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Remarks at the Irish Jewish Gathering

Farmleigh, 25th July 2013

Minister Shatter, Ambassador Modai, Rabbi Lent, Distinguished guests and friends,

Sé mo phléisiúr é, an tráthnóna ceoil seo a roinnt libh, i halla rince álainn Theach Farmleigh. Ba mhaith liom mo bhuíochas a ghabháil ach go háirithe leis an bhfeidhleadóir Istvan Barnacz agus leis an bpianodóir Melanie Brown, atá tar éis tús spreagúil a chur lenár dtionól, chomh maith le mo bhuíochas a ghabháil le Maurice Cohen, Cathaoirleach Chomhairle Ionadaitheach Ghiúdaigh na hÉireann, as an gcuireadh fiail uaidh a bheith páirteach sa cheiliúradh seo.

It is a great pleasure to Sabina and I to be present here this evening as your guests and to share with you such wonderful music which celebrates the Irish Jewish Gathering, in the beautiful ballroom of Farmleigh House. Sabina and I thank Maurice Cohen, Chairman of the Jewish Representative Council of Ireland, for his kind invitation to take part in this celebration. May I extend a special welcome to those of you who have travelled from afar – from Israel, Britain, Denmark, Switzerland, the United States, Canada and South Africa – in order to join with us tonight.

I also wish to pay tribute to violinist Istvan Barnacz and pianist Melanie Brown for the wonderful music with which they have so rousingly opened this gathering.

This evening we are gathered to celebrate the return, for a short time, of members of the Irish-Jewish community who have left Ireland’s shores, whether temporarily or for good, as well as others whose ancestors departed Ireland many generations ago. We are here to honour the resilience of a small, but significant, community that has made a rich contribution to the life of this island, – in particular to the Irish arts, professions and politics – and to enjoy one another’s company.

The life and consciousness of the migrant has often been neglected as one of the most important experiences that inform our history and our contemporary existence. James Joyce was well aware of this when he gave the world what would come to be its most famous migrant, Leopold Bloom.

This festive reunion, then, might be an occasion to reflect on the various conditions of mobility – whether forced or chosen – in our contemporary world. In his book on the human consequences of globalisation sociologist Zygmunt Bauman – who himself was forced out of his native Poland by a government-orchestrated anti-Semitic campaign – argued that the “tourist’s bliss” is hardly reconcilable with the trajectories of those he calls the “vagabonds,” all those who were driven out of their places of origin by political violence or economic harshness.

Tonight it can also be appropriate to recollect the circumstances which led many of your forefathers to establish themselves in Ireland. Indeed, as some of you know very well from your own family history, and as was shown in Professor Dermot Keogh’s seminal 1998 book, entitled Jews in Twentieth Century Ireland: Refugees, Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, a significant proportion of Ireland’s small Jewish community are descendants of refugees hailing from regions that were formerly encompassed in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Hundreds of thousands of these people – the Litvaks – were brutally uprooted by the surge of pogroms that swept Czarist Russia at the turn of the twentieth century. For these people, America, not Ireland, was the worldly haven they longed for, a land where they aspired to live and prosper, free from the destructive fear of murderous mob attack. For various reasons, a small number of these men, women and children fleeing the Russian empire never reached America and they settled in Ireland instead.

Today Ireland’s Jewish community is getting smaller. Many of your children and grand-children live their lives overseas. To uncover the reasons which made so many Irish Jews decide to leave this island would probably teach us much about ourselves as a society. Is this emigration motivated by the same factors which currently lead numerous young Irish people to depart? Or are there specific factors – perhaps unspoken or less visible – underlying Irish-Jewish emigration? These questions are certainly worthy of study and debate for they touch upon the genuine level of inclusivity Irish society offers.

Finally, I wish to emphasize that in a world of global communications – a world in which notions of mobility, adaptability and fluidity are highly valued – not everybody has the same ability to travel and cross distances. This feature of contemporary life was, again, well captured by Zygmunt Bauman in his aforementioned book:

“For the first world”, Bauman wrote, “the world of the globally mobile, the space has lost its constraining quality and is easily traversed in both its ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ renditions. For the second world, the world of the ‘locally tied’, of those barred from moving and thus bound to bear passively whatever change may be visited upon the locality they are tied to, the real space is fast closing up.”

