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JEWISH HERITAGE EUROPE
An Online Resource Centre
REPUBLIC OF IRELAND
Irish Jewish Museum
Ireland is reputed to have had resident Jews in the thirteenth century, with contact first recorded some two centuries earlier. A handful of conversos reached Ireland in the 16th and early 17th centuries, one of whom became the Mayor of Youghal in County Cork.
The modern story of the Jewish presence in Ireland paralleled that of Jews in Britain from the mid 17th century onwards; a Sephardi community briefly existed in Dublin in the 1660s; the city’s Ballybough cemetery dates from 1718. The two islands were formally united under the British Crown in 1800. Immigration from Eastern Europe swelled the size of the community from just 258 in 1871 to 4,800 in 1904. Ireland became an independent Republic, apart from Northern Ireland, in 1922 and remained neutral in the Second World War. Since then, emigration, mostly to places with larger communities, has reduced the number of Jews throughout ‘the island of Ireland’ to under 2,000 today, with a mere 200 resident in the capital of Northern Ireland, Belfast. Dublin’s major Victorian synagogue at Adelaide Road (1892) was demolished in 1999.
The Survey of the Jewish Built Heritage in the UK and Ireland, begun in 1997, has recorded over 350 synagogues and Jewish sites that date from before the Second World War (see
www.jewish-heritage-uk.org).
For this, and further information on the community, see
www.jewishireland.org.
The Office of the Chief Rabbi of Ireland:
Address
Telephone
Fax
Email
Website
Herzog House
Zion Road
Rathgar
Dublin 6
+353 1 492 37 51
+353 1 492 46 80
ofchiefrabbi@jewishireland.org
www.jewishireland.org
(Updated August 2008)
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