By Lianne Kolirin
Ireland’s Jewish community, a tiny minority in the officially Catholic country, has always been proud of its heritage and history.
Early signs of Jewish life in Ireland date back almost a thousand years, though the real momentum came in the late 19th century when migrants from Germany and the Baltic began laying down roots.
Today, the dwindling community, predominantly in Dublin with small pockets in Cork, Galway, and Limerick, is unsettled.
Headlines were made late last year after it emerged moves were afoot to rename Herzog Park. Chaim Herzog, born in Belfast and raised in Dublin, the son of a former chief rabbi of Ireland, was president of Israel between 1983 and 1993. Today his son Isaac holds the largely ceremonial role.
The proposal sparked widespread criticism, including from the taoiseach, Micheál Martin, who described it as “overtly divisive and wrong”.
Dublin city councillors had been due to vote on the motion, which sought to rename the park in memory of a girl killed in Gaza, but it was eventually withdrawn after the body’s chief executive admitted there had been an administrative error in the process.
The episode compounded the Jewish community’s unease, which has been growing since Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October 2023 and war subsequently broke out in Gaza.
At the end of 2024 Martin’s predecessor, Simon Harris, announced plans to arrest Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, then the defence minister, if they landed in Ireland. The International Criminal Court had issued arrest warrants for them.
Soon afterwards Martin, who was then Ireland’s foreign affairs minister, announced the country’s backing for South Africa’s case against Israel at the International Court of Justice. Days later Israel said it was shutting its Dublin embassy, with the country’s foreign affairs minister Gideon Saar accusing Ireland of “antisemitism based on the delegitimisation and dehumanisation of Israel”.
Yoni Wieder, who was born and raised in London, was appointed to the role of Ireland’s chief rabbi in June 2023. He recalled being told during his interview by the synagogue chairman: “Oh by the way twice a year you’ll go on TV and talk about Passover or Yom Kippur and you’ll just be expected to say a generic idea about freedom and forgiveness and it will all be very sweet’.”
The dramatic events of that October changed everything. “Suddenly it was constant media interviews, podcasts and radio, so I’ve been very quickly brought up to speed,” he said.
Rabbi Wieder, who tried to do a lot of reading about Irish-Jewish history before taking up the job, added: “It became very relevant to understand the context when it came to commenting on antisemitism and the Jewish community in Ireland and its future.”
The exact size of Ireland’s Jewish community is hard to pinpoint but there’s no doubt it is tiny. The 2022 census put it at about 2,300 people within an overall population in the republic of 5.15 million. But the data does not provide a full picture, especially as there is no requirement to provide religion for the census.
Ireland’s demographic make-up, still predominantly white and Catholic, has nevertheless undergone a significant change in the 21st century, and even more so since Brexit. As the main English-speaking nation in the EU today, it has drawn many migrants from across the Continent and beyond, and Brexit led many top-tier corporations to move their European headquarters to Dublin.
That has given the Jewish community a unique feel, Rabbi Wieder says. “The Israeli embassy, before it shut down, estimated there was anywhere between 2,000 and 3,000 Israelis living here and many of that number would likely not have been included in the census.
“At the Orthodox synagogue on a Shabbat morning we average over 100 people — around 80 of whom will be Irish,” he said, adding that most of the Israelis would call themselves secular but strongly support the more social events.
Whether they are secular, religious or Irish by birth, Jewish residents have experienced “a sharp rise in antisemitic incidents”, Rabbi Wieder said. “Some of what we have witnessed in the past two years has been unprecedented.”
In the past four months, Ireland’s Jewish Representative Council has documented more than 150 antisemitic incidents across schools, universities, workplaces, and hospitals — and that’s not including online abuse.
“The rise in expressions of hatred against Jewish people here, both online and in real life, has been rapid and troubling,” the rabbi said.
The history of this situation is not straightforward, according to Maurice Cohen, chairman of the Jewish Representative Council. “Ireland’s relationship with the Jewish people and later with the state of Israel developed through recognition, divergence, and increasing strain rather than through any single rupture,” he told the Religion Media Centre.
