The End of Irish Jewry?

The push to rename “Herzog Park” in Dublin is but the latest effort to erase the history — and make intolerable the present experience — of Irish Jewry. Dublin’s Commemoration & Naming Committee voted this week, with only one dissent, to strip the name of Israel’s former president, Chaim Herzog, from a spot of green in the Rathgar neighborhood. That Herzog, born at Belfast, was the father of Israel’s current president, Isaac Herzog.The decision on whether to erase the Herzog name now falls to the Dublin City Council. If that body approves of this outrageous expression of enmity to Jews and the Jewish state, a “consultation process” will begin to “determine an appropriate new name.” Dublin describes the park as a small village park close to the centre of Rathgar village in south Dublin. It has a small woodland … The park is also the home of Rathgar Tennis Club.”This unremarkable patch of recreational space was blessed with an extraordinary name. Chaim’s father, Rabbi Yitzhak HaLevi Herzog, was chief rabbi of the Irish Free State between 1921 and 1936. From there he moved to Palestine, where he served as chief rabbi until 1948. Herzog was fluent in Irish, and came to be known as “the Sinn Féin Rabbi” for his support of Irish Republicanism during the War of Independence.Ireland today is the most anti-Israel nation in Europe, which is no mean distinction. Its history, though, is far from bereft of Jewish thriving. Robert Briscoe and his son both served as Lord Mayors of Dublin. Robert was an Orthodox Jew and a veteran of the Irish Republican Army during the War of Independence. He was named after an 18th century Irish revolutionary, Robert Emmet. The Irish hero Michael Collins called Briscoe “my Jewman.”Briscoe accompanied Prime Minister Éamon de Valera to America and wrote that he worried about having possibly violated the Second Commandment by loving Ireland more than the God of Israel. Briscoe was also a Zionist and a friend of the Zionist prophet Vladimir Zabotinsky. The Revisionist lion even paid him a secret visit in Dublin to take notes on guerilla warfare against the British. Briscoe advised Prime Minister Menachem Begin.Then there is Leopold Bloom from James Joyce’s “Ulysses.” The protagonist of the 20th century’s greatest novel is Jewish on his father’s side, Irish on his mother’s. The poet Robert Pinsky calls him the “most famous Jew in modern English literature,” and in the pages of “Ulysses” Bloom parries antisemitism and even dreams of “orangegroves and immense melonfields north of Jaffa.” He tells a bigoted nationalist in a pub that Jesus was a Jew, too. Amid the crisis in the Middle East, Dublin’s City Council could embrace this history. Were it to choose the opposite course, and strip Herzog’s name from a piece of Ireland, it would confirm the animus that has surfaced. In a sign of how serious all this is, an op ed last week warned that antisemitism and pro-Palestinian mania are now so virulent that Irish Jews — the heirs of Herzog, Briscoe, and Bloom — face “extinction.” Is that what Ireland wants?

The End of Irish Jewry?

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