, passport applications and residency registers documented their lives before World War II – and, in some cases, how abruptly those lives came to an end.

They were forced into the Riga Ghetto during the Nazi occupation, and on 30 November and 8 December 1941, over 25,000 Latvian Jews were marched to the Rumbula Forest and murdered. The episode closed with Rashida and Peggy visiting the Rumbula Forest Memorial, with its large menorah and engraved memorial stones.

The Bretzel on Lennox Street was once run by the brothers Sidney and George Benson (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2025)

But programmes like this are made for popular audiences, and often cannot go into great detail. I found myself asking why, when Rashida Jones was visiting the Irish Jewish Museum on Walworth Road, she was not brought around the corner to see the house at 15 Victoria Street where the Rosenberg family lived and where Rita Benson was born.

Or they could have visited the former home of the Rosenberg family on Dufferin Avenue, off the South Circular Road and close to Greenville Hall, once one of the largest synagogues in Dublin until in closed in 1984.

I would have been interested too in knowing too which Benson and Rosenberg families she may be related to.

Some members of the Rosenberg family changed their name to Ross. The Benson families in ‘Little Jerusalem’ included the brothers Sidney and George Benson and who ran the Bretzel Bakery on Lennox Street as Bensons.

The late Asher Benson (1921-2006) took part in the Battle of Cable Street on 4 October 1936. He was the driving force in setting up the Irish Jewish Museum, and was the author of Jewish Dublin, Portraits of Life by the Liffey, published posthumously in 2007. His sons the travel agents Alan and Gerry Benson were key figures in the Jewish community in Dublin. My friend Alan, who was once president of the Jewish Representative Council, died in 2014

Scenes of Rashida Jones eating challah in the Bretzel on Lennox Street, or knocking on doors in Victoria Street and Dufferin Avenue would have enriched more of my memories of ‘Little Jerusalem’.

Zekher Tzadik Livrakha, זכר צדיק לברכה (May the memory of the righteous be a blessing)

Shabbat Shalom, שבת שלום

Philip Baker, the Jewish refugee from Latvia who became Irish chess champion

Philip Baker (1879-1932) was the Irish Chess Champion on four occasions in the 1920s (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

When Philip Baker filled out the census form in his small, single lodging room on Castle Street, Tralee, on the night of 31 March 1901, he may well have thought he was the only Jew living in Co Kerry.

He was a 22-year-old draper, and he gave his religion as ‘Hebrew’ and his place of birth as ‘Russia.’ There were four Jewish short-term guests staying at the Great Southern Hotel in Killarney that night, all linen manufacturers from London in their 20s. But the only other Jew who was resident in Kerry at that time was Amélie Bischoffsheim (1858-1947), wife of Sir Peter FitzGerald, Knight of Kerry, who were living at Glanleam on Valentia Island.

The paths of Philip Baker and Lady FitzGerald probably never crossed. She was the London-born daughter of the Dutch banker Henri Louis Bischoffsheim (1829-1908); her sister Ellen (1857-1933), the Dowager Countess of Desart, later became a Senator in the new Irish Free State and has been described as ‘the most important Jewish woman in Irish history.’

But Philip Baker’s accomplishments as a poor Latvian Jewish refugee fleeing the pogroms in the Tsarist empire are worth recounting. For Philip Baker (1879-1932) was an Irish Chess Grand Master who won the Irish Championship on four occasions in the 1920s, including three consecutive years, and a clothing factory owner who was regarded as a model employer. In time, he became the patriarch of an important Irish legal family.

The brothers David and Philip Baker were born in Riga in Latvia, then part of Imperial Russia. They were the sons of Simon Baker, a Jewish grocer or draper, and they came to Ireland at a young age, fleeing the pogroms in Tsarist Russia.

David Baker began his working life in Dublin as a ‘rags and metal merchant,’ a ‘draper’ and a ‘wool merchant,’ and at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, he lived in a number of houses in the narrow streets off the South Circular Road that became known as Dublin’s ‘Little Jerusalem,’ including Spencer Street, Raymond Street, and Greenville Terrace.

He married Yetty (Gertrude) Berman on 25 July 1899. She was a daughter of Abraham Berman, a self-employed draper and traveller, of 5 Oakfield Place, and his wife Rachel, both originally from Telshi in the Kovno district of Lithuania. David and Yetty were the parents of at least three daughters and a son. Like his brother Philip, David Baker too was noted chess player and played first board for the Clontarf Chess Club. He later moved with his family to Leeds.

