REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE ON HER VISIT TO THE JEWISH HOME OF IRELAND 11TH JULY 2000
REMARKS BY PRESIDENT McALEESE ON HER VISIT TO THE JEWISH HOME OF IRELAND 11TH JULY 2000
I am delighted to join you this morning as you celebrate the 50th anniversary of this wonderful Home. I would like to thank your Chairman, Mr. Laurence Citron and the Committee for their kind invitation.
The Jewish community in Ireland has always deeply valued its older members, acknowledging the respect and care due to them as people who are important repositories of wisdom and experience on whose lives our futures are built. Your community has been a profound witness to the importance of family ties and you have a long and proud tradition of taking care of those of advancing years. This Home is a fine example of that ethos in action and faithfully sustained over half a century.
As we grow older it is a comfort to be among our peers, among people who understand us, who share our memories, the good and bad times, our beliefs and way of life. This Home is truly a home, in the sense that many of you were not only friends in earlier times but I understand that there are many residents here today who are related to each other. So it’s wonderful to think that as you move through the circle of life your lives touching each others over the years, you each bring that store of shared memories to this place and create new shared memories in this your beautiful communal home.
I would like to extend a special greeting to Claire Wine who is now a resident here and whose family have been generous and distinguished benefactors of this home over many years. I am sure the Home is delighted to be able to welcome you, Claire, into its family, its community of care.
Great thanks is due to the Wine family, to the Home’s Committee, to the Eastern Health Board and to all those who have contributed both in terms of time and finance to provide the best care for the Home’s residents. Invaluable support comes too from the wider Jewish community and together all these efforts stitch together a patchwork quilt of loving care. For those who live here that care is crucial to their well-being, their enjoyment of life, their ability to live contented and fulfilled lives. For those who love them, their sons, daughters, nephews, nieces, friends, many of them scattered across the world it is so reassuring to know that here in this place there is happiness and the best of care
The contribution which the Jewish Community has made to Irish life has been far out of proportion to its size – Lord Mayors of three principal cities, representatives in the Dáil and members of the judiciary, to say nothing of the extensive contribution to the business and cultural life of Ireland. If ever any group of people proved the immeasurable enrichment that comes from embracing diversity, creating space for others and letting their genius flow spontaneously, the Jewish community in Ireland tops the league.
Many of you or your parents and grandparents came to Ireland when it was a poor country. You came often from grim circumstances which no human being should be asked to endure. But you put down roots in this island and made it your home, working with your neighbours to give it new hope, new heart. Your quiet but powerful witness to the potential of this place was a potent expression of faith through times that were tough and difficult for everyone.
Today’s Ireland is blessed by prosperity and prospects which no other generation has known. It is important to be grateful and to honour those senior citizens to whom we owe a huge and unrepayable debt. We have thanks to you stable and caring society. Thanks to you we know how vulnerable all things based on human endeavour are and we know we must be as vigilant and as hard-working as you taught us by example to be. We are entitled to take righteous pride in the accomplishments of today’s Ireland and to see in them the fruits of your labour, your sacrifice, your faith. I would like to express our thanks to you and to all older people for all you have given us.
May I thank the marvellous, dedicated staff of the Home who commit themselves day in and day out to making this a place of welcome and contentment. On a day like this it is so important to tell you how deeply your work and your care is appreciated.
Ms. Fanny Siev at 99 years young, is the most senior resident of the home, to her and to all whose home this place is I wish you health and happiness, the joy of friends and the comfort of good care.
I am delighted that I have had the opportunity to join in your celebrations here today and to look back with pride on fifty years of community care at its best. But of course you also have your sights on a new future and I wish you every success in your plans for a new building and sheltered housing scheme. The plans speak of a people full of both determination and imagination, a people who believe that our elderly who have given of their best are entitled to the best. I wish you every success in everything you do and ask God’s Blessing on those who live here, who work here and on those who involve themselves in the life of the home and who care so deeply about its future.
Go raibh míle maith agaibh go leir.