In the late 19th and early 20th century, he said, Irish nationalism and Zionism were often recognised as “parallel movements shaped by diaspora, historical trauma, cultural revival, and resistance to British rule”.
He said Éamon de Valera, who served as both president of Ireland and taoiseach, was “very friendly” with the current Israeli president’s grandfather, Isaac Herzog, then widely known as the “Sinn Féin rabbi” for his sympathy with Irish independence. He became the first chief rabbi of the independent state.
But after the Six Day War of 1967, “Irish thinking on the Middle East shifted decisively”, Mr Cohen said. “Identification moved increasingly towards the Palestinian cause, with Israel coming to be viewed less through the lens of vulnerability and more through that of power.”
Alignment between Irish nationalists and the Palestinian cause grew in the 1970s, with ties formed between “elements of the Provisional Irish Republican Army and Palestinian militant organisations”.
Co-operation was “limited and sporadic”, Mr Cohen said. “Nonetheless, the relationship had symbolic weight, reinforcing a narrative of international revolutionary solidarity that resonated within republican circles at the time, even as the political, religious, and strategic contexts of the two conflicts remained fundamentally different.”
That alignment persists. Rabbi Wieder said: “In those parts of Northern Ireland which are generally nationalist you can often see murals that depict clearly this parallel — calling for Britain out of Ireland and Israel out of Palestine.
“A sense of victimhood and resistance to imperial power forms a strong part of the national story, and that narrative is projected onto the Israel-Palestine conflict, rather than engaging with it on its own terms. It’s totally simplistic and it’s very unhelpful.”
He added: “It’s hard to overstate the extent to which Israel features in public discourse. It’s changed somewhat since the ceasefire, but for over two years it would have been a lead news story every single day.
“From the outset, the portrayal of the war against Hamas was extremely one-sided. Pro-Israel perspectives were rarely, if ever, engaged with seriously in politics or mainstream media.”
Like in other Jewish communities, when people in Israel are targeted “we feel it very deeply”., he said. “But members of our community who have family or friends in Israel can feel that there’s no room in Ireland for them to openly express their grief because the discourse here is so hostile towards Israel.
“It’s been a challenge, and it has made Jewish belonging in Ireland feel more fragile than it should do.”
That sentiment was echoed by Mr Cohen in an address to the foreign affairs and trade committee of the Irish parliament last year. He recounted a conversation with a friend who said, ‘I always thought of myself as an Irishman who happened to be Jewish. Now I know that I am just a Jew living in Ireland.’ Many of us think like that,” he added.
While the war gave rise to anti-Israel feeling in Britain too, there are significant differences, Rabbi Wieder said. “You’ve got all those voices in Britain for sure but you also have very mainstream MPs who will get up in parliament and offer very robust support for Israel which here would be unthinkable.
“At the general election just over a year ago, the one thing all eight political parties broadly agreed upon was the boycott on Israel and speaking out even more vocally about what they perceive to be Israel committing genocide.”
The gardaí have been “excellent” in supporting the community, he said, though the same cannot always be said for politicians.
“In May 2024 Michael Higgins, then president of Ireland, dismissed claims of antisemitism in Ireland as a ‘PR exercise’. I cannot tell you how difficult it is to try to address issues on the ground when the president of the country says something like that.”
He described the hostility as a “growing trend”, adding: “It doesn’t mean antisemitism has become a day-to-day issue for all Jews in Ireland — it hasn’t, and it’s important to stress that. But there are persistent and serious concerns that have yet to be properly addressed.”
That said, there is a silver lining for the community. “This has been a time when many have embraced a deeper sense of Jewish identity: to be proud of their values and of who they are, not only at home or in synagogue, but also in school, at work, and on the street,” the rabbi said.
And whether they stay or not, the Israeli residents are contributing to that, Mr Cohen added.
“Some have been here over 20 years. They have purchased homes and are married with families. I anticipate that this will keep the community strong although in a different form to the traditional orthodox that has pertained up to now.”