Philip Baker was born in Riga on 31 March 1879. He began his working life in Ireland as a draper and a cap factory representative, and eventually owned his own clothing factory. He was a 22-year-old draper and was living in Upper Castle Street, Tralee, Co Kerry, at the time of the 1901 census.

The Aliens Register (1914-1918) shows he arrived in Dublin from Tralee on 31 January 1903. He was living at 15 Vernon Street, Dublin, on 9 September 1904 when he married Fanny Berman, a sister of David Baker’s wife Yetty. Her father Abraham Berman was 71 when he died at 5 Oakfield Place on 26 October 1919. Her widowed mother, Rachel Freda Berman, died at the age of 73 on 27 May 1922.

At first, Philip and Fanny also lived in the streets of ‘Little Jerusalem’ off the South Circular Road, including St Alban’s Road, Raymond Street and Wolseley Street. Their children included Edmund Salem Adam Baker, born 1905, died an infant; Joshua Baker (1906-1979); David Baker, born 1908; Isaac Baker, born 1911 (married Ellen Kelly); Sarah Rebecca, born 1911 (married Lazare Scheps); Sheila, born 1916 (married Barry Spain); and Sylvia ‘Lammie’ (1918-1984), who married Henry Aimers Wheeler (1916-1993), archaeologist, Office of Public Works and a president of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland.

Philip joined the Sackville Chess Club, which was founded in 1902, and soon became an Irish Grand Master. He was the Leinster champion in 1922 and 1926, and first became the Chess champion of Ireland in 1924, when he finished first in the Tailteann Games. With the Sackville Chess Club, he won the Armstrong Cup in 1926 and 1929, and he was the Irish Champion again for three consecutive years, in 1927, 1928 and 1929.

Later, as the proprietor of his own clothing factory, Philip was recognised as a model employer. He died at 77 Kenilworth Square, Rathmines, Dublin, on 18 April 1932, aged 53.

Philip Baker’s son, Professor Joshua Baker (1906-1979), earned a double first in Hebrew and Oriental Studies and Legal Science at Trinity College Dublin, and earned a gold medal and a scholarship to the US, where he completed his doctorate.

Josh Baker had a demanding practice as a senior counsel and legal expert, yet he lectured at TCD for 30 years in Hebrew and as Reid Professor of Criminal Law. His friend and colleague, Professor Jacob Weingreen, in his obituary in the Jewish Chronicle, praised his ‘lucid, analytical mind, genial personality, special sense of humour, and many acts of friendship.’

Another son, David Baker, was the Hebrew/Gaelic interpreter when the leaders of Israel and Ireland met.

Philip Baker’s eldest daughter Sarah married Leslie (Lazare) Scheps, a Swiss Jewish immigrant. Their daughter Rosalind married Judge Henry Barron (1928-2010), who was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1997. He presided over the inquiry into the Dublin and Monaghan bombings, in which 33 people were killed in 1974, and granted Ireland’s first legal divorce in 1997. He was also president of the Irish Jewish Museum.

A chess set in a shop window on the island of Murano in the Venetian lagoon (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Joining the choir for the ‘Agnus Dei’ at a Latvian ordination in Christ Church

The Revd Imants Miezis (right) makes the declarations in the chapter house in Christ Church Cathedral before Archbishop Lauma Zušēvica and Archbishop Michael Jackson (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2016)

Patrick Comerford

I never learned to sing, and I never learned to play music. Although, over the years, my music has become one of my great aesthetic and artistic pleasures, and while I went to a school where I had the opportunities to learn any musical instrument I wanted to, or to join in choirs and musical productions, I came from a home that was totally lacking in any musical interest, and that gave no musical encouragement – there was no piano, no violin, not even a record player until I bought my own in my late teens.

I came to appreciate music in my late teens and early 20s, but for many decades still lacked confidence in singing in church and in joining in the hymns.

But over time I realised that part of this was due not so much to my poor childhood experiences but because I had not found my own comfortable pitch and tone.

My willingness to sing has grown with confidence in recent years, but that does not mean there has an improvement in the quality of my singing – anything but.