Therefore while the Gathering is an occasion to revive links with geographically distant relatives and friends, it must also be an opportunity to ponder on the value of the local and the place of proximity-bonded communities who may not have the opportunity, the will, or the resources to operate at a global level.

The musical piece that opened our evening – Vittorio Monti’s Csárdás – raises interesting issues of identity and cultural hybridity. Indeed one may ask whether it pertains more essentially to the Hungarian, Jewish, Gypsy or even, in this case, Italian, repertoires. Similarly, one may muse over what the late David Marcus termed as the “hyphenated heritage” of the Irish-Jewish community: are members of that community primarily Irish or Jewish? What qualities, what emotions, what memories do they ascribe to each of these poles of identification? Or does such a reflection matter at all?

To all these questions, there is no simple answer, and indeed quite rightly, none is suggested in Kaleidoscope, the collection of a hundred portraits of Irish Jews compiled by Yanky Fachler, which Maurice Cohen will introduce to you in more detail later on. Fachler’s book is anything but a univocal, all-encompassing account of the nature of relations between Jews and gentiles in Ireland. Rather, it renders the variety of paths, encounters and experiences – both felicitous and discordant – which has characterized Jewish life on this island over the course of the last two centuries.

The complex, sometimes conflicting, feelings of belonging expressed by Irish-Jewish men and women help us grasp the experience of all those migrants who, in contemporary Ireland, have learnt how to add the new place to the old one, and must constantly balance themselves between the act of staying and the act of leaving.

Louis Lentin, one of the portraits in Fachler’s book, is quoted as saying:

“I am a Jew and it has never occurred to me that I could be anything else. That being so, can I also truly be of Ireland? … All I can offer up, even at my advancing years, is a mostly un-admitted commonality with many Irish Jews, that no matter how long you stay, no matter what you contribute, ‘Ireland of the Welcomes’ is but a Resting Place, a night shelter for the eternal homeless.”

And he goes on asking:

“Is it my lot to remain the inside-outsider, existing under a slightly cracked glass ceiling? Not entirely ‘of’?”

Such a query, although intrinsically linked to the Jewish standpoint in history, is not an exclusively Jewish search. It finds deep resonance with the situation of all wanderers in this world: migrants, refugees, or dissenters who are looked upon suspiciously by those who derive from their imagined rootedness a sense of entitlement and exclusive propriety of all things “national”. The exilic and the migratory are existences often chosen by those who simply want to use the perspective of distance in order to understand their own society.

The life story of Gerald Goldberg provides another illuminating case of concurrent assimilation and exclusion. Born in a Yiddish-speaking household, Goldberg was a son of the internal migration which was precipitated by the 1904 Limerick riots and boycott.
My dear friend the late Jim Kemmy was one of those who fearlessly exposed this appalling black period in the history of Limerick, which was created by a clericalist abuse of irrational fears whipped up to the mob violence which it became.

These events ruined Limerick’s Jewish tradesmen and led a majority of them to depart for Cork, a city of which Gerald Goldberg was elected Lord Mayor in 1977. Asked once in an interview if he had encountered much anti-Jewish prejudice during his lengthy public career, Goldberg replied: “Oh yes. Yes indeed.” And then, after a pause: “In Dublin, they always have the knife out for the Corkman.” Many years ago when I was Minister for Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht I visited Gerald Golberg in Cork and I repeated an earlier apology I had made to him for not only the events to which I refer but also for the distortion of the memory of them.

Dear friends, I know we together look forward to the rest of this evening’s programme. Let the musical instruments express our happiness at being together.

Bíodh lúcháir orainn sa tionól díomuan seo de dhaoine ó chian is ó chóngar a dtagann a gcosáin, a gcúlraí agus a gcuid samlaíochta le chéile trína gcéadfaí dian-mhothaithe faoi Éirinn mar bhaile, mar thobar dá gcuimhní cinn nó mar thearmann in am an ghátair.

[Let us rejoice in this transitory assembly of people from near and far whose paths, stories and imaginings come together around deeply felt notions of Ireland as home, place of memory, or night shelter.]

Guím gach rath oraibh. Shalom!