My approach to singing has been complicated in recent years with the diagnosis of sarcoidosis on my lungs. There are days when it seems to play up to a degree that my voice is deep enough to make Leonard Cohen or a full choir in a Russian Orthodox church jealous of its depths.

Then, out of the blue, late on Thursday evening, a totally unexpected email arrived from Christ Church Cathedral. Would I be at the Cathedral Eucharist this morning [16 October 2016]?

The choir was singing a feast of interesting music by Latvian composers. No, they were not asking me to sing. But the Agnus Dei had a spoken part and would I be interested in speaking it with my bass voice as the choir sang. Ian Keatley, the Organist and Director of Music in Christ Church, told me: ‘You have the perfect voice for it – not to mention the necessary gravitas to pull it off.’

The Mass in question is the Missa Rigensis by the well-known Latvian composer Uǧis Prauliņš. The compositional style of this Eucharistic setting is very striking: lively in the Sanctus and Benedictus and intensely intimate and devotional in the Agnus Dei.

Earlier in the morning, before the Cathedral Eucharist, I rehearsed the spoken part accompanying the Agnus Dei with the choir:

Domine Deus, amo te super omnia et proximum meum propter te, quia tu es summum, infinitum, et perfectissimum bonum, omni dilectione dignum. In hac caritate vivere et mori statuo. Amen.

This prayer by Cardinal Pietro Gasparri is found in the Catechismus Catholicus (1931) and translates: ‘O Lord God, I love you above all things, and I love my neighbour on account of you, because you are the highest, infinite and most perfect good, worthy of all love. In this love I stand to live and die. Amen.’

The music this morning also featured music by another well-known Latvian composer, Rihards Dubra, whose compositional development has been heavily influenced by minimalism and Gregorian chant in particular. The Kyrie and Gloria at the start of this service will be sung to Gregorian chant to echo this minimalist style.

This morning’s Communion Motet by Dubra was based on I Corinthians 2: 9:

Oculus non vidit, nec auris audivit,
nec in cor hominis ascendit,
Quae praeparavit Deus his,
Qui diligunt illum.

No eye has seen, no ear has heard,
no mind has conceived
what God has prepared
for those who love him.

With Archbishop Lauma Zušēvica in Christ Church Cathedral

This morning’s occasion was the Cathedral Eucharist with the Ordination of a Deacon by the Archbishop of the Latvian Evangelical Lutheran Church Abroad, the Most Revd Lauma Zušēvica.

The celebrant was the Archbishop of Dublin, Dr Michael Jackson, and the preacher: was the Precentor of Christ Church, Canon Neill McEndoo.

The Latvian Evangelical Lutheran Church Abroad (LELCA) is a Lutheran Church with a presence in Latvia, Ireland, Sweden, Germany, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and the US. It is a member church of the Lutheran World Federation, which it joined in 1947, and is also a full member of the Porvoo Communion, which brings together the Anglican and Episcopal Lutheran Churches in Europe, the World Council of Churches and the Conference of European Churches.

The church was originally formed by Latvia refugees after World War II, when Latvia was occupied and incorporated into the Soviet Union.

Dr Lauma Zušēvica, who lives in the US, became the first woman Archbishop of the Latvian Evangelical Lutheran Church Abroad in 2014.

This morning, Archbishop Lauma ordained the Revd Imants Miezis as deacon. Imants is a journalist and the founder of website www.baltic-ireland.ie. He has been working in Dublin for the past 11 years. As he will minister in Dublin, the Archbishop of Dublin gave him a licence to officiate in the Dioceses of Dublin and Glendalough. Archbishop Jackson’s central role in this Latvian ordination symbolised the bond that exists in the Porvoo Communion between the Anglican and Episcopal Lutheran member Churches.

Later, after coffee in the crypt, three of went to lunch in Mykonos, the Greek restaurant in Dame Street, before two of us went for a walk along the sea front in Bray and around the harbour.

The tide was out and the sky and sea were such a rich blue that it was possible to imagine this afternoon that this was late summer rather than late autumn.

Before leaving Bray as the evening began to close in, we dropped into Carpe Diem on Albert Avenue for much needed double espressos.

Meanwhile, the Cathedral Choir is on Half Term until 30 October. It was a privilege to be part of the choir this morning. I hope other opportunities arise when they return.

Autumn sunshine on the beach in Bray late this afternoon (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2